MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandrake | 2025-05-11 16:38:59+00:00
People really over exaggerate how much a rank-and-file software IC actually makes at these companies. Yea, they make a decent amount, but they're not casually making $2M bonuses like the investment banker types over at Goldman Sachs are, unless they are those rare outlier high-level employees. A lot of it might be stock, too, so their "good year" comp might be 3X to 4X their "bad year" comp.

People see their cousin's uncle's neighbor's roommate making $400K at Meta and just assume every single employee there makes that much. Or they point to those salary sharing sites where people self-report their best salary + highest possible bonus + equity as if every year was 2021, and think of them as representative.
by renewiltord | 2025-05-11 16:39:44+00:00
I actually find this strange tendency of online commenters to link something to their own obscure interest very amusing. It's been a classic for as long as I recall but I encountered another today which I thought was very entertaining where a commenter remarked that he only just realized that "Suno" is the Hindi word for what we'd say in Latin as "Audi". In Latin! Hahaha!

I have decided that I, too, shall use obscure things as benchmarks and references. It's pretty good fun. In this post-Ragnarok-Online world one can imagine we need more such milestones to judge other things by.
by bitwize | 2025-05-11 16:39:48+00:00
You can't just bung an extension in to do HDR. You have to change the X11 protocol itself. This is because the X11 protocol was designed way back in the 80s, when it was completely unfathomable that anyone would need more than 32 bits per pixel. So pixel values are CARD32s (unsigned 32-bit integers) in X11. So yeah, I guess theoretically you could do 10-bit-per-channel HDR in the current protocol, but not anything more. And forget about floating point.

There are NO plans by any of the Xorg maintainers to add HDR support to X11 or the Xorg server, for this reason. There probably never will be.

Window coordinates are worse -- they are INT16s (signed 16-bit integers). So any window, including the root window, can have a maximum size of 32,768x32,768. That's as big a screen as you can get in X11. You sit four 8k monitors next to each other, you start getting close to that hard limit. (Don't dismiss it out of hand. I once worked with a guy who needed no less than five monitors. It was just how he worked. And that's not even addressing things like large wall-sized displays for meetings, war rooms, and the like. Once those start getting high-res, they become beyond X11's ability to handle.) Again, simply extending the protocol won't help -- the protocol must be changed.

Well, while we're changing the protocol, why not do some housekeeping? X11 wasn't designed with security in mind, so let's address that from the jump in our new protocol. Also, modern toolkits do all their rendering client-side, relying on OpenGL or Vulkan to provide GPU-accelerated rendering. All you really need the display server for is to manage the rendering surfaces, composite them together on the final display, and handle user events. So let's start by eliminating all those draw calls from the 1980s that were designed for 1980s displays and not modern GPUs, and pare down the protocol to what's necessary for the above, to avoid bloat and legacy cruft.

Oh shit, we just invented Wayland.

Wayland is the changes to X11 that are necessary in order to move forward.
by antman | 2025-05-11 16:39:49+00:00
I don't think like this person at all. Two major differences.

First, people often prioritize what’s immediate over what’s truly important. But people who are near death don’t have the excuse of postponing what matters, because for them, the important has also become immediate. That’s why I listen to their words, which tend to be consistent across cultures and surveys.

Second, the idea that someone must be high on Maslow’s hierarchy to reflect deeply or be truly happy goes against my experience. In remote villages where people weren’t stripped of their resources or caught up in consumerism, I met individuals who lived with very basic safety yet were happier by Aristotelian standards. Many successful businesspeople and political leaders I’ve met didn’t have a consistent sense of happiness. Often relying on medication, especially when their goals of artificial happiness like amusement or luxury stopped producing dopamine. When that stopped working, they tried to escalate, but eventually that too became unsustainable.
by absolutelastone | 2025-05-11 16:39:59+00:00
I suspect it's probably worse than that in reality. From a quick search on state of the art ECG results (the full system of leads attached all over your torso) it looks like around 90 percent specificity (True negative rate) and under 50 percent sensitivity (true positive rate). So it's only pretty good at ruling out heart attacks, but still misses them sometimes. But is pretty bad when it comes to false alarms. I think they use it along with multiple other tests and consideration of symptoms in triage at the hospital.
by bradly | 2025-05-11 16:40:29+00:00
Our area in San Diego, CA has different public high schools have a different offering that maybe all high schools would have had in the past. They are not vocational schools, but schools that offer specialized programs for you to use during your electives (2 of your 6-7 classes you take you get to choose yourself).

For example we have a high school with a culinary program, another with an auto program, another with a guitar building program, another with a music/theater arts program. These are all academic, public schools in the same district. You are assigned the school near* to your home, but you can petition for a different school.

*there is gerrymandering here too
by lolinder | 2025-05-11 16:40:36+00:00
If we're going to go with the seatbelt comparison then we'd have to flesh it out a bit:

Your new car sounds an alarm non-stop if any seat belt in the car is unfastened, whether or not a seat is occupied and whether or not the car is even on. This seems kind of silly, so you raise it with the manufacturer and they say that standard procedure is to just leave all seat belts fastened all the time.

You start doing that and quickly realize that it's much harder to remember to put your seat belt on than it was in your old car, because the car doesn't warn you when you've forgotten your seat belt and when you do remember on your own you have to sit up awkwardly to unfasten it before you can get under it and fasten it around you. You point this out to some fans of the manufacturer and they act like you're the weird one for not seeing how this makes you safer.
by fullstackchris | 2025-05-11 16:41:16+00:00
> you'll have customers that demand you rewrite your app just because they gave you $9

I've also seen this first hand. Customer emails me 3 times within 3 days and one of those emails included him stating that "time is precious". He subscribed on the $7 / month tier... and then cancelled the next day anyway because he didnt even read what the product did... sigh
by kmeisthax | 2025-05-11 16:41:39+00:00
There's also a bit of this that's culture war fodder. A lot of middle-class conservatives send their kids to colleges, their kids reject their parents' conservatism, so the parents think the college has used some kind of magic liberalism ray[0] on their kids.

The reality is, of course, that their kids weren't nearly as conservative as the parents thought. But that doesn't stop the salient myth of liberal indoctrination in colleges.

Trade schools come into play mainly as a totem to hold up against liberal colleges. They are being played up as a sort of bastion of conservative thought, mainly because they don't have those pesky general ed requirements that might accidentally tell people how to fight against the elites running the system.

There's a kernel of truth in all of this, in that there's some trades that shouldn't have been left out of the STEM paths that colleges like to push as an obvious moneymaker. The culture war is ultimately one of mottes and baileys, where you take some truth and ride it as one's political hobby-horse. Hell, just to explain why this happens I've already had to do the same thing.

[0] In the same way that some people think tech companies can "hack our dopamine loops" or whatever
by johnisgood | 2025-05-11 16:41:58+00:00
Yeah, I have used Odin before, I am thinking of giving C3 a try as well.

At a quick glance though:

> Enum support various reflection properties: .values returns an array with all enums. .len or .elements returns the number of enum values, .inner returns the storage type. .names returns an array with the names of all enums. .associated returns an array of the typeids of the associated values for the enum.

I do not like that the length is named ".elements" instead of just ".len". And why are there two ways, or are they not the same? Etc.
by TMWNN | 2025-05-11 16:42:00+00:00
> I sort of have two theories. One is that you probably have to be relatively smart to go into the trades. I remember listening to a podcast recently on military recruitment and they said because the military is so modern, they have to do most of their recruiting in middle class neighborhoods with good schools.

This has been the case for a long time. For almost the entirety of the post-1973 end of US military conscription, a high school diploma has been required to enlist. From a 2008 study <http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-...>: "Members of the all-volunteer [American] military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods." Also, "American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree ... Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service."
by api | 2025-05-11 16:43:32+00:00
One thing that’s fascinating to me is that these straight out of sci-fi things are novelties or demos, and don’t seem all that popular. Most people just aren’t interested.

It’s the “boring” stuff that’s interesting: automating drudgery work, a better way to research, etc.

I’ve been predicting for years that glasses — whether AR or VR — are and will remain niche. I don’t think most people want them.
by KerrAvon | 2025-05-11 16:43:49+00:00
Maybe, but:

1. People won’t ultimate go download ChatGPT.app or use a website — they’re going to be using the functionality through structured services in iOS and Android, and it’s necessarily going to be under control of the OS vendors for security/privacy reasons. This doesn’t mean Apple and Google own the LLMs — there will be consumer choice for antitrust reasons if nothing else — but the operating system has to be a conduit for access to your data, and also for unified user experience. Which means advertising will be limited.

2. Say it does go the way you think it will — what prevents a real non-profit, open source LLM from taking it away from the commercial players? There really is no moat (other than money, energy, data center space).
by gruez | 2025-05-11 16:44:18+00:00
Shouldn't countries have the right to control activities inside their borders? The order was approved by the courts, so insofar as due process and checks and balances go, this seems fine. This is no different than any other sort of injunction or court order. What should be the alternative? That the internet should be some sort of lawless wild west? Opposing this on the basis of "they'll extend it to political opposition ..." makes as much sense as opposing the arrest of criminals because "they'll extend it to political opposition ...".
by techpineapple | 2025-05-11 16:44:35+00:00
I’ll bet it’s a scale issue though. Everyone knows a person (I’m one of them) who does bad in say math class but later gets a job with applied math, because doing math in a classroom is boring.

But if you try to design a curriculum for say “math you need to be an electrician for people who failed math class”. You’re mostly going to get people who just don’t have the whatever they need to be good enough at math to be an electrician.
by nradov | 2025-05-11 16:45:46+00:00
It's true that bad schools make poor neighborhoods unproductive for military recruiters. They usually don't want recruits who dropped out of high school or have low ASVAB scores. But a lot of young people in those neighborhoods are also disqualified because of poor health (particularly including obesity, asthma, and various mental conditions), history of illegal drug use, and criminal records. These social issues are all highly correlated.
by haswell | 2025-05-11 16:45:54+00:00
This seems like a fallacious analogy to me.

Why is a cracked bridge dangerous? Because anyone traveling over it or under it is at risk of being hurt if the bridge collapses. Warning people that it is cracking does not increase the likelihood of a collapse.

Why is a software vulnerability dangerous? Because anyone who knows about it and has nefarious intent can now use it as a weapon against those who are using the vulnerable software, and the world is full of malicious actors actively seeking new avenues to carry out attacks.

And there are quite a few people who would exploit the knowledge of an unlocked door if given the chance.

There’s a very clear difference in the implications between these scenarios.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-11 16:45:54+00:00
I'm sure people who have worked at FAANG for 20 years aren't starving in the streets, but you don't know enough about their financial situation to predict whether they are "unreasonably wealthy." How much of their salary went straight in to their landlord's pockets? Towards student loan interest? Towards health issues, childcare, or taking care of extended family members? Maybe they tried investing and lost money. Heck, maybe they just prioritized travel over saving money, or something. You can't just assume someone has F-you money just because they worked for 20 years.
by Herring | 2025-05-11 16:46:52+00:00
You're missing the point. My response was to the article:

> The report somehow fails to mention the bit where the Silicon Valley VC and executive crowd worked their backsides off to elect Trump and several of them sat in the front row at his inauguration. Then they were actually surprised when the leopard ate their faces too.

They vibe with Trump because they have the same training, and they've done very little actual democratic governance. Very little thinking about the common good. You can argue most companies are actually more like benign dictatorships, but that's irrelevant.

To be fair I'm often a fan of markets, but not when the companies are monopolies larger than most nation states, actively increasing inequality and fighting counters like regulation/unions, not to mention affecting elections like fb/musk. In that case it's not voluntary. Wikipedia has an entire section on market failures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure
by ghaff | 2025-05-11 16:47:08+00:00
In fairness, as a company, you pretty much have to jump on the next bandwagon a lot of the time even if you have doubts whether it's there yet or is going to be a splash in the pan.

My story is that OpenStack didn't really work out but, if you were serious about the cloud thing, you sort of had to hop aboard even if, in general, the landscape ended up playing out differently with containers.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-11 16:47:15+00:00
Sometimes they are machine translated by someone who doesn't understand Ctrl+C shortcut if it's longer than 10 words, but equally often they're just hand kneaded. Japanese English education is effectively machine translation with human brains as machines - we're not actually taught English at all[0], just memorized technical rulesets that yield predictable garbage. A lot of weird "Engrish" text is likely result of that.

0: That's supposed to be drastically changing, we'll see if it does. English skills is still a resume stuffer in Japan.
by carabiner | 2025-05-11 16:47:45+00:00
If you read the threads in /r/construction that come up about this or adjacent topics ("trades are a guaranteed job, better than college") they usually say that the job is awful on your body without much pay.

Personally, my friend is a carpenter and lives with his dad to save money. This is in Seattle so tons of construction and work to go around. He says he wishes he studied computer science in college (has an english degree).
by StefanBatory | 2025-05-11 16:48:38+00:00
I'll say something unrelated to my question before, but damn if I don't envy you for electives.

I had zero elective classes up through my entire pre-uni education. At my uni, I had one or two elective classes - at fifth and sixth semester, and that's all.

It is an aspect of American education I do like a lot.

(here we choose our profile, which assigns us to extended classes - i.e, Maths/English/Physics, Maths/Biology/Chemistry, Polish/Geography/History and so on, but then we don't get to choose anything after.)
by bolobo | 2025-05-11 16:48:58+00:00
> - Have a real time video conversation with an AI which can see what you see, translate between languages, read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.

Maybe it's me having an extremely low imagination, but that stuff existed for a while in the shape of google lens and the various vision flavor of LLMs, and I must have used them.... 3 times in years, and not once did I think "Gosh I wish I could just ask a question aloud while walking in the street about this building and wait for the answer". It's either important enough that I want to see the wikipedia page straight from google maps and read the whole lot or not.

> an AI which can read text, recognize objects, and interact with the real world.

I can already do that pretty well with my eyeballs, and I don't need to worry about hallucinations, privacy, bad phone signal or my bad english accent. I get that is certainly an amazing tools for people with vision impairments, but that is not the market Meta/OpenAI are aiming for and forcefully trying to shove it into.

So yes, mayyybe if I am in a foreign country I could see a use but I usually want to get _away_ from technology on vacation. So I really don't see the point, but it seems that they believe I am the target audience?
by collingreen | 2025-05-11 16:49:06+00:00
What an amazing business to convince people to use. Making people pay to use LLMs to supervise the LLMs they pay for in order to get decent results is diabolically genius.

At the risk of offending some folks it feels like the genius of the Mormon church making its "customers" pay the church AND work for it for free AND market it for free in person AND shame anyone who wants to leave. Why have cost centers if you don't have to!

It's a business model I wasn't smart or audacious enough to even come up with.
by dave1629 | 2025-05-11 16:49:13+00:00
From the Conclusion: "In applying current law, we conclude that several stages in the development of generative AI involve using copyrighted works in ways that implicate the owners’ exclusive rights. The key question, as most commenters agreed, is whether those acts of prima facie infringement can be excused as fair use. ... But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries. ... These groundbreaking technologies should benefit both the innovators who design them and the creators whose content fuels them, as well as the general public."
by parpfish | 2025-05-11 16:49:29+00:00
I’m kind of disappointed that the generative AI hype has overshadowed how many non-generative tasks are basically “solved”, especially in vision.

Human level object recognition can easily be trained up for custom use cases. Image segmentation is amazing. I can take a photo of a document and it’s accurately OCRd. 10-15 years ago that would be unfathomable.

I think current LLMs would give AI a much better reputation if they focused on non generative applications. Sentiment analysis, translation, named entity extraction, etc. these were all problems that data folks have been wrestling with that could very well be seen as “solved” and a big win for AI that businesses would b able onconfidently integrate into their workflows, but instead they went with the generative route and we have to deal with hallucinations and slop
by mdaniel | 2025-05-11 16:49:54+00:00
> People could really benefit from it because QR codes are used everywhere.

I hear you, and at the same time we're solving the wrong end of that pipeline, in my opinion. Almost every QR code I have ever seen in my life either points to bit.ly or some other link-shortener or marketing tracker domain which I would put good money will be dead way before the QR code's ink deteriorates

I don't mean that QR is a terrible standard, but at least until we can get URL forms that are on the whole less than 128 characters, I wish they had met the world where it is. I believe the http2 compression scheme comes with dedicated dictionary slots for header strings that they know are going to appear, so QR would have benefited from the same (e.g. http/https taking less than 4/5 bytes, :// less than 3)

Then again, having thought further about this, I guess Marketing's Razor is the most likely explanation: it wasn't a technical reason they're using bit.ly, it's for those sweet engagement metrics
by hwillis | 2025-05-11 16:49:57+00:00
This is out of my specific expertise, but the AFE1291 does 8k 24 bit samples per second and uses 495 μW when sampling. That's enough to run full rate for 10 straight days on an apple watch battery (1.189 Wh was the first google result).

Integrated frontends have had big impacts on efficiency and improving batteries have had basically the same increase in specific energy. I would be shocked if power was a limiting factor.

https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/ads1291.pdf?ts=17469713549...
by afavour | 2025-05-11 16:50:14+00:00
> Most people just aren’t interested.

Which makes sense, really. Buying an expensive pair of glasses so that I can point at an object and say “what is that” is a cool parlour trick but I can imagine very few scenarios where I’ve wished I had that functionality.

Realtime translation… absolutely a feature I’d use. For a week a year, max. IMO the killer, everyday application just isn’t there yet. I’m still not sure what it would be.
by andrehacker | 2025-05-11 16:50:27+00:00
It is regarded to be "the best" book on the topic by many. I found just like what Giles Thomas wrote that the book focuses on the details and how to write the lower level code without providing the big picture.

I am personally not very interested in that as these details are likely to change rather quickly while the principles of LLMs and transformers will probably remain relevant for many years.

I have been looking for, but failed, to find a good resource that approaches it the way 3blue1brown [1] explains it but then go deeper from there.

The blog series from Giles seem to take the book and add the background to the details.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M
by somnium_sn | 2025-05-11 16:51:23+00:00
Hey, I am one of the MCP authors.

We appreciate the criticism and take it very seriously. We know things are not perfect and there is lots of room for improvement. We are trying to balance the needs of the fast paced AI world, and the careful, time consuming needs of writing a spec. We’d love to improve the spec and the language, and would of course appreciate help here. We also work with an increasingly larger community that help us get this right. The most recent Authorization specification changes are just one example.

Similarly we are working on the SDKs and other parts of MCP to improve the ecosystem. Again, it’s all very early and we appreciate help from the community.