MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-23 17:27:52+00:00
"These kinds of devices have reached the point where they have just joined refrigerators, washing machines, and microwaves."

This is "fine" and "okay" as long as Silicon Valley is not one's "career".

"What we're seeing right now is not innovation, we're seeing people struggle to contend with the reality that it's over. They're coping with the fact that the innovation phase for computing devices has finished. They're grasping for continued relevance."

The people struggling are ones who made Silicon Valley their "career".

They still have too much cash, no real career, all they ever did was play with computers (to the exclusion of anything else), and so they are going to make noise on their way out. Maybe that's "fine" and "okay", too.
by game_the0ry | 2025-05-23 17:28:34+00:00
As a south asian person, I could not agree more.

The irony is that my parents were immigrant entrepreneurs and my grandparents were also entrepreneurs on both sides. Yet my parents pushed me towards medical school or a stable job at the least.

I think this was for a couple reasons:

1. Asian parents express their insecurities through their children. They wanted a stable and high income (which maps to "doctor") so they push their kids to become the version of them they never were.

2. Asian parents treat their children like status symbols. Nothing says "I am the best parent" than being able to say "my son/daughter is a doctor." Saying 'my son/daughter owns their own business" just does not have the same ring to it.

In asian cultures, status and conformity are very valuable, and those do not map to high agency.
by slantview | 2025-05-23 17:28:41+00:00
This is exactly the problem that pay-per-use LLM access is causing. It's gating the people who need the information the most and causing a divide between the "haves" and "have nots" but at a much larger potential for dividing us.

Sure for me, $20/mo is fine, in fact, I work on AI systems, so I can mostly just use my employer's keys for stuff. But what about the rest of the world where $20/mo is a huge amount of money? We are going to burn through the environment and the most disenfranchised amongst us will suffer the most for it.
by hyperpape | 2025-05-23 17:29:49+00:00
Even in older versions, if the compiler can see that there are no side-effects, it is free to remove the loop and simply return the value from the first iteration.

I'm actually pretty curious to see what this method does on versions that don't have the optimization to treat hashCodes as quasi-final.

A quick test using Java 17 shows it's not being optimized away _completely_, but it's taking...~1 ns per iteration, which is not enough to compute a hash code.

Edit: I'm being silly. It will just compute the hashcode the first time, and then repeatedly check that it's cached and return it. So the JIT doesn't have to do any _real_ work to make this skip the hash code calculation.

So most likely, the effective code is:

computeHashCode(); for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++) { if (false) { // pretend this wouldn't have dead code elimination, and the boolean is actually checked computeHashCode(); } }
by komali2 | 2025-05-23 17:30:02+00:00
That was enjoyable, and I appreciated the overall message. A little bit trickier of a pitch to introverted people, maybe.

One bit though I'm interested in chatting about:

> The truth is there are thousands of different places you could go work, and you have to consider them all and figure out which is the best. But that sounds impossible, right? You only had to choose between 60 different majors, and now you have to choose between thousands of different jobs? How do you even do that? The first step, is to acknowledge that you have to.

Do you really "have" to? I guess we can relatively safely assume that basically 99% of those graduates have essentially the same life goals in terms of financial stability, retirement, etc. Lately though I've wondered about the basically unspoken premise we pitch to our kids from the get-go. I recently found a diary entry from me when I was 7 years old that had a line along the lines of, "I finally figured out what I'm gonna be when I grow up!" I noticed also that so frequently one of the first questions asked at parties or meetups is, "So what do you do for a living?" We really seem to be telling eachother that you go to school and then you do a career and that's how you define yourself, mostly. Differentiate based on hobbies you get to brag about during a "and tell us one interesting fact about yourself" portion of an icebreaker.

I have a friend here that teaches English about 15 hours a week. The rest of his time he spends painting murals on the riverside (unenforced here in Taiwan, graffiti is kinda just considered public art) or drawing people he sees on trains. I asked him why he doesn't take up more hours, he replied that actually he'd work less if he could, but he needs to hit a certain minimum annual income in order to be eligible for permanent residency. Once he gets that, he'll work even less. He's one of the happiest people I know.

I've been wondering if one of the responses to late stage capitalism will be more en-masse opt-outs. There's a recognized class of this in the PRC, called "Lying Flat People," or "Full Time Children," or my favorite, "Rat People." They scrounge together enough cash for a street BBQ and beers, and then spend their day just lounging, drinking, smoking, and bbqing. In Taiwan we have "Moonlight Tribe," people who spend all their money the second they get their paycheck and then live penny to penny until the end of the month. I'm guessing other countries have similar movements - I remember meeting vagabonds (their self-description) in New Orleans that were happily living a "post-capitalism" life.

It's maybe short-sighted since it basically guarantees you will die younger than most, but then again none of us are guaranteed to make it to retirement anyway so I can also respect the choice.
by hunter2_ | 2025-05-23 17:30:53+00:00
The real absurdity of 2k/4k/etc is that those refer to approximate horizontal pixel counts, when "lines" (vertical pixel count) such as 480/525/1080/etc has been the typical dimension for such a long time. Why the switch? In the 16:9 world, ~2k horizontal is close enough to ~1k (1080) vertical, and ~4k horizontal is close enough to ~2k (2160) vertical, etc. so it can't be that the horizontal numbers round to the nearest k better than the vertical numbers.
by cmehdy | 2025-05-23 17:31:00+00:00
I was that other kid. Grew up in a pretty tough place, where dodging blades was no euphemism and emotional regulation was on permanent hiatus. Grew up with severe issues in personal life and balance of self, absence of anchors in family and social relationships. Was always curious, always loved understanding things.

When you don't have good people around, you pay the price in time and pain. Those people will save you years and hundreds of thousands - or even millions, simply by showing you the most egregious traps to avoid and the more virtuous behaviours to adopt. They'll make your success more predictable, less reliant on the specifics of your genetic makeup, domestic instability, and odd moments of luck.

I was a good kid. Didn't end up well at all. Figured I could at least try to be a good person to others as time goes on, and pass on the gotchas and virtuous habits I partly figured out myself.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-23 17:31:19+00:00
Oh yeah, forgot to mention the 2-player game I invented that requires no pieces. It's based on haggling.

Designate one player as the seller of an imaginary product and one as a potential buyer. The buyer needs a random secret number B from 50-100 which is the max they can pay, and the seller needs S from 0-50 which is the min they'll sell for. Use an RNG if you have one, otherwise you can do it yourself: Have both think of two random numbers from 0-100. Each says one number but not the other. Add the other person's number to your secret one, mod by 50, then add 50 if you're the buyer.

Negotiate over the price until either a sale is made at P or someone unilaterally kills the deal. Seller wins (P - 50) points, buyer wins (50 - P). If the deal dies, seller loses S points, buyer loses (B - 50). I hope I remembered these right. Then switch sides and repeat.
by bohanoai | 2025-05-23 17:31:24+00:00
> The key insight, and main message, of the talk was that if you are not too write heavy you can scale Postgres to very high read throughput with read replicas and only a single master! That is exactly the message that needs to be spelled out as that covers the vast majority of apps.

This is exactly the message I wanted to convey in the talk—thank you so much! -Bohan
by hilbert42 | 2025-05-23 17:32:03+00:00
I was just about to post same quote but you beat me to it.

I'd go further, I think their work was a remarkable feat for the late 1790s. That they achieved that accuracy given the primitive equipment of the day says much for their abilities and understanding.

Also at the time France was in turmoil, numbers of its scientists were victims of the French Revolution—Antoine Lavoisier, probably the greatest chemist of his time—was beheaded by guillotine in 1794, so the political environment was anything but stable.

Look back 225+ years ago: there was no electricity, no material science to speak of to make precision instrumentation—journal bearings on lathes, etc. couldn't be made with the accuracy of today, backlash would have been a constant worry. All instrumentation would have been crafted by hand.

And the old French pre-metric system of units was an imperial system similar to the British (France even had an inch that was similar in length to British Imperial unit). All instrumentation up to that point would have relied on the less precise standards of that old system.

Traveling was by horse and sailing ship, and so on. Surveying would have been difficult. There wasn't even the electric telegraph, only the crude optical Chappe telegraph, and even then it was only invented in the 1790s and wasn't fully implemented during the survey.

They did a truly excellent job without any of today's high tech infrastructure but they made up for all these limitations by being brilliant.

In today's modern world we often underestimate how inventive our forefathers were.
by profjure | 2025-05-23 17:32:05+00:00
TabPFN is an amazing innovation. But there are some crucial differences in model capabilities that make it hard for a fair comparison.

TabPFN can only operate on a single small table. But real-world datasets are actually multi-table and to make accurate prediction you need to capture signal from multiple tables (for example, customers, products, purchases).

So, the comparison to TabPFN would be unfair as it would only use data from a single table and that would lead to bad performance of TabPFN.
by intuitionist | 2025-05-23 17:32:58+00:00
I dunno. Utilitarianism sounds nice on the surface—how can you be against the greatest good for the greatest number?—but it’s pretty under-specified (hedonic or preference? act or rule? do you discount future beings’ utils, and at what rate?) and if you take any particular specification seriously you get moral claims that are wildly counterintuitive, like “insect suffering is orders of magnitude more important than heart disease in humans” or “there may be quadrillions of sentient beings in the far future, and making their lives 1% better is a better use of resources than eradicating malaria now” or “it’s morally justified to steal billions of dollars of other people’s money to give to pandemic prevention and AI safety.” And maybe these are correct claims, but they definitely don’t align with many people’s moral intuitions, and it’d be a tall task to convince those people.
by petesergeant | 2025-05-23 17:33:58+00:00
> The key idea here is that with Superlinked, your search system can understand what you want and adjust accordingly.

I read as much of this article as I could be bothered to and still didn’t really understand how it removes the need for reranking. It starts talking about mixing vector and non-vector search, so ok fine. Is there any signal here or is it all marketing fluff?
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-05-23 17:35:04+00:00
The name AGI (i.e. generalist AI) was originally intended to contrast with narrow AI which is only capable of one, or a few, specific narrow skills. A narrow AI might be able to play chess, or distinguish 20 breeds of dog, but wouldn't be able to play tic tac toe because it wasn't built for that. AGI would be able to learn to do anything, within reason.

The term AGI is obviously used very loosely with little agreement to it's precise definition, but I think a lot of people take it to mean not only generality, but specifically human-level generality, and human-level ability to learn from experience and solve problems.

A large part of the problem with AGI being poorly defined is that intelligence itself is poorly defined. Even if we choose to define AGI as meaning human-level intelligence, what does THAT mean? I think there is a simple reductionist definition of intelligence (as the word is used to refer to human/animal intelligence), but ultimately the meaning of words are derived from their usage, and the word "intelligence" is used in 100 different ways ...
by slg | 2025-05-23 17:35:35+00:00
>Israel’s war on Gaza does not coincide with the evangelical mission to trigger the second coming.

Maybe you don't see it because you aren't willing to think this darkly. Rebuilding the Temple is not a particularly popular idea, either domestically in Israel or internationally. The country would have to be much further radicalized for that to become realistic. Executing an ethnic cleansing of their Arab population with the tacit endorsement of the US would arguably be steps along that path to creating a world in which the Third Temple might be built.
by alwillis | 2025-05-23 17:36:12+00:00
> Apple will happily let Webkit languish as much as possible to drive people to apps.

Doesn't make any sense: why would Apple allow an app that's on 2+ billion devices to languish?

There's no evidence of WebKit languishing. If anything, the WebKit team has shipped important web platform features more quickly than it ever has before.

WebKit is arguably the most important framework for the App Store; many thousands of apps rely on it, including many of Apple's first party apps.

* first to ship <search> in Safari 17, September 2023

* first to ship :has in Safari 15.4, March 2022 [1]

* first to ship wide gamut color support [2]

* the only browser shipping support for JPEG XL

* so many new features shipped in Safari 18.4 it took 8,000 words to describe it all [3]

[1]: https://www.webkit.org/blog/13096/css-has-pseudo-class/

[2]: https://webkit.org/blog/10042/wide-gamut-color-in-css-with-d...

[3]: https://webkit.org/blog/16574/webkit-features-in-safari-18-4...
by OJFord | 2025-05-23 17:37:52+00:00
I guess simply 'milk' I also missed, which is a bit sweet of course but I wasn't intending to lump it in with fruit juices and added-sugar drinks.

I did almost mention jaljeera, but thought that might be a bit niche. It is also often sweetened though. I've never known not-sweet lassi though? Salted lassi is still sweet underneath, like salted caramel, ime. We could count it with the sweet-ish milk drinks, anyway.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-05-23 17:38:14+00:00
The more I think of who I wish would buy them out based on some of the things they've done for side funding. I think someone like CloudFlare (not Google, Microsoft or Apple) would fit the bill for me. Mozilla birthed Rust, they very likely still have Rust talent onboard. CloudFlare relies on Rust for critical software.

I kind of miss the world the Mozilla was going all in on Rust for Firefox, I think the language could benefit greatly from it, especially in terms of out of the box libraries. One of my hopes was that Rust would eventually build out a standard GUI stack that's cross-platform that would be used by Firefox, but could be used by everyone. Same could be said of all the different pieces that make up Firefox, including the JS engine, could have been its own discrete Rust crate.
by scotty79 | 2025-05-23 17:38:19+00:00
Some did well, some did bad. Completely unsuspicious gauss curve you can easily achieve if you are aiming for it when you grade. Nobody's gonna argue because we signed up for computer science and physics is just there to be passed and forgotten.

Of course the problem was me. I needed to understand to remember. Many people don't need that. They can reproduce completely arbitrary piece of text they were "taught". The grade I got from him was the only non top level semester grade I got in my about nine years of learning physics across five different teachers. And it's not that he hated me or something. We barely interacted. He was just terrible at explaining things and I didn't have a book I could just read instead of trying to understand him. Terrible teacher can make all the difference.
by vel0city | 2025-05-23 17:38:30+00:00
I don't get the point of things like changing the tone of something with AI in Notepad. If I'm going to write something formal, I'm probably not writing it in Notepad.

What I'd kind of like with something like Copilot in a text editor, assuming it's going to be included in the first place, would be recommendations to fix formatting or a source to help find issues in config files.
by Liquix | 2025-05-23 17:38:41+00:00
the anarchist's cookbook was readily available on textfiles (way less safeguards than google/LLMs), yet society hasn't devolved into napalm 'n' pipe-bomb hyperviolence.

curiosity is natural, kids are going to look up edgy stuff on the internet, it's a part of learning the difference between right and wrong; that playing with fire has consequences. censorship of any form is a slippery slope and should be rejected on principle
by apothegm | 2025-05-23 17:39:00+00:00
Aside from relatively low COL for a major city (and assuming no roots in the state), why would anyone want to live in Tulsa at all?

I say that as someone who’s spent a non-trivial amount of time there, too.

The weather is miserable in summer, marginally less miserable in winter (depending on your climate preferences). It’s a car-dependent big box wasteland hellscape even near the city center. The intolerance I encountered was astonishing. It has little to offer in the way of culture, and even less in the way of beautiful natural spaces. It would be borderline uninhabitable without aggressive air conditioning and similar modern “conveniences”.

Basically all is has to offer is endless room for suburban sprawl. But so do dozens of other American cities.

I’m sure there are some people who love it there.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-23 17:39:31+00:00
People underestimate the anger that has festered in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and parts of BC due to Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Program [0]. It caused a severe recession across western Canada back in the 80s and 90s leading to the Reform Party movement, Social Credit movement (a proto-MAGA movement), and the BC Liberals (a reform party splinter that uses the Liberal name, and all the liberals got pushed into the BC NDP as a result), and that resentment has festered.

Secession is a pipe dream, but do not underestimate the anger and conservatism in Western Canada outside of Greater Vancouver, Nanaimo, Victoria, Kelwona, and a couple other islands of liberalism in a sea of conservatism - there's no cultural or social difference between Abbotsford and Bellingham (edit: whitcom county, did not realize Bellingham gentrified), or Lethbridge and Great Falls. Western Canada's resource-driven economy also plays a major role in this because for a lot of Canadians it's their only shot at middle class salaries and life.

At least Carney grew up in Alberta during that era, so he can probably avoid the misteps that Justin Trudeau and his father did when dealing with Western Canada.

[0] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Energy_Program
by lanstin | 2025-05-23 17:40:12+00:00
That's because between the two approaches "explain me this thing" or "write code to demonstrate this thing" the LLMs are much more useful on the second path. I can ask it to calculate some third derivatives, or I can ask it to write Mathematica notebook to calculate the same derivatives, and the latter is generally correct and extremely useful as is - the former requires me to scrutinize each line of logic and calculation very carefully.

It's like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZr54G7ec7A where Prof. Tao uses claude to generate Lean4 proofs (which are then verifiable by machine). Great progress, very useful. While the LLM only approachs are still lacking utility for the top minds: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/113132502735585408
by giancarlostoro | 2025-05-23 17:40:57+00:00
I listen to online debates, especially political ones on various platforms, and man. The AI slop that people slap around at each other is beyond horrendous. I would not want an LLM being the final say on something critical. I want the opposite, an LLM should identify things that need follow up review by a qualified person, a person should still confirm the things that "pass" but they can then prioritize what to validate first.
by ZeroConcerns | 2025-05-23 17:42:17+00:00
> mania takes hold

Sure, unlike the rest of the industry, which has taken a noticeably restrained approach to AI... But, oh, wait, this is El Reg, so it's all to be taken with a whole shaker full of salt.

Anyway, PSA time: if you're on Windows, and you dislike anything about the "New Notepad" experience (for me, the inexplicable approach to tab handling was the dealbreaker), here are the arduous steps required to get rid of it:

1. Find Notepad in your Start menu, right-click its icon, select Uninstall.

Yeah, I know... (FAQ: "Will this restore my precious notepad.exe to its previous functionality, which is wrapping the Win32 text edit control without any frills? Yes!")
by hamburga | 2025-05-23 17:43:28+00:00
> The argument that persuaded many of us is that people have a lot of desires, i.e., the algorithmic complexity of human desires is at least dozens or hundreds of bits of information

I would really try to disentangle this.

1. I don't know what my desires are. 2. "Desire" itself is a vague word that can't be measured or quantified; where does my desire for "feeling at peace" get encoded in any hypothetical artificial mind? 3. People have different and opposing desires.

Therefore, Coherent Extrapolated Volition is not coherent to me.

This is kind of where I go when I say that any centralized, top-down "grand plan" for AI safety is a folly. On the other hand, we all contribute to Selection.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-23 17:43:42+00:00
Maybe if somebody made a paid version of Linux for desktops, they could pay for people to do the job of designing a sandbox and store.

It sounds like not many volunteers find it very fun (which isn’t surprising, it sounds incredibly tedious, high-stakes, and annoying to work on). This isn’t the sort of thing people do for free and it also isn’t obvious what the business model is supposed to be… the incentives aren’t here.
by criddell | 2025-05-23 17:43:44+00:00
I don't know what the axes are for your trajectory plot, but some of the people I know who seem to really enjoy their lives are not high achievers if you measure by status or finances.

It's hard to find things that all of them have in common. They all come from supportive, functioning families and all of them are artistic people working in technical fields and have high EQ. They are all very curious but not scattered or unfocused.

I didn't know if I should write creative or artistic above because they are so similar. They are different though, right?