MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gwern | 2025-05-02 22:12:00+00:00
My point is that there are no 'genuine consequences'. We are told that supposedly there is selection and that the predictive power is nearly perfect and everyone relies on solely genetics to do everything; and yet, we do not see a world which reflects such effects at all. This worldbuilding does not make sense from a scientific perspective. Instead, what we see is a world in which you have extremely cheap sequencing in a panopticon and a caste society based on seemingly-random arbitrary discrimination with no actual consequences to any supposed inferiority or superiority*, akin to the classification of supposedly-objective 'classes' in North Korea where everyone is finely graded on hereditary loyalty to the elites but could be knocked down a rung at any time for suspected disloyalty.

(My headcanon is that the esoteric story of _Gattaca_ is that none of the supposed embryo selection or valid/invalid screens exist at all, any embryo selection is just ordinary IVF quality control for aneuploidy etc, there is only cheap universal sequencing developed by a totalitarian police state like the CCP (see: Zero COVID testing), and the classification exists to manufacture distinctions and divide families and punish/reward elite supporters; the Freemans were some lower 'wavering' class, grouped with religious minorities, as indicated by their dissenting 'natural' birth, and so they earned a valid vs invalid split within their family. It makes more sense than the actual story, anyway.)

* I've remarked elsewhere that _Gattaca_ is an example of how movies with a message tend to fail by loading the dice too heavily for one side, removing any 'moral dilemma', and it is no exception: we never see any evidence that Vincent is doing anything wrong or that he shouldn't go on the space mission. In fact, given his methodical penetration, high competency, motivation, and extraordinary success at getting into the mission, he shows that he should be selected for his moxie and chutzpah. So what _Gattaca_ should have done was to make the ending Vincent suddenly clutching his heart from the shock, and fade to black.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-05-02 22:12:16+00:00
I don't think Intel Macs have the grunt for this. Physical modelling of complex networks is pretty intensive.

You can take it a stage further and model networks of complex shapes like metal plates. That gets even more interesting because you get multiple resonant modes.

In the limit you could use finite element modelling to create precise simulations of acoustic instruments - like all of the strings in a piano, all of the dampers, the resonator, and the wooden enclosure.

But that's a brute force way to do it, and there isn't nearly enough compute available to make it happen in real time. (You might be able to do it on a supercomputer. I'm not aware of anyone's who's tried.)
by chasil | 2025-05-02 22:13:36+00:00
> Kodak and digital photography: Kodak actually invented the first digital camera in 1975. But the company was so committed to its film business model that it couldn't adapt its thinking when digital technology began to take over.

The opposite of this is "knife the baby" which I first heard in a stage production of (I think) The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

The Macintosh would far supplant the cash cow of the Apple ][ (Apple 2).

Jobs did it anyway.

This appears to contradict both confirmation bias and groupthink (mentioned in the article).

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/theater/reviews/the-agony...

https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/microsoft-asked-appl...
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-05-02 22:15:52+00:00
Yeah, prices on goods in China have gone down noticeably. I mean, it's always cheap, but now it's pretty ridiculous.

I was chatting with my wife about this, and we came to the conclusion that 1000RMB in China gets you more stuff than 1000EUR in Europe. And, honestly, there's not that much of a quality difference.
by nlh | 2025-05-02 22:17:16+00:00
Similarly - one of my biggest complaints about almost every rating system in production is how just absolutely lazy they are. And by that, I mean everyone seems to think "the object's collective rating is an average of all the individual ratings" is good enough. It's not.

Take any given Yelp / Google / Amazon page and you'll see some distribution like this:

User 1: "5 stars. Everything was great!"

User 2: "5 stars. I'd go here again!"

User 3: "1 star. The food was delicious but the waiter was so rude!!!one11!! They forgot it was my cousin's sister's mother's birthday and they didn't kiss my hand when I sat down!! I love the food here but they need to fire that one waiter!!"

Yelp: 3.6 stars average rating.

One thing I always liked about FourSquare was that they did NOT use this lazy method. Their score was actually intelligent - it checked things like how often someone would return, how much time they spent there, etc. and weighted a review accordingly.
by KristenDev | 2025-05-02 22:17:25+00:00
This has ruined many careers in the making. The DDOS attacks happened while this breach like hotspot was open. who do we contact if any of our studies are leaked out like a publicity stunt day in day out and the x.ai hasnt responded for months after stating concern and rogue like actions on different AI services. Do we post videos, make statements or just gather and share tips and insight?
by caseyross | 2025-05-02 22:17:47+00:00
So, building on this, we can view Beat Saber not as a music game, but as a *dance* game that figured out a reliable, precise way to track player movements.

It's interesting to note that similar movement-quantizing systems are at the core of numerous other hit games, most notably in Dance Dance Revolution but also to some extent Rock Band and Taiko no Tatsujin.
by jacobgkau | 2025-05-02 22:19:09+00:00
Too many "rounding errors" adding up seems like a reasonable justification for not allowing even seemingly small sources of additional inconsistency. Slippery slope and all that.

Also, just because the other potential sources of bias you brought up exist doesn't mean new ones should be let into the process. I wouldn't be against solutions to remove the ones you mentioned. But I don't think you'd be entirely convinced that just allowing cartoon dragons would decrease bias by making people more empathetic.
by maj0rhn | 2025-05-02 22:20:16+00:00
Perhaps a more enlightening view is in the book "The Socratic Method," by Ward Farnsworth, who is dean of the UTexas Law School. This is a great book for those just starting on the adulthood road, though it could have been shorter.

It analyzes the dialogs of Socrates with practicality in mind, showing how to question the world around you, question your own beliefs, and question the beliefs of others, all without coming off like a dick (as Socrates often does). Moreover, as related to the OP's article, it tells you precisely how Socrates would have defined an intellectually rich life, and I think Farnsworth is correct.

Farnsworth's Socratic method is about much more than just asking questions. The trite "Know thyself" injunction is seen to be a specific outgrowth of the Socratic method, echoing in some way the OP's claim that everything tracks to philosophy.

Incidentally, the book includes a stunning revelation from Ben Franklin saying that he found the Socratic method to be the best way of getting people to change their mind and do what he wanted. He gave it up, however, because it was too powerful a tool and he decided to adopt instead a more diffident personality, which he found also successful.

I would have thought a book like this would sell about 10 copies, but it has 800 comments on Amazon! [I have no connection with the author or with Amazon.]
by m3047 | 2025-05-02 22:21:13+00:00
How many people took Zantac (ranitidine) the highly spammed H2 blocker? https://www.nfcr.org/blog/3-common-heartburn-drugs-are-assoc...

Doctors don't ask about this. People still take Prilosec, and it's acknowledged that it causes cancer. You get what you give: confirmation bias.

Edit: The essential problem is that ranitidine isn't shelf-stable. This could explain some problems with other theraputics which we won't name to avoid downvoting / politics.
by sebastiennight | 2025-05-02 22:21:42+00:00
data:text/html;,<input id=i><button onclick="l.textContent='Now do '+i.value">Do</button><button onclick="l.textContent='Do nothing'">Nope</button><label id=l>

Will work in your browser if you copy/paste it. Or as a QR code: https://d1yei2z3i6k35z.cloudfront.net/2914/6815454b25323_qr-...
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-02 22:22:00+00:00
One personal project I'd love to find the time for is to try to write out a sequence of math notes that essentially builds up a Lean repository, intentionally "refactoring" as it goes along. So you do some explicit coordinate vector or system-of-equation calculations with both real and complex numbers, eventually define interfaces for fields and vectors, do your linear algebra proofs, realize that linear endomorphisms are almost-but-not-quite a field, so define rings and go back and refactor your field proofs to use them, realize vector spaces are "K[T] not-quite vector spaces", define modules, refactor your vector space code, etc.

This was kind of how math classes worked, but without that explicit phrasing. It would certainly make the analogy between the two activities more obvious. I also wonder whether people would have less trouble with quantifiers if they were phrased in programming terms: a proof of "forall x, p(x)" is a function x=>p(x), and a proof of "there exists x such that p(x)" is a pair (x, p(x)). e.g.

Continuity: (epsilon: R, h: epsilon>0, x_0: R) => (delta: R, h2: (x: R, h3: d(x,x_0) < delta) => d(f(x),f(x_0)) < epsilon)

Uniform continuity: (epsilon: R, h: epsilon>0) => (delta: R, h2: (x: R, x_0: R, h3: d(x,x_0) < delta => d(f(x),f(x_0)) < epsilon))

proof of UC => C = (epsilon, h, x_0) => let delta, h2 = UC(epsilon,h) in (delta, h2(_,x_0,_))

So when you're trying to figure out how to do the proof, it's clear what kind of type you need to return and your IDE could help you with autocomplete based on type inference.
by danenania | 2025-05-02 22:22:25+00:00
I think people are getting hung up on comparisons to a human therapist. A better comparison imo is to journaling. It’s something with low cost and low stakes that you can do on your own to help get your thoughts straight.

The benefit from that perspective is not so much in receiving an “answer” or empathy, but in getting thoughts and feelings out of your own head so that you can reflect on them more objectively. The AI is useful here because it requires a lot less activation energy than actual journaling.
by flipflipper | 2025-05-02 22:23:18+00:00
I brainfarted a bit and mixed up my attempts with making LTSPICE asc schematics (which are the text representations of the GUI sch, with wires) with the normal node based SPICE syntax. I just tried this specifically asking for spice to run with ngspice to run in a CLI. Seemed to run great! Going to play around with this for a bit now…
by mort96 | 2025-05-02 22:23:51+00:00
The impression I have, as an outsider, is that Google hoovers up all information available to them and uses it as input to various algorithms and ML models for targeted advertising. I'm sure individual Google employees are as thoughtful as you say, but I don't think the organization views itself as it users' "enemy" or as something which its uses should be protected from.

I'm not afraid of employees at Google or random Google divisions obtaining unauthorised access to information at me, it's not about that. I'm certain that there's very little data that the targeted advertising part of Google can't access.
Show HN: Cryptle – Wordle for Cryptogrphy
by Haris1245 | 2025-05-02 22:24:34+00:00
Hi HN! I am Haris, high schooler from Bulgaria and i had a couple of hours laying around and i really love solving puzzles and ciphers!

So, I built a game like Wordle but for Cryptography everyday there is a new word ciphered that you have to decode and guess!

Would love if you check it out and share your results: cryptle.site
by ggm | 2025-05-02 22:24:46+00:00
I also used these ones in Edinburgh decades ago, and the same model at Leeds uni which was a similar vintage. The Napier one there is a story about a lecturer convincing two students it went upside down and if you tried to loop the loop you had to stand on your hands to do the transition... much hilarity when they appear upside down on the other side.
by talyke | 2025-05-02 22:25:57+00:00
Software Engineer specializing and experienced in Healthcare Technology and related Security and integrations in the Healthcare Industry. Both in US and Canada. United States Citizen(born in upstate NY). Currently Locate din SLC, UT. 6 years experience professionally and if interested, please hit me up!

Interested in company and Machine Learning or SWE Staff role.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tlkeene

You can find me on LinkedIn to request my resume or contact info.

Best

Tara Keene
by robomartin | 2025-05-02 22:26:21+00:00
> You lost me at Kevin O’Leary.

That's an unreasonable position to take. What matters isn't who says something at all. It's if what the person says is true. And, in Kevin's case, what he is saying is 100% on point and correct.

Aside from personal experience, I have met many entrepreneurs who got shafted by China's approach to business and intellectual property. One of them had to shutter his company barely six months after introducing their first product. The product was successful enough that it got cloned very quickly. They introduced a cloned product at half his price. Orders evaporated. He had to let go of his employees and close the business.

Whether you like it or not, what O'Leary says in his videos is 100% accurate and true. Your experience with him is absolutely irrelevant and not worth discussing.
by photonthug | 2025-05-02 22:26:22+00:00
> But more annoyingly if I asked "I am encountering X issue, could Y be the cause" or "could Y be a solution", the response would nearly always be "yes, exactly, it's Y" even when it wasn't the case

Seems like the same issue as the evil vector [1] and it could have been predicted that this would happen.

> It's kind of a wild sign of the times to see a tech company issue this kind of post mortem about a flaw in its tech leading to "emotional over-reliance, or risky behavior" among its users. I think the broader issue here is people using ChatGPT as their own personal therapist.

I'll say the quiet part out loud here. What's wild is that they appear to be apologizing that their Wormtongue[2] whisperer was too obvious to avoid being caught in the act, rather than prioritizing or apologizing for not building the fact-based councilor that people wanted/expected. In other words.. their business model at the top is the same as the scammers at the bottom: good-enough fakes to be deceptive, doubling down on narratives over substance, etc.

[1] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8693 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%ADma_Wormtongue
by gradstudent | 2025-05-02 22:27:12+00:00
>Or, when people become familiar with many instances of X they seek out the "best" instances of X

I think you're saying the same thing as the GP? Ulysses is a book for lit nerds, which I suppose the Modern Library board were.

Looking at the list, there's hardly any books from after mid 20th century. That makes me think that the board comprised primarily old lit nerds, who stopped reading long before voting. The list is also super ethno centric, which makes me more dubious still about the claims for "best" anything.
by transcriptase | 2025-05-02 22:27:16+00:00
Basically for the people with little to lose, who for the last 30-40 years have been increasingly screwed over by the wealthy and the political elite (and the media who serve them) Trump is a nothing but a Molotov cocktail to throw back.

Whether he’s on their side, lying, or a net negative is irrelevant. Things steadily getting worse for the poor and lower-middle class is nothing new, but things finally not going the way the elites want and seeing them seethe is cathartic. The fact that nearly everyone who is responsible for the erosion of the middle class hates him is reason enough put him in power, because what else can the average voter do to make those who hold all the power feel the same uncertainty they have.

That’s what people don’t understand about a significant part of who they think is his “base”, who in reality just consider the enemy of their enemy to be their friend.
A macOS app to prevent sound quality degradation on AirPods
by dunelly | 2025-05-02 22:28:10+00:00
Coudldnt' reply so I'd reiterate the thread, this app should fix any issues by auto switching away from the bluetooth mic when airpods connect.

https://dunelly.github.io/Bluetooth-Mic-Switch/#

or the macos app store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bluetoothmicswitch/id6744818861?mt=12
by netsharc | 2025-05-02 22:29:08+00:00
> Good luck with the collective will needed to fight for an ideologue in the 21st century.

Look at the January 6 mob...

I can imagine there's the willingness to fight for democracy or the return of the rule of law, or just "to see those corrupt scumbags be punished", people had food in 2020 but still went to the streets because of the police murder of George Floyd.
by RajT88 | 2025-05-02 22:29:14+00:00
I'll try. YMMV, but:

DC:

You can get just about any kind of food - because just about every culture in the world is represented. You can find some of the more home-y type menu options too for the same reason. For example, Greek restaurants where I am at don't generally have Taramosalata (carp roe dip). Due to the shorter flights to Africa, the is a much larger African population in the DC area. One trip, I bought some Nigerian movies at a gas station. Then there's all the historical stuff - tomb of the unknown soldier, Vietnam wall, Air & Space Museum, etc. As I wandered around town on one of my early trips there, I keep seeing things I thought were very familiar - and it turns out at least some were because Bethesda (HQ'd nearby) had done an awesome job recreating apocalypse versions of them in Fallout 3 (which I played a lot of).

SF:

I went cycling a few times with a friend of mine. We went over the Golden Gate bridge, which was amazing. Also to the top of some mountain (big hill?) overlooking the city. What a view! I like to fish, and dropped a line near my hotel and caught a leopard shark. I saw an old Japanese homeless man wheel a little red wagon on a pier near the Mozilla HQ (near the many-billion dollar company I was visiting), and catch a pile of Jacksmelt using a spark plug as a sinker. There is a lot of excellent Asian-influenced dining options - my personal favorite is Lilo Lilo Yacht Club. I got to see a tent city of what appeared to be techies - all really nice huge family-sized tents, well dressed and apparently happy and well fed. One time, I was having a drink in a bar in SFO, and chatted up a guy who had just come from an executive meeting with a bunch of VP's and CTO's of Sony, where chewed them out about their usage of Kubernetes. I saw a shirtless man walking around with what appeared to be pony boots? I assume part of the gay scene.

Now - you may not like all that, but you are not generally having those experiences near suburban corporate parks. Yes, they have Outback Steakhouses, but they have rather a lot more going on.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-02 22:29:22+00:00
Moments like these make me reevaluate the AI doomer view point. We aren't just toying with access to dangerous ideas (biological weapons, etc) we are toying with human psychology.

If something as obvious as harmful sycophancy can slip out so easily, what subtle harms are being introduced. It's like lead in paint (and gasoline) except rewiring our very brains. We won't know the real problems for decades.
by m463 | 2025-05-02 22:30:40+00:00
There's definitely some of that going on.

I've gotten the same feeling watching old movies a second time.

I would watch a movie when I was young, and it just came out. It would be "modern", maybe state of the art, and it would have an impact on me. But I was young, and easily impressed by the cliche or trite.

And then I would watch the same movie decades later. Times changed, the art has changed, casting, pacing, effects have all advanced to support the storytelling. And I am older, a different person, and maybe more aware of what is "timeless" with a little more experience under my belt.

It might be a historical deep dive, but compared to the available material our present has, some older media should drop off the list.
by ben_w | 2025-05-02 22:30:43+00:00
Hence:

"When the physical cost of building the house is forces to go up, the value of the land is forced to go down."

Land in the UK, for housing, is expensive. But it's only worth what the house price can get away with. Everyone gets richer => land is more expensive. Interest rates go down => land is more expensive.

This is also why UK houses are so small compared to much of EU, US. Materials are cheap, land is where the money goes.
by goodluckchuck | 2025-05-02 22:30:56+00:00
Incarcerating someone until they comply is a tried and true approach, but it’s complicated with a company.

Who do you jail? The CEO? What if he’s directed his subordinates to comply and they simply know he doesn’t really want them to? It’s hard to jail those lower down the food chain, because does Apple even care? I don’t know that would be effective. They might get indignant and use it as a rallying cry, because it doesn’t really cost the business anything.

A more comparable analogy would be to enjoin Apple from selling the relevant products, e.g. they cannot collect any commissions until they comply.

Jail is a good punishment, but not a very effective form of coercion when the wrongdoer is a business.
by robomartin | 2025-05-02 22:31:41+00:00
> Whatever your hopes and dreams around domestic manufacturing

This isn't about my hopes and dreams, it's about reality. I gave up years ago. I manufacture in China and other places. My take, after suffering the consequences for years, was simple: If my own government does not help me with such things as IP protection, control of currency manipulation, etc., screw it, I'll look after myself and my family. No choice.

So, I sold my manufacturing equipment and got the fuck out. We work with two factories in China and, well, I don't give a shit any more. Sounds horrible, I know, but, as the movie line goes "Mongo small fish in pond of life". This is something for the next generation to figure out...or not...and suffer whatever the consequences might be.

What is always notable is that almost nobody commenting on these kinds of threads know what the fuck they are talking about. A bunch of software engineers playing business person. Not a clue. Go talk to real manufacturing entrepreneurs and see what they say. Until then, you are not at all equipped to understand what's in front of us at all.
by Retr0id | 2025-05-02 22:31:51+00:00
> I'm genuinely mystified why its not applied anywhere I can see.

I wonder if companies are afraid of being accused of "cooking the books", especially in contexts where the individual ratings are visible.

If I saw a product with 3x 5-star reviews and 1x 3-star review, I'd be suspicious if the overall rating was still a perfect 5 stars.
by jncfhnb | 2025-05-02 22:32:04+00:00
I don’t really agree with the thesis that it’s about motion. I found myself moving less and less as I got better at beat saber. I didn’t care at all about the scoring, and if I did, it was about hit percentages and combos, not slicing accuracy.

It’s a good game with nice UX. It is most definitely a rhythm game. But you could get 99% of its value prop on an arcade machine setup sort of thing. It doesn’t need to be strapped to your head. It’s barely VR. The fact that it’s still pointed to as the best VR experience is proof that VR gaming is going nowhere.