MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Balgair | 2025-05-07 18:00:25+00:00
The longer portion from the Dwarkesh interview isn't as flashy as the article makes out. Mark is essentially saying in that interview that people need more friends, have room for them in their lives, and they struggle to keep them. Using AI to help you get real people to be your friends is the goal there, not to replace people.

That said, if you listen to the whole interview, then it really does come across that Zuck really doesn't know what a friend is, and never really has. And at this point in his life, I don't think that going to change. Dude lives in a house with meter thick RPG-proof windows. His reality very much is too distorted by his wealth. He's, literally, too rich to function.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-05-07 18:00:34+00:00
A saying that increasingly resonates with me (50's) is that inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

I think this idea that you become a fundamentally different person as you age is wrong. Things do change - the physical changes of ageing suck, mentally I'm more at peace than I was when I was younger.

But I'm still basically me. I would love for us to solve the problem of physical decrepitude with aging. Even if we lived no longer.
by lr4444lr | 2025-05-07 18:00:38+00:00
I had a near-death health emergency 5 years ago in my late 30s, which turned out to be due to a chronic but perfectly manageable set of conditions I didn't know I had been developing.

Part of that management is a commitment to healthy living: daily vigorous exercise, dietary restrictions, and sleep optimization. I was on and off in shape before then, but the motivation to avoid sliding into a very marked decline due to those conditions has resulted in my achieving better health and higher fitness now in my early 40s than I had for most of my 30s (even some of my 20s), and the numbers don't lie.

Ceteris paribus, if I had adopted this lifestyle in my 20s and 30s I'd probably have then outperformed my current self, and I certainly cannot recover as quickly now from overexertion, but that's besides the point. Do we look at people in their 20s with cystic fibrosis or in 30s with multiple sclerosis and say they're doing "better" than the average person in their 40s or 50s optimizing their health?
by alganet | 2025-05-07 18:00:46+00:00
You're all over the place.

Your first paragraph describes a simple prompt. The second implies a "jailbreak" prompt.

The bible paragraph is just you being snarky (and failing).

Your examples don't help your case.

I stand on the side that wants to restrict AI from generating triggering content of any kind.

It's a safety feature, in the same sense as safety belts on cars are not a censorship of the driver movement.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-07 18:01:23+00:00
LOL, wow. Both to the Dilbert PHB-IRL "ArthurStacks" and to the LLM being so obsequious. At least it had candor, I guess? You want to say "Just stop filling your context window with apologetic analysis and do it correctly."

But yes. Sometimes it is so brilliant I smile (even if it's just copying a transliterated version of someone else's brilliance). Sometimes it is SO DUMB that I can't help but get frustrated.

In short, job security assured for the time being. If only because bosses and clients need someone to point at when the shit hits the fan.
by seanhunter | 2025-05-07 18:01:24+00:00
Irrespective of opensearch, if the dimension of your vector embedding is reasonably large you'll probably want an approximate nearest neighbours approach like HNSW rather than knn itself

https://docs.opensearch.org/docs/1.2/search-plugins/knn/appr...

For whatever an endorsement from a random stranger is worth, we've been using opensearch for a vectordb for hybrid search across text and multimodal embeddings as well as traditional metadata and it's been great but we're not "full production" yet so I can't really speak to scale, but it's opensearch so I expect the scale to be fine most probably.
by duskwuff | 2025-05-07 18:01:33+00:00
document.querySelector("#user-plus-gate").remove() document.body.classList.remove("csm-premium-gated")

There's also a pair of more comprehensive reports (linked from the main page) on:

Social AI companions in general: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/pug/csm...

Character.AI in particular: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/pug/csm...
by autoexec | 2025-05-07 18:01:37+00:00
Exactly. The posted link is unreadable, but other stories on the topic (for example: https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/30/tech/ai-companion-chatbots-un...) don't give me any reason to think that they are safe for adults. Adults are just slightly/somewhat better able to handle the hazardous material.
by JohnMakin | 2025-05-07 18:02:25+00:00
I laugh at 20 somethings that consider mid/late 30's as "old." Blink and you'll be here too with the same receding hairline, pal.

My body of course is slowing down, to some degree my mind, but I very much feel like a 20 year old at heart and don't imagine that will change. I do at some point probably need to stop living like one, though.
by optymizer | 2025-05-07 18:02:26+00:00
You know, setting expectations for yourself when you're young for what you want your life to be when you're old is great, but it can be a bit like providing estimates for how long a project will take when you have barely started it.

You made an estimate when you had the least amount of information. Now that you have accumulated more information, the most productive course of action is to revise the estimate and work towards to meet that goal.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-05-07 18:02:39+00:00
My university had rampant cheating. Students attending for others was a big one, especially for the exams in rooms with 90 students. Finding someone to write papers for you was super easy, but CS cheating was cut throat. Guard your code because people will steal it, will break into the professors office after hours, and will try to hack your computer, just to name some incidents that happened. Granted I'm now 10 years out of uni but even back then, students felt more entitled to the degree, and were willing to color outside the lines if that is what it took to get it.
by tvaughan | 2025-05-07 18:02:46+00:00
Can relate to both. There aren’t a lot of winters left where I’ll be able to ski. The future no longer feels infinite. I do not have all of the time in the world to do the things I enjoy. But, and my younger self would be very upset with me, I am very happily done with the hussle.

> But these days, there’s nothing lovelier than a Saturday morning with a bit of jazz or classical playing, pottering about the kitchen, and then being tucked up in bed before 10pm. Wild.

Play with the dogs. Smoke some weed, a nice meal and play cards with the wife. Don’t need much more.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-07 18:03:11+00:00
> Having the entire space be reachable when you're sampling a solution space and the solution may be smaller than 1/8.

You're out of luck there; no matter what happens you can only generate floating point numbers. If you're worried that the solution lies within the space of floating point numbers, but not within the part that's reachable by generating uniform samples with 1/2^53 resolution, you need to be much, much, much more worried that the solution isn't a floating point number at all.

By contrast, if you're unconcerned with the numeric properties of the numbers you're generating, and what you want is to sample "floating point values" to examine what kind of implementation-specific behavior they might have, you would never want this scheme - you'd want to generate random floating-point values, which you can do by just filling in random bits. Those will be concentrated around zero, which doesn't matter because you're not interpreting them as numbers.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-07 18:03:11+00:00
That is essentially just the fixed point method mentioned here, and it is uniformly distributed across the range (and faster because you do less), but it does not fill the low bits of the number correctly (53 bits of precision != 2^53 of them between 0 and 1). If you look at the final distribution of numbers and you use under 1-10 million numbers, that method and the division method will appear to be unbiased unless you have a pathological case.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-07 18:03:14+00:00
Modern shoes can be very cheap, which is also not durable at all. Beyond that, price and durability are two different metrics, and can tell you about a person. Some people buy expensive shoes specifically for the durability, which could tell you things about what they value, that they are willing to do research. Some people buy expensive shoes for wrongly perceived durability, which could tell you that they want to be perceived as rugged or refined. Some people buy expensive shoes for their lack of durability, which could tell you that they want people perceive their status (conspicuous consumption).

Someone wearing pristine white Jordans, Red Wings boots, or bottom tier Cole Hann dress shoes can all say things about a person.
by fatbird | 2025-05-07 18:03:21+00:00
There's a cycle to one's relationship with Mckinsey and the big accounting firms. You start with a lot of attention from the partner, who over time shifts you to more experienced assistants, who over time shift you to new hires. Then you scream at them about the shit quality of their work, and you get the partner's attention again for a year or two.
by dendrite9 | 2025-05-07 18:03:25+00:00
I've heard about businesses that had to jump into a fundraising mode to prepare for the tariffs just so they could receive product. There's also the problem in less direct sales where businesses in the chain expect a certain margin. Simply passing on the tariffs quickly leads to large price increases to the customers. I've looked at a few ways to pass on the tariff and none are very appealing, likely the healthiest option is to try to spreading the effect out by reducing margins at various stages.

I feel lucky that the tariffs were announced at a a time where we were preparing to order new inventory. Otherwise the cash flow effects would be ruinous. Unfortunately we primarily export and there is a real chance we move our manufacturing out of the US as a result of this mess.
by archagon | 2025-05-07 18:03:26+00:00
If your partner is your best and only friend, not only are you putting far too much weight on one person to manage your emotional well-being, but you’ll be SOL if/when they leave, die, or become incapacitated.

Women, who tend to maintain more social connections, will often thrive without a partner in their old age. Men will often just kind of wither away.
by lysace | 2025-05-07 18:03:26+00:00
Congrats on your non-retirement!

My personal Cloudflare pro/con list:

+ Keeps the web working at scale

+ Made me a lot of money in the stock market

- It's so very high-touch/sales-intensive. I want a tiered public price list that is universally adhered to. Otherwise there's always that nagging feeling that I'm getting screwed for not being aggressive enough, or something. I know I'm fighting an uphill battle here. See also this documentary about Jared Dunn/Ed Chambers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-CA2EW4Z_U
by QuadmasterXLII | 2025-05-07 18:03:46+00:00
It’s not really about looks. If you collect this data, and enroll a student who is seeking asylum, the current administration will attempt to get this data from you to send your student to life in prison in El Salvador. Which is an impact a bit beyond looking aligned. (Of course, reasonable people can disagree about whether life in prison is an appropriate punishment for seeking asylum through legal channels)
by kmeisthax | 2025-05-07 18:04:20+00:00
The music industry in the 90s was so dead-set on albums because albums were their cash cow. You see, when CDs came out, the industry realized it was the perfect gimmick to sell you your whole music collection all over again, now in crystal-clear digital audio. So much so that new industry labeling standards had to be made just to distinguish between re-releases and new all-digital recordings[0].

Problem is, you can only sell people better versions of the same White Album before they have perfect copies of the master tapes, after which anything higher quality is just snake oil. They didn't want the boom to end, so they pushed hard for all their artists to release albums, even if singles made more sense for them. The music industry didn't have a glut of good songs that needed to get packed onto albums for efficiency. They were larding up discs with cheaply-produced filler songs to justify charging album prices for a single.

Also, fun fact: the original plan for CD singles was to package them on smaller discs; Sony even made a portable CD player sized specifically for them. That would have further reduced the distribution and production costs of singles, as they'd take up less shelf space and use less polycarbonate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARS_code
by Tainnor | 2025-05-07 18:04:26+00:00
OP specifically asked for a program that would derive code from logical specifications, not a run-of-the-mill compiler where you have to write the code yourself (albeit on a higher level).

If your specification logic is strong enough to enclude basic addition and multiplication (and if it's not, it's probably not very useful), it will be affected by incompleteness. So you can write down the Gödel sentence corresponding to your program synthesiser's inference rule and it won't be able to find either a proof (i.e. an implementation) or a disproof (i.e. failing explicitly), so it will have to loop forever.

Another way to see it is that the set of valid theorems in FOL is uncomputable. To take a concrete example, if you write down the specification for "find the smallest number that is a counterexample to the Goldbach conjecture", finding an implementation for it would be equivalent to answering the conjecture in the negative while getting an error message would mean that the conjecture is true, but obviously nobody has solved it yet.
by killerstorm | 2025-05-07 18:04:36+00:00
I've been using IntelliJ IDEA and similar products for almost 10 years, and I'm not impressed.

Java/Kotlin is their main thing, and yet neither Maven nor Gradle builds are stable. If your build fails or there are some unresolved dependencies, you restart IDE in hope it works...

AI coding tool trial failed for me -- IDE told me it's not activated even after I activated it on billing portal. And doc implied it might take some time. WTF. Does it take some batch processing?..

People who were able to get AI coding tools working said it's way behind Cursor (although improving, apparently).
by senordevnyc | 2025-05-07 18:04:44+00:00
Exact same here. I love PHPStorm for Laravel dev, but I’ve barely used it in months. Meanwhile I’m paying $100+ per month to Cursor for subscription + premium model usage. And honestly I kinda hate Cursor as an editor / IDE. I really hope Junie is good enough to switch back, but I won’t give up integrated AI agentic coding in my editor if it’s not.
by Molitor5901 | 2025-05-07 18:04:56+00:00
I disagree. I had a number of tenured professors who absolutely did not give AF. They were openly hostile and put in the barest minimum to teaching, because as they told us, they would rather be doing research. I attended a research university, and that's cool and all, but the job of a professor should be to teach, and research should be second. In my humble opinion, that has been turned around. So we do have a lot of tenured professors, essentially immune from their core responsibility, slowly phoning it in as they prioritize research over lecture.
by whatshisface | 2025-05-07 18:05:25+00:00
>How exactly do they think that parents can ban it?

Like this:

"You're allowed to walk to your friend's house, but don't suddenly sprint out into the street."

Or,

"You're allowed to talk to the librarian, but not the guy who stands around outside with a paper bag in his hands."

Or maybe,

"You're allowed to put things in the microwave, but not metal utensils."
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-07 18:05:54+00:00
Yes! One thing that would be pretty likely to work is radically changing our city layouts, patterns of settlement, methods of commute, density of living, food quality, food prices & price structuring, worker protection & time-off laws, and a bunch of other stuff.

In the meantime (so... indefinitely, because moving the needle on one of those things would be the work of a lifetime) we now have drugs that can do it.
by neonnomad | 2025-05-07 18:06:20+00:00
b.well | https://www.icanbwell.com | Fully Remote | Sr. Sre

b.well is on a mission to change the healthcare industry by empowering patients with their data to make informed decisions. We have partnered with some of the largest tech companies, pharmacies, health systems and insurers to ensure patient right of access to their data so patients and their health care providers can make better informed decisions about their health. We are building the first interconnected health network and we want you to join us to change healthcare for the better!

Job Description

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer you will be tasked with making sure we build a reliable, secure and efficient platform for the b. Well network. You will be encouraged to blog, speak, and join events to talk about the work you are doing and encourage other companies to follow our lead. We will build solutions to delight our customers, employees and business. This role will also focus heavily on automation as it is a core value to our business from reliability to scaling.

What you will do:

- Let the robots do the work! We want you to focus on automating everything from building infrastructure, monitoring and disaster recovery

- Python, Rust, Go Go Go. Whatever you are comfortable in programming/scripting in we just want to see you deliver

- Love Penguins? We do too, whatever your flavor of Linux is bring your deep technical experience to the team

- New Platform, who dis? Build new solutions that enable our business and pass the knowledge on to your peers

- Like the Eye of Sauron you will monitor our infrastructure for anomalies and issues

- Code is for building solutions, not in how you communicate. Work well with your peers and communicate clearly so they understand the WHY behind what we do

- Must feed, water and provide high fidelity low friction platform solutions to engineers to keep them happy

- Write the ancient artifacts of documentation so your peers know how things work in the environment and write policies/procedures that make sense for the business

- Pass on your knowledge and wisdom to your other team members

- You like reading about the latest technology and trying it out? Come get paid for it!

https://www.icanbwell.com/careers/?gnk=job&gni=8a7885ac958c3...

Comp Range: $153,000 - $190,000 per year
by aanet | 2025-05-07 18:06:23+00:00
Kudos to JGC! <3

I've always loved reading his blog posts on his own site, and learning / using the wide variety of his projects (hello POPfile!, hello Make!) and interests (Analytical Engine!).

Thanks for your efforts to get the British Govt to apologize for their actions towards Alan Turing!

Well deserved promo, Sir!
by campbel | 2025-05-07 18:06:25+00:00
From the linked Programmer blog [1]:

> It might seem lowly to be a Programmer, but in a world where so much is driven by computers there's nothing shameful in being the person who makes them go.

I find it interesting that in 2012 he thought the title of "Programmer" was shameful. In 2012 I was a somewhat recent grad and definitely more junior, at that time I thought programmers were the smartest folks at my company, exactly because they were "the [people] who make [computers] go".

[1] https://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/programmer.html
by Hilift | 2025-05-07 18:06:36+00:00
Everything in the cloud is throttled. Network, IOPS, CPU. And probably implemented incorrectly. AWS makes billions if the customer infrastructure is great or terrible. I found that anything smaller than an AWS EC2 m5.8xlarge had noticeably bad performance on loaded servers (Windows). The list price for that would be about $13k per year, but most organizations get lower than list prices.

This also applies to services, not only compute. Anything associated with Microsoft Office 365 Exchange, scripts may run 10x slower against the cloud using the MSOnline cmdlets. It's absolute insanity, I used to perform a dump of all mailbox statistics that would take about one hour, it could take almost 24 hours against Office 365. You have to be careful to not use the same app or service account in multiple places, because the throttle limits are per-account.
by twodave | 2025-05-07 18:07:04+00:00
It’s not about what’s easy. This is what the OP is talking about. Anyone who is in shape over a certain age pretty much has to wake up and choose the hard thing most days. Whether it’s bunions, old (or recent) injuries, GI problems, arthritis, inflammation—movement is good for all of these things. I know this from personal experience. If I stop moving for a few weeks it is very painful to get back into the groove. I’m currently dealing with some kind of lower GI problem that is affecting my energy and causing a lot of discomfort. I have foot problems, a messed up rotator cuff, etc.

But if you just keep showing up and putting in the effort (and most of all, not comparing yourself to anyone else, even your past self), the results will come.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-07 18:07:05+00:00
What if I told you that a dev group with a sensibly-limited social-club flavor is where I arguably did my best and also had my happiest memories from? In the midst of SOME of the "socializing" (which, by the way, almost always STILL sticks to technical topics, even if they are merely adjacent to the task at hand) are brilliant ideas often born which sometimes end up contributing directly to bottom lines. Would you like evidence of social work cohesion leading to more productivity and happier employees? Because I can produce that. (I'd argue that remote work has negatively impacted this.)

But yes, I also once worked at a company (Factset) where the CTO had to put a stop to something that got out of hand- A very popular game at the time basically took over the mindshare of most of the devs for a time, and he caught them whiteboarding game strategies during work hours. (It was Starcraft 1 or 2, I forget. But both date me at this point.) So he put out a stern memo. Which did halt it. And yeah, he was right to do that.

Just do me this favor- If a dev comes to you with a wild idea that you think is too risky to spend a normal workday on, tell them they can use their weekend time to try it out. And if it ends up working, give them the equivalent days off (and maybe an extra, because it sucks to burn a weekend on work stuff, even if you care about the product or service). That way, the bet is hedged on both sides. And then maybe clap them on the back. And consider a little raise next review round. (If it doesn't work out, no extra days off, no harm no foul.)

I think your attitude is in line with your position (and likely your success). I get it. Slightly more warmth wouldn't hurt, though.
by matthewcford | 2025-05-07 18:07:19+00:00
I've tried it, as even a low dose gives the person much more willpower to make other life changes, which have nothing to do with the effects of feeling fuller.

Ozempic and other GLP-1 agonists can:

Modulate dopamine release in brain regions associated with reward and motivation, such as the mesolimbic system and nucleus accumbens.

Reduce the rewarding effects of food and possibly other addictive substances, which may explain the increased sense of control or willpower.

Some studies in animals show that semaglutide can alter dopamine metabolism and suppress dopamine-driven behaviors.