MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2025-05-01 20:56:18+00:00
> Nowhere in the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics will you find an equation describing this collapse. We are left to assume it happens.

Nada. We are not left having to assume anything but the very clear laws we already have, and continually confirm.

The field equations clearly explain why a collapse “appears” to happen. There is no need to invent an actual literal collapse to explain something already explained.

Let’s keep going with cats.

We know from the laws of momentum and of light-matter interactions that if you throw a cat behind a couch it will “disappear” from existence.

Now imagine people proposing new “disappearing” laws beyond the laws we know. Or saying we are just supposed to assume there is one.

The problem with both responses is (1) the cat didn’t really disappear from the universe, we just perceive it that way, and (2) the reasons for that perception are already explained.

Likewise, quantum collapse doesn’t really happen, it is perceived, and we know why:

The field equations don’t just apply to cats inside boxes, but also cats outside boxes!

When an outside cat opens a box to determine the state of the inside cat, both cats are part of a single field equation. The total field equation covers all potential points of contact between the contributing fields of each cat. These points of contact are called “events” but not classical events. These events all happen. This is why we could have a dead/alive cat in a box in the first place.

(The field equations predict all the events, with different relative distributions, in superposition. Numerous elaborate experiments, and practical systems like quantum computers, both confirm these equations, including their distributions of superpositions.)

Now if you are an outside cat, which one are you? Pick any version based on which “event” you want, and that cat will see that event, see an inside cat alive or dead, and conclude the cat is alive. Or the cat is dead. But the cat never collapsed into one or the other. Another version of outside cat is seeing the other type of event in the total field equation.

So: each outside cat perceives a “collapse” of a dead/alive inside cat into either an alive cat, or a dead cat, but (1) there wasn’t a collapse, just two ways to half the field, and (2) the perception of a “collapse” is exactly what the field equations predict. There isn’t anything unexplained.

Apparently when we are very young and learning about the world, “disappearing” cats behind couches seems strange, and either inexplicable, or “needing” a special “disappearing” law, due to our lack of experience with occlusion.

Today, many people find “collapsing” cats (or atom states) strange and either inexplicable, or “needing” a special “collapse” law, due to a lack of experience with field equations of superpositions, that include themselves.

Contrary to politicians and newborns who may assume perception as reality. It is only a starting point for actually understanding reality. Which seldom actually conforms to our perceptions.
by sensanaty | 2025-05-01 20:56:27+00:00
Someone please shoot me if my PM ever gets this idea in his head of using LLM slop to spam tickets with en masse.

There's nothing I hate more than people sending me their AI messages, be it in a ticket or a PR or even on Slack. I'm forced to engage and spend effort on something it took them all of 3 seconds to generate without even proofreading what they're sending me says. The amount of times I've had to ask 11 clarifying questions because their message has 11 contradictions within itself is maddening to the highest degree.

The worst is when I call out one of these numerous contradictions, and the reply is "oh haha, stupid Claude :)", makes my blood boil and at the same time amazes me that someone has so little pride and respect for their fellow humans to do crap like that.
by filoleg | 2025-05-01 20:56:42+00:00
> Are companies really doing 100% remote interviews, as in: you sign the offer letter without even meeting a single person in person?

Yes, I got multiple job offers like that back in 2022 at FAANG and similar places, and a lot of my friends who interviewed recently had plenty of processes that were fully remote as well. The first time I’ve actually met someone irl from the company I signed my offer with was at least a month after I already started working, and it was just an optional lunch meetup.

However, afaik, these days most serious companies like big tech or tech-centric finance (JS/Citadel/Jump/etc.) or top AI places (OpenAI/Anthropic/etc.) would have the final rounds in-person.
by paulnpace | 2025-05-01 20:56:54+00:00
While driving a car, it is possible to do something, even on accident, that can land a person in jail. These crimes do not have the option of paying a fine in lieu of prison time.

A "self-driving" car can cause the same accident but gain advantages over a human driver that the person ultimately responsible is no longer held to the same set of laws.

This seems to undermine foundations of law, placing the owners of those assets into a different legal category from the rest of us.
by mrandish | 2025-05-01 20:57:10+00:00
> He thought he belonged... he thought he could do things and that people would let him.

This is a good point and, in the case of successful startup entrepreneurs, it may not rely solely on how much society grants or denies that belonging. Entrepreneurs tend toward a kind of selective irrationality in how they see themselves and in how they think others see them. Steve Jobs was always the first victim and/or beneficiary of his own reality distortion field. Internally, this lack of self-awareness would tend to help one ignore some of the emotional downsides of belonging being denied and externally to seize more belonging than is being granted - just through sheer chutzpah.

I've heard it said that many successful startup entrepreneurs feel all the insecurity of 'imposter syndrome' without processing any of the 'imposter' part. They tend to think they belong even when they objectively don't. While irrational, annoying and unhealthy, it's hard to imagine this doesn't have some advantages too.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-01 20:57:12+00:00
Commute time still matters, and congestion pricing will become the norm.

I can read on the subway, but while a 20 min subway ride is fine, an hour each way is still a lot, and a two hour train commute just doesn't leave much time in your life for doing social things.

Also, I think there's going to be a huge surge in in-demand AI buses. Rideshares will take people to a random spot, you'll wait 2 minutes for a predetermined seat on a specific bus, and then switch to a rideshare van for the last 5 minute drive to your office in the city.

It's just going to be so much cheaper. With economies of scale and urban congestion pricing, you'll have to choose between dropping $45 on a dedicated hour-long door-to-door car trip, or $6 for the car-bus-van version which is only 20% slower anyways.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-05-01 20:57:15+00:00
>it REALLY REALLY HELPS to also have a risk appetite, capital, and connections.. which are what coming from even moderate wealth provides.

I graduated in 2008, and I watched classmates make the 'insane' decision to risk it all and go off and try to found startups. Inevitably, some failed, but to my shock it wasn't the end of the world for them? In one case the 'bank of mom and dad' paid rent until they got back on their feet, and in the other, they moved into an ADU in their parent's back yard.

That's when it hit me that those folks took risks because they could afford to. I was worried about winding up sleeping under a bridge. That concern was as foreign to them as the thought of having a safety net to fall back on was to me.
by SequoiaHope | 2025-05-01 20:57:40+00:00
Yes I was referring to MDMA assisted psychotherapy, which I am a huge proponent of. However I’ve found these materials to be quite effecting at healing when taken conscientiously outside of a traditional assisted therapy session. Of course there probably haven’t been a lot of studies on this because formal therapy studies are probably easier to get approved, so I wouldn’t take the absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
by jmward01 | 2025-05-01 20:57:49+00:00
We have a lot of messed up rulings in the past that allow corporations to act like people but skate by when they do things as if they weren't people. I say if a corporation can have free speech like a person then they can get thrown in jail like a person too. When illegal stuff happens it should have real, meaningful, consequences like the board being fired and massive fines or outright closing the company. I am not a fan of the industry right now. Apple is a symptom of a broader problem and we need bigger changes to start correcting the direction corporate america has been heading for the last 50 years.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-01 20:57:59+00:00
Waymo doesn't say very much, but other self-driving services have been more open. It is things like "the fire truck is at a weird angle and the car didn't know what to do, draw a path where it pulls slightly into an oncoming lane so it can get around." A lot of common sense stuff which is far beyond the reach of AI in 2025.
by ryan29 | 2025-05-01 20:58:02+00:00
I've used https://historio.us since 2011 and still pay for it to keep access to all the pages I've archived over the years. The price has been kept low enough that I can't bring myself to cancel it even though I've been using self-hosted https://archivebox.io/ for the last few years.

I always include an archived link whenever I reference something in documentation. That's my main use at the moment.

However, I also feel like I've gotten a lot of really good value when trying to learn a new development topic. Whenever I find something that looks like it might be useful, I archive it and, because everything is searchable, I end up with a searchable index of really high quality content once I actually know what I'm doing.

I find it hard to rediscover content via web search these days and there's so much churn that having a personal archive of useful content is going to increase in value, at least in my opinion.
by Lammy | 2025-05-01 20:58:10+00:00
True; I should have said metadata and not just data since you're right that the volume of raw images would be too big to store indefinitely. It's way more feasible to process the raw images and store the inferences, like number of persons visible in last 5 seconds, or dates and times a person who looks like me has been seen by a Waymo while my particular Android phone is nearby, or dates and times they have seen [my OCRed car number plate].

Flock is the same way. For example here's the Flock privacy policy from one of SF's fine local shopping centers: https://www.stonestowngalleria.com/en/visit/lpr-privacy-poli...

> Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be retained indefinitely. Should any information from the LPR Dashboard be needed to assist with a security or law enforcement matter, it may be retained indefinitely, in paper and electronic form, as part of the security file until it is determined it is no longer needed; in addition, it may be shared with local law enforcement who may retain it in accordance with their own retention policy.

If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. The one on their website is conspicuously labeled Waymo Web Privacy Policy lol
by kajecounterhack | 2025-05-01 20:58:12+00:00
I don't think the Jaguars are particularly spacious or nice. They just got a good deal on the platform. If anything, given the commodity nature of vehicles I'd expect car quality to improve.

Cleanliness doesn't seem that related to how expensive the tech is either - if anything it would only go down if it ceased to affect willingness to pay. As it stands, clean cars are important to their customers. If usage increases, cleaning can ostensibly increase too, no?
by ssharp | 2025-05-01 20:58:18+00:00
I'm not sure about Census but Fivetran's free plan has met my needs to sync data from different ad platforms to BigQuery pretty well.

One of their pitfalls is charging by the row. If you're cost-conscious, you really need to watch what data you're syncing and you need to pare it down quite a bit during the 2-week period they give you when setting up a new connector. If you do all that though, you can get a lot of mileage out of the free plan for some use cases.
by SigmundA | 2025-05-01 20:58:38+00:00
Not sure sharing the neutral buys much as conductor size needs to go up vs just running separate wire.

Most hybrid inverters now days are high frequency and have a HVDC bus sitting between battery DC/DC, solar MPPT and AC inverter/converter. Since solar comes down from roof with HVDC it can be inverted without a transformer to AC then the LV battery uses a physically smaller HF transformer on the buck/boost to that bus.

Seems to be lots of talk to tap that HVDC bus for say EV charging as its around 400v, also some inverters moving to HVDC batteries as well simplifying the DC/DC even more so.

Could see a future where houses have a HVDC panel with battery, solar, inverter and EV charger hanging off it, perhaps even HVDC from pole with solid state transformers. If/when EV become popular then you will have much more readily available/cheap HVDC switching gear at 400/800v. Hard to beat the simplicity and reliability of AC using transformers though for distribution.
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-01 20:58:40+00:00
Funds duly allocated by the Legislature, which means they must be spent in service of what the Legislature allocated them for. Presidents cannot impound funds since the Impoundment Control Act, so either they need to spend them or convince Congress to change that allocation.

We can argue about the basis for terminating the grants until the cows come home, but this administration through DOGE has made it clear that they're not otherwise going to be spending this money, which is something the president cannot do.

Clawing back and terminating grants without due process is what dictators do; it's the opposite of what supporting and defending the Constitution is.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-01 20:59:01+00:00
What is 1000% better about Waymo than rideshares is the liveried fleet vehicles.

Regular taxis around here are also liveried fleet vehicles. Especially the very large providers: if I summon a taxi cab, I know for sure its make and model, and its paint job will clearly indicate it's on-duty as a taxi cab. You don't understand how incredibly important this is sometimes.

For the simple yet panic-inducing task of strapping on my seat belt: I can do it in seconds with a liveried vehicle, because I know exactly what to expect. In a rideshare like an Uber, every time a car arrives, it is a new make, new model (I swear to god what the fuck is a "Polestar"???) and the owner might have wrapped on some crazy aftermarket seat covers, and finding the seat belt and its mating latch is a huge drama. I've taken to leaving the passenger seat open, until I can get the belt safely latched, because otherwise the driver will promptly take off, and panic will increase 3x as the vehicle is moving and I can't find the seat belt.

Other than that, the liveried vehicles are easier to maintain; they're easier to keep clean; they're much better for brand recognition. Hallelujah for Waymo!
by _tom_ | 2025-05-01 20:59:13+00:00
Doesn't AGPL give you LESS rights? (fewer?)

AGPL is pretty much a non-starter for any commercial development.

The RSALv2 let you use Redis, unless you were a service provider. Now, you can't use it for anything (EVERYTHING is accessed over a network now) without sharing your source.

So, before everyone but amazon could use it for commercial purposes, now no one can.
by omneity | 2025-05-01 20:59:33+00:00
It's okay for extracting simple things like addresses, or for formatting text with some input data, like a more advanced form of mail merge.

I haven't evaled these tasks so YMMV. I'm exploring other possibilities as well. I suspect it might be decent at autocomplete, and it's small enough one could consider finetuning it on a codebase.
by 16bytes | 2025-05-01 21:00:03+00:00
> The burden of proof lies with the manufacturer to present sound, robust, transparent, third-party audited evidence.

Waymo releases its safety data: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/, which is backed by public reporting requirements.

To say that it is wholly insufficient to make any safety claims on publicly driven 50M miles, is ridiculous. At the very least, it appears sound, robust and transparent, and able to be validated.

> https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/new-swiss-re-study-waymo

Is Swiss Re a valid third party? They also address peer-reviewed and external validation in the above safety impact page.

I can understand being skeptical because of Cruise and especially claims made by Telsa, but there is a preponderance of supporting data for Waymo.

Given all of this evidence, you would still conclude Waymo is unsafe?
by xenadu02 | 2025-05-01 21:00:05+00:00
Indeed and all languages accumulate exceptions and oddities in one form or another. The larger the speaker population the more that is true.

None of them are really that much easier than any other, they just slot into patterns your brain already recognizes from languages you know (oh that feature is easy) vs ones you don't (oh that feature is difficult).

My pet theory is the human brain is willing to deal with a certain amount of complexity in speaking and in reading/writing. Some languages consume their complexity budget in number of characters and their forms, others in their spelling. For spoken language some have lots of types of forms of address or lots of grammar cases. Others have significant formal and implied word order, use lots of accessory words, etc.

When there is too much complexity in certain dimensions people naturally simplify in others. The accelerated form of this is when there is a great upheaval in society or movement of people: speakers quickly start to simplify the rules they care the least for (or convert formal spelled/spoken rules into info inferred from context).
by cobertos | 2025-05-01 21:00:13+00:00
If you free up the peer/employee/worker from thinking about the constraints of scarcity of money, doesn't the next resource of scarcity become time (or perhaps, intellectual property)? Which can still lead to a straying from the candor and other ideals this compensation system hopes to promote. The corporation still owns all your time, and all your production during that time.

I just can't help but think this scarcity of resources still causes poor incentives that lead to not as good human/team outcomes. Maybe better than in a "normal" compensation structure though?
by munificent | 2025-05-01 21:00:25+00:00
There is an infinitely long list of things that were part of the environment when that kind of passionate creative problem solving in software was thriving.

What the author is saying is that not all of those properties were causative to make software great again.

Do we need people to have enough of a safety net to take risks with entrepreneurship? Yes. Do we need enough regulation to prevent entrenched companies from using regulatory capture to stifle competition while having little enough regulation that small companies can spin up and be nimble? Yes.

Do we need to be listening to N'Sync, wearing JNCOs, watching Beavis and Butthead, and drinking Crystal Pepsi? Probably not. Those were in the air, but not causative.

And, certainly, I see little evidence to support the implicit claim in "anti-woke" that somehow sexism, homophobia, and racism were causative factors that enabled entrepreneurialism to thrive a few decades ago.
by dougb5 | 2025-05-01 21:00:36+00:00
My cynical answer: I think they reframe their history to see it as a series of ever-larger successes -- with some setbacks maybe. They avoid introspection that might lead to the unpleasant conclusion that they have actually gone off the rails and caused societal harm since their initial success. By and large their net worth has continued to increase, and that's the measure that they're comfortable with associating with success, and they see that as validation. Plus, they are surrounded by people who have the same incentives to lie to themselves and to each other.
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-01 21:00:48+00:00
It's never ceases to amaze me how much software folks think that their job cannot easily injure or kill them. All of the devs I know have no work/life balance, skip doctor's appointments because of work commitments, and several I know have had strokes or heart attacks at their desk while pushing to meet a deadline.

Just because you likely won't be killed in a crane collapse or someone dropping a hammer doesn't mean that the workplace is safe and that working conditions are good.
by jasode | 2025-05-01 21:01:00+00:00
>The real explanation for why sales people get paid so well is that some really good sales people sold the idea of a highly favorable 'industry standard' model for enterprise sales.

Is there a notable company with enterprise sales that's successful without sales commissions?

Companies in the past have tried a "flat salary no commissions" comp structure for salespeople before and it doesn't work even though intuition seems to tells us that it should. The thinking goes something like... "If salespeople are paid a good salary and therefore aren't under any pressure to meet any quotas to earn a high income, that mental freedom should allow them to sell."

What actually happens is that fixed salaries for sales positions attracts underperformers who can't sell and simultaneously, makes the job not attractive to "rainmakers" who know they're worth more than the fixed salary.

E.g. Pluralsight made the news in 2014 for not paying commissions to salespeople with a list of intuitive-sounding reasons: https://www.inc.com/aaron-skonnard/why-sales-commissions-don...

... But 2 years after that story, they changed their policy and had to pay sales commissions again. They eventually learned what previous companies already figured out: variable pay for salespeople works the best.
by ec109685 | 2025-05-01 21:01:18+00:00
You could say the same thing about paying everyone a flat salary that you attract the middling ones.

And no way all salespeople are worth all the commission they are paid as all times.

You think the quality of Anthropic’s salespeople had much to do with them crushing their numbers as Claude exploded?

Even the most incompetent salesperson could sell their service if it’s currently the best model out there.

While that should increase everyone’s equity, it’s dumb that non-salespeople can’t participate in that abundance.
by GodelNumbering | 2025-05-01 21:01:28+00:00
Nominally yes, but a lot of things to worry about:

- iPhone growth basically stalled at just +1.9% YoY despite a new "iPhone 16e" model.

- China Revenue at $16.00 billion (-2.3% YoY), marking the fifth consecutive quarter of decline. Doesn't look like they will recover anytime soon either given the tariffs/trade-war

- Wearables segment declined -4.9% YoY, signaling less demand/fatigue of Apple Watch, AirPods etc.

- Operating expenses (+6.3% YoY) outpacing revenue growth (+5.0% YoY), with R&D spend up 8.2%. Spending heavily but getting less growth per dollar.

- Smaller buyback program: $100B vs $110B last year.

Source: https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/AAPL/apple-q2-revenue-climbs... (disclaimer: it is a website run by me)