MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by autoexec | 2025-05-13 16:39:28+00:00
You'd spend far longer in the post office and the courts than you would on the phone.

All the company has to do in that court room is show that you mailed the form to someone whose job has nothing to do with account services, or who doesn't even have access or authorization to access people's private account information, or that they tried and failed to reach you in order to verify your identify since they sure as hell won't cancel the account of someone and shut off their service all because an anonymous letter showed up somewhere nobody was expecting to get it. What a great way to DoS an enemy or competitor if that worked. Just mail off some letters to a few store's webhosts right before Christmas or black friday.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-13 16:39:35+00:00
You want to know what I think? I have begun to believe that McCarthyism and the “Red Scare” and the House Committee, while purporting to be “anti-communist” were inwardly concerned about Eastern Bloc Jews gaining the upper hand domestically.

Now some Jews were Communist sympathizers and some weren’t. But there were just so many who flooded in from staunchly Eastern-Bloc, Soviet-dominated areas that they were sure to gain powerful footholds in Western society.

McCarthy and the House couldn’t afford to be perceived as “anti-Semitic” so they chose to couch everything in patriotic anti-Commie terms. But in hindsight, look at how miniscule the influence has been here from Soviet Communism, compared to ideologies of Eastern-Bloc Jews [many who are quite secular and Americanized].
by Terr_ | 2025-05-13 16:39:42+00:00
That reference to one-sided exclusivity via contract law reminds me of a recent Doctorow piece [0]:

> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.

> They want to be able to fire employees at will – but they want those same employees to be bound to them just as surely as serfs were bound to their lords’ land.

[0] https://locusmag.com/2024/03/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
by nailer | 2025-05-13 16:39:52+00:00
There's also:

- An update from the Open Source Initiative ('Meta's Llama license is still not open source'): https://opensource.org/blog/metas-llama-license-is-still-not...

- A GitHub issue: https://github.com/meta-llama/llama3/issues/156

- A message from the the European Parliament about Meta's actions: https://bsky.app/profile/birgitsippel.bsky.social/post/3lmjo...
by hbartab | 2025-05-13 16:39:55+00:00
> The authors cite various other studies on remote work showing how it frees up time by reducing commuting, increases productivity, offers more flexible hours, and reduces employee monitoring.

Sounds like a benefit to society to me. When people do not waste time on commutes, they spend it either with their families and friends or thinking about solving problems, which occasionally turn into new businesses. Without such time freed up, these business ideas would never have come to fruition.

I also don't see why how employees spend their time off (as almost no employer counts commuting as work time) should factor into remote policies.
by nabilhat | 2025-05-13 16:40:27+00:00
Reading summaries like this requires great skepticism. It's exceptionally difficult in this particular case to avoid directing results to arbitrary conclusions through cohort selection and grouping.

> analyzed IP address data in conjunction with LinkedIn data to cross-reference those working from home with those who formed new businesses. ... a title change and employment change on LinkedIn indicating a shift from being an employee to a founder.

Is this more likely to tell us something about the people and roles selected to work remotely, or an outcome of working remotely? At this scale the influences of each are absolutely inseparable. Do cohorts robustly account for education, experience, skillsets, tenure, etc.? The same values which improve one's ability to start a business strongly overlap with the considerations for employing someone remotely. I'm not saying they're comparing a "remote" cohort including developers to a "not remote" cohort including construction workers, but it's important to confirm.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-13 16:40:32+00:00
How many workers would succeed at so-restricting the people at the top of the company, in that contract? Pretty much none, right? Probably you're thinking it'd be absurd for them to even ask such a thing. Why? Because this is a matter of class, and the worker isn't of the right social class to be afforded such liberty, while others are. And the worker can't force such a clause despite that resistance. Why? Because they're by-far the weaker party in the negotiation. If these weren't true, it wouldn't seem so immediately absurd to even suggest such a thing.

Why don't people who can avoid these clauses embrace them anyway, since the justification is that the company needs and deserves your undivided attention to the greatest legally allowed degree, when they have far more power over the company and are being rewarded far more for their effort? The same reasoning applies far more to them! Because it's very undesirable to be restricted in that way, of course, so damn the company's best interests.

If it's very undesirable to be restrained by these, and the benefit to the employer is evidently not so large that it's necessary to restrict those for whom the reasoning applies 1,000x more than for some lowly peon, why do normal workers accept those clauses approximately 100% of the time they're demanded? Because they don't feel they have a choice.

"Voluntary" isn't binary.
by rzr | 2025-05-13 16:41:02+00:00
A smooth transition from GNU screen to tmux, will be appreciated for potentially 60K users.

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=screen

I note that tmux has only 40K users (of debian popcon users)

https://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=tmux

I am considering to try the link shared previously:

https://github.com/grml/grml-etc-core/blob/master/etc/tmux.c...

Now I miss a way to translate CLI options and batch files
by horhay | 2025-05-13 16:41:08+00:00
They're gonna say this at a time where people are starting to question how farther we can scale hardware with the scientific knowledge that we've had? It doesn't even take researchers to know that GPU capabilities aren't scaling as much as it used to. And then what's clearer lately is that it seems hardware scaling isn't helping AI companies as much as it used to anymore.

Things that have so many question marks like that should be treated with a lot more pragmatism. But that's certainly not a language the Silicon Valley folks speak. Everybody's promising the next iPhone moment anytime they bring something out.
by yieldcrv | 2025-05-13 16:41:32+00:00
the goal post typically moves to "but our soft power as a world leaaaaderrrr"

which... yeah, I could do without. I'm fine reaching parity with the level of market access in trade that other countries offer us, as well as the level of apathy in funding programs and conflicts that other countries have.

I do think its absurd to apply a different standard to the US, by people that don't really seem to notice what the standard other countries they respect are using.

I can also acknowledge that its disruptive. even at a blanket 10%, that's too much too fast for market forces to adjust adequately. but the overall idea of having domestic supply chains and velocity of wage payments and wage growth is something I like.
by Duwensatzaj | 2025-05-13 16:41:34+00:00
I’m very torn. Obviously USAID, NSF and academia in general do valuable things. But when organizations get hijacked and used as a slush fund to fund naked ideological activities and organizations barely related to the original purpose, I’m not surprised when the eventual response is to just hack and slash. I wish it was done more thoughtfully and carefully, but that doesn’t appear to be a choice. Just a choice of funding hostile NGOs and academics who endorse discrimination in education, employment, health care and even law nowadays or the current mess. It all sucks and I don’t have any solutions other than focusing on my career and family.
by quantified | 2025-05-13 16:41:55+00:00
We can hear things in our minds in many ways. Your question was open to interpretation in two distinct ways: 1: Enumerate some ways, please. 2: I think not, why do you think so?

I interpreted as #2. You, however, might disagree that these are actually options for any number of reasons. Perhaps you do? There are other stronger ones, of course. As an intelligent human, living within some national political framework, I'm sure you can think of others. Since your question hinted you thought there were none at all, "do you mean like" is testing whether these fit your definition.
by 0xffff2 | 2025-05-13 16:42:36+00:00
Just to take the low hanging fruit that I'm directly familiar with, there _is_ rail service from LA to San Diego. Just keeping the existing service operating is a massive challenge costing millions of dollars per year to keep the existing train lines operational in the face of coastal erosion. Meanwhile, there are literally dozens of proposals ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to implement a long-term fix by relocating the rails and realigning them to support HSR. Cost aside, _all_ of these proposals are being met with strong NIMBY and/or environmentalist resistance. Do NIMBYs and environmental protection laws not exist in Europe?
by mmastrac | 2025-05-13 16:42:40+00:00
We, as in the rest of the world, need to get off our butts and take advantage of this self-own, forced-error of a presidency. It's the perfect time to build industry outside of the USA which has shown itself to be a bad partner, unreliable and willing to turn on all of us in the span of a few weeks in order to right perceived wrongs that may or may not exist (more likely the latter than former).
by ednite | 2025-05-13 16:42:53+00:00
No, I’m not based in Silicon Valley. I’ve always believed location matters less these days—especially in software.

As for networking, I’ve always catered to businesses—and in my experience, most of them face similar challenges regardless of geography. Odds are, the problems a company faces in my neck of the woods are the same ones you’ll find in yours.

This is a bootstrapped, client-first effort—no buzz, no funding, just trying to solve one real problem at a time. It’s also my first time working directly with individual subscribers, unlike my other projects which were built for businesses and their internal teams or clients. I’m still learning as I go and looking forward to sharing more with the HN community.
by svnt | 2025-05-13 16:43:43+00:00
Toxic positivity in startups means the people not looking at the real issues role play startup while everything crumbles around them.

Maybe it works out in big orgs but if it infects the team of a small org your work environment will be ruined when you are all laid off after months or years of overworking to make a blind optimist happy. Unemployment coincident with burnout is worse than some negative feedback during the process.
by Retric | 2025-05-13 16:44:02+00:00
What consumers care about is the customer facing aspects of the business. As such you’d benchmark Zoom on various clients/plugins (Windows, Max, Android, iOS) and create a never ending priority list of issues weighted by marketshare.

7 people was roughly chosen to be able to cover the relevant skills while also being a tiny fraction of the workforce. Such efforts run into diminishing returns, but the company is going to keep creating low hanging fruit.
by jrockway | 2025-05-13 16:44:03+00:00
The government could be more efficient, but you have to look at the exact choices being made by the current administration. Why are we heavily taxing trade and the flow of ideas? Why are we dismantling our military with 2 major wars going on? Why are we being soft on financial crimes and crypto scams? Why are we accepting personal gifts from nation states? Why are we micromanaging medical care? Why are we removing our "soft power" influence? Why are we spending our money to "crack down" on people with autism? Why are we using the government's money to fund religious indoctrination?

There is always an argument to make the government more efficient, but I don't think this <gestures> is what anyone really has in mind. People want cheaper eggs, the ability to receive medical care, the ability to stabilize their living situation through property ownership, and a stable job. What are we doing about those things? The reality is that the "machine" has always tried to add stability in those areas, and throwing away the machine isn't making things better for anyone. Like, if we made the government so efficient, why am I still paying 40% of my income in taxes?

When we disappear people to El Salvador without trial, that's fascism, my friend.
by elefanten | 2025-05-13 16:44:26+00:00
Fair enough and sorry for the snark. Certainly it's worth aiming for, but I don't think the standard here is that every claim has to be cited.

A better version of my post would be to point out that it took 3 seconds to get some initial info with which to do a quick pass of self-assessing the claims.

I agree with your original point that rhetoric gets stretched a lot on these contentious topics.

Browsing some of the clips myself, I think it's a bit less than a slam dunk on the narrowest interpretation of the streamer "supporting" various groups... but a pretty convincing display of a strong bias wrt said contentious topic.

And to zoom back out to the context of the original comment vis a vis the posted article, it provides some useful context about why this person might be targeted for additional screening by domestic security organizations -- regardless of what one thinks about the validity or wisdom of those particular decisions.

Edit: And to your original framing, I think it's very easily apparent that this streamer is not a simple case of "concern for civilian deaths" -> "endorses Hamas". He's very consistently making the claim that they (and others) are emancipatory groups which are being maligned as terrorist.
by dogleash | 2025-05-13 16:44:28+00:00
Very reasonable counterpoint. It's unfortunate you're addressing a bland dismissal that shouldn't carry weight on it's own. Everything is always more nuanced. Doesn't mean grantparent poster didn't have a good reductive shorthand. The dismissal didn't even bother trying to reframe.

But it's always an uphill climb because there is an internally-consistent manager-brain line of thinking for the workspace they've created, and it's really good at Uno-reversing any criticism of workplace norms as a problem with criticizer.

"Oh, you don't like working with people that are bad at their jobs? Sounds like someone's just not senior-ing hard enough."
by trevinhofmann | 2025-05-13 16:44:58+00:00
I'm also having a difficult time getting the first users for my AI software development service. I decided to start with a high-touch Early Access model to understand the users and their needs better, and I'm up to 8 users so far.

For Early Access, I started with a LinkedIn post, reaching out to close colleagues, commenting in relevant Slack groups/channels, and introducing it to some of my better freelance clients. I'll be signing up 2 more of the freelance clients shortly, with one key feature request from each first. It's important not to get stuck in the trap of developing one-off features to get each new user, but these are features that would be broadly beneficial.

Soon, I'm planning to add a super-simple demo at the top of the landing page to increase conversions, and then I'll start promoting it more. Likely also some relevant informational content marketing on a blog.
by wubrr | 2025-05-13 16:45:17+00:00
Many human 'experts' produce nonsensical data. Verification of data by humans is also mostly based on 'prior' data. We've had many popular medical practices over the years developed and supported by medical experts which turned out to be completely wrong.

The main thing missing right now, imo, is the ability for LLMs to verify data via experimentation, but this is completely solvable.
by alp1n3-dev | 2025-05-13 16:45:19+00:00
It isn't a "new" botnet, but just continued use of a rotating array of available addresses. Some are enterprise and will be upfront (as you've observed), some less so.

Different devices also enable this, as mentioned in the comments. Smarthome / IoT devices, cable-brand router/APs, etc. There are also services for rotating residential proxies, that are essentially breaking the ToS of the companies in charge of them, but they trade/buy new IPs constantly.

The larger scale a site is indexed at, the more you'll see this traffic pick up. CloudFlare has rules that can help with it, and you can get stricter with them if you know your audience / customer base via whitelists; geo (can be circumvented ofc, but quiets the noise), user-agent, http version, etc. For the more broad ones, just immediately prompt a challenge if you don't want to outright drop/block them.

It's been this way for a while, LLMs have made it worse, but there was already a ton of garbage requests / scanning going on.
by mystraline | 2025-05-13 16:45:27+00:00
> I genuinely don't understand how this can be a coup when all three branches agree.

The courts have been captured and politicized heavily. Clearance Thomas should be expelled for emoluments. Kavanaugh also for lying on the stand.

Congress has a bare majority for republicans. So getting impeachments for actual crimes by republicans is a non-starter.

POTUS and executive branch can run roughshod, and order all sorts of illegal actions. Congress won't impeach. And they can pardon anybody underneath them. Musk is a perfect example - no clearance, yet somehow 'legally' is destroying sections of government that was investigating him. And given a complete pass. Its also how ICE can kidnap and traffick people, all the while flaunting disobeidance from a federal judge.

This is a coup by the oligarchy against the people. And aside violent uprisings (of which I do not condone), there's not much at all we can do.
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-05-13 16:45:28+00:00
Basically none of modern optics would exist without astronomy (well at least astronomy is a convenient cover for military/intelligence interests funding better optics). Most of statistics and efficient cameras originate in astronomy/astrophysics (mostly because you have to count all the photons and you are never getting a second relevant measurement point)

There are huge parts of physics which are only publicly funded. Results are often spun out into companies, but there is no institution that can fund experiments that require timelines of multiple decades (even things like fusion power is nearly completely government funds)

And those are the only two parts where I actually have some competence. So yeah.. I wouldn't buy
by Closi | 2025-05-13 16:45:34+00:00
It’s not an either/or - it can be both!

If you have the best foundational research, but then find yourself blocked by compute, that’s a bad place to be in.

At the moment compute is a constraint too (at least for the smaller shops, maybe not OpenAI!)

We don’t necessarily know that the next AI breakthrough will need less compute either! A breakthrough that gives 5x performance for 20x training compute and 2x inference cost would still be a giant breakthrough and need a lot of hardware! Although this sort of breakthrough is unlikely, and it’s likely to be smaller steps forward - but I think it might be the case that models continue to get more computationally expensive even if there are breakthroughs that make models more efficient because we will want higher capability.
by pier25 | 2025-05-13 16:45:52+00:00
> Do you have someone spend extra time optimising your software or do you have them produce more functionality

Depends. In general, I'd rather have devs optimize the software rather than adding new features just for the sake of change.

I don't use most of the new features in macOS, Windows, or Android. I mostly want an efficient environment to run my apps and security improvements. I'm not that happy about many of the improvements in macOS (eg the settings app).

Same with design software. I don't use most of the new features introduced by Adobe. I'd be happy using Illustrator or Photoshop from 10 years ago. I want less bloat, not more.

I also do audio and music production. Here I do want new features because the workflow is still being improved but definitely not at the cost of efficiency.

Regarding code editors I'm happy with VSCode in terms of features. I don't need anything else. I do want better LSPs but these are not part of the editor core. I wish VSCode was faster and consumed less memory though.
by mettamage | 2025-05-13 16:45:56+00:00
500 million euro's to attract scientists?

I asked ChatGPT, it thought for 3 minutes and 36 seconds. You can see the Q&A here [1].

Assuming that a one year salary of the average scientist is 100K euro's [2] then that means you're trying to attract an extra 1250 scientists that will work for 4 years.

That doesn't sound like a lot on a continental scale.

[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/682376a6-5c68-8005-89ab-2bedd453c7...

[2] It's definitely lower than 100K, but it allows for unexpected hidden overhead that ChatGPT potentially didn't account for.
by burkaman | 2025-05-13 16:46:12+00:00
- Most of the titles have incorrectly split words, for example "P ART 2—R EPEAL OF EPA R ULE R ELATING TO M ULTI -P OLLUTANT E MISSION S TANDARDS". I know LLMs are resilient against typos and mistakes like this, but it still seems not ideal.

- The header is parsed in a way that I suspect would mislead an LLM: "BRETT GUTHRIE, KENTUCKY FRANK PALLONE, JR., NEW JERSEY CHAIRMAN RANKING MEMBER ONE HUNDRED NINETEENTH CONGRESS". Guthrie is the chairman and Pallone is the ranking member, but that isn't implied in the text. In this particular case an LLM might already know that from other sources, but in more obscure contexts it will just have to rely on the parsed text.

- It isn't converted into Markdown at all, the structure is completely lost. If you only care about text then I guess that's fine, and in this case an LLM might do an ok job at identifying some of the headers, but in the context of this discussion I think ai.toMarkdown() did a bad job of converting to Markdown and a just ok job of converting to text.

I would have considered this a fairly easy test case, so it would make me hesitant to trust that function for general use if I were trying to solve the challenges described in the submitted article (Identifying headings, Joining consecutive headings, Identifying Paragraphs).

I see that you are trying to minimize tokens for LLM input, so I realize your goals are probably not the same as what I'm talking about.

Edit: Another test case, it seems to crash on any Arxiv PDF. Example: https://pure.md/https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.12104.
by mrsilencedogood | 2025-05-13 16:46:15+00:00
No, American big business talking heads are supposed to be direct. American workers are supposed to be demure, grateful to have health insurance, and slot perfectly into the cog slot they've been assigned. Someone who openly criticizes their former employer is showing they have opinions and will resist being mistreated. I mean, showing they're not a team player.

Companies would much rather miss out on growth than have employees who have any kind of leverage over them.
by Symmetry | 2025-05-13 16:46:37+00:00
Bell labs was funded from the profits of a legal monopoly, and the money spent on it was used to justify the continuance of that monopoly. You do see some private basic research these days as with Google in robotics or Microsoft in quantum computers but its fairly rare and small compared to government funded research.

And pharma companies do a lot of research but it's almost entirely applied, taking the basic processes discovered by NIH funded research and figuring out how to turn them into feasible drugs. You need both halves there to sustain our current progress.