MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-08 15:57:29+00:00
If Americans are not ideologically opposed to being spied upon by corporations, there is no disconnect here. Americans have strongly signaled, through politics and actions, that they do not give a fuck about their privacy or information security, and ask any voter and they'll repeat some bullshit about "I don't care" or "nothing to hide".

But Americans do not want to be spied upon by a literal adversarial government which sets up police stations in other countries.

I don't want to be spied upon by my country, but currently Republicans want to use the force of the federal government to police and punish wrongthink, and Obama was a true believer in the US spy state, so they didn't exactly try to remove it.

It's hard to get America to undo a policy that was sold as "Kill the terrorists in our country" when those same voters have, 20 years later, enthusiastically supported another round of "kill the brown and muslims because they are terrorists" and want to deport people for tweets.
by akomtu | 2025-05-08 15:57:39+00:00
What would you do with so much money?

At his level, he doesn't just spend or give away a pile of money, he is somewhat like a force of nature: he controls and directs a significant portion of the money stream in the world. Think of what the Gulfstream does for air, but for money.

His story started with computers: he was among the few who built the foundation of the technocratic civilization. Computers and machinery have created a good deal of prosperity, but there is a grave problem with it: computers and machinery have been completely isolated from ethics. Research in AI is no longer guided by what's good for humanity, but by what's possible. Today this manifests in such relatively innocent crimes as disregarding copyright and data privacy when training AI. But that's a sign of a deeper disease: the isolation from ethics. If it's allowed to continue like that, in a few decades this anti-ethical AI will kill at first humanity within humans and then the civilization itself.

IMO, the biggest difference he can make now is finishing the story that he started long ago, by bringing the AI beast under the umbrella of ethical control. It won't stop it, but will significantly reduce the fall out.
by toast0 | 2025-05-08 15:57:39+00:00
The state goes out of their way to encourage it.

Let's say you just won the startup lottery and you've got a significant amount of now tradable stock. Some of which was early exercised and the cost basis is effectively zero. Some of which was RSUs or non-qualified options and you owe ordinary income. And that you're way over into the top tax brackets.

If your zero cost basis stock is Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS), there's a very nice discount on federal capital gains, so you might not need to do the rest of the stuff.

Otherwise, if you donate your apprechiated zero basis stock, you get to save federal capital gains of 20% + 3.8% net investment income. Plus it offsets against your ordinary income that's 37%. So that's a 60.8% discount on being charitable for the feds. If you live in California, capital gains are regular income, so you're saving 13.3% because the capital gains go away and offsetting 13.3% on your ordinary income, so your total discount is 87.4%. In other words, your difference in cash after taxes for selling $1M of zero basis stock or donating $1M of zero basis stock is $126k.

When the government is telling you it only costs $126k to give a charity $1M, it's pretty compelling. The math used to be different, when you'd get credit for state taxes on the federal return, but that was many years ago now.
by mnky9800n | 2025-05-08 15:58:26+00:00
Do you think the SNCC students who sat at the counter for the first time thought they would be completely safe? No they probably were afraid out of their minds that they would be lynched and their families would follow. But they had an integral part in the desegregation of the United States which led to a much freer and safer place for them and their children. They were individuals who made choices that they knew could lead to suffering because they thought it might make their world a slightly better place. There are plenty of ways to make the world a better place.
by oulipo | 2025-05-08 15:58:38+00:00
Sure, but only capitalism concentrates so much wealth in such few hands

An alternative would be that company like Microsoft couldn't gain so much wealth, simply because their revenue would be capped / taxed high enough that the extra money they make goes back directly to people and governments

In this case, *everyone* gets to vote and choose for what philanthropies the amount gets used, rather than having just "one guy" deciding for himself how to spend all this money, which is prone to errors
by wat10000 | 2025-05-08 15:58:48+00:00
It’s helpful if you want to be helped and not just complain.

Your browser doesn’t have it, or it’s bad? Use a different one!

Responsibility? Responsibility and five bucks will get you a coffee at Starbucks.

You can solve the problem, or talk about how other people should solve it. Do whichever one you prefer, but only one of them actually produces the desired outcome.
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-05-08 15:58:52+00:00
Love how the goalposts magically shifted to ”green hydrogen deployed today!!” even though many grids still don’t even reach saturation from renewables. Storage or green hydrogen is an enormous waste of money in Poland given their grid composition.

That renewable buildout leads to larger fossil emissions being wrong is trivial to verify. The UK as one example of many:

- Coal has gone from 150 TWh to zero. - Fossil gas from 175 TWh to 85 TWh. - Nuclear from 80 TWh to 40 TWh.

Massively decreasing all fossil fueled electricity production of course "extends the life" of these plants. All those plants that were shut down had their "life extended".

You can do the same for Denmark, Portugal, California, South Australia and everywhere else. First renewables offset coal followed by cutting into gas usage.

After hitting a plateau storage is now unlocking massive reductions in fossil gas usage in California:

- Gas is down 45% v '23 and 25% v '24

- Batteries up 198% v '23 and 73.4% v '24

https://bsky.app/profile/mzjacobson.bsky.social/post/3lnw3hs...

Storage is exploding globally. China installed 74 GW comprising 134 GWh of storage in 2024. Increasing their yearly installation rate by 250%. The US is looking at installing 18 GW in 2025 making up 30% of all grid additions. Well, before Trump came with a sledgehammer of insanity.

Storage delivers. For the last bit of "emergency reserves" we can run some gas turbines. First our existing fleet and then when it becomes the most pressing issue to decarbonize we can utilize the solution aviation and shipping settled on.

Or just run the gas turbines on biofuels, green hydrogen or whatever. Start collecting food waste and create biogas from it.

Doesn't really matter, we're talking single percent of total energy demand.

I love how completely insignificant issues becomes blown up to enormous proportions try to force nuclear power into the conversation.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-08 15:59:00+00:00
When it comes to funding various "public good" efforts, we don't need agility. We need fairness and at least some kind of public influence over what gets funded.

The problem with leaving everything to private charity is that only the wealthy people and churches doing the donating dictate what counts as "public good" without you and I having any say over it. We luck out when the donor has good intentions and chooses to donate to an organization doing good, and we have no say when the donor has evil intentions and chooses to donate elsewhere. Allowing a small handful of rich donors to decide what counts as a good cause is not ideal.
by zahlman | 2025-05-08 15:59:05+00:00
> If it's a simple question posed by a non-English speaker that needs some thought, then it doesn't belong (but that's why comments were introduced later.)

No, that's not why. If we can understand the English, we edit to fix the English.

We constantly get questions by native English speakers that are nevertheless barely comprehensible. Even when the problem is clearly described, it still needs to meet several other standards (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/417476/). This is by design.

We aren't closing questions because we want to close questions. We're closing questions because they need to be improved by the OP (i.e., fixing the question requires OP's perspective or knowledge) before they are compatible with the site's objectives, which do not necessarily align with yours as a person who has a question.

This is not a punishment and is not in general a permanent state. Closed questions can be, and are, re-opened if the problem with the question is fixed (without fundamentally changing it).

> I just opened the site after some time away. At the top, pushing the question list below the fold, are: Reputation, Badge Progress, and Watched Tags blocks.

And the people doing the majority of the curation work do not care in the slightest about reputation or badges. I certainly don't.

The users with the most reputation are generally the ones who spend hours a day answering easy questions that don't come anywhere close to meeting the site's standards (not because they're easy, but because they're terribly asked and probably duplicates) after doing a bit of mind-reading to figure out what the terribly-asked question is (or scanning through a couple dozen lines of code for trivial problems without really reading the question - because they usually don't need to) and getting a quick upvote and accept from the OP.

Questions like that have ruined the site and continue to make it worse - by diluting search results, by making it harder for curators to find the "canonical" targets for closing duplicates, by click-baiting away from questions other people actually want to find (e.g. by describing a completely different problem with all the same keywords, or by completely misidentifying what's wrong), and most of all by the broken-window effect (bad content examples overwhelm good ones).

But the reputation system rewards people who answer those questions. (The obsessive answer writers I complain about the most in Stack Overflow chat often have 10x or more my reputation.)

Curators have had a goal of closing bad new questions quickly (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/260263), trying to beat the answer to the punch. But answer-writers get a grace period, and can fill in a stub answer and edit it later; and they can act unilaterally while curators usually have to come to a consensus.
by Mistletoe | 2025-05-08 15:59:49+00:00
Have you tried Deoxit? It works much better than contact cleaner in my experience. I just got a beautiful old Sony STR-6046A from an antique store and used contact cleaner and it helped the issues some, but they weren't totally fixed until I got more Deoxit and sprayed all the pots and switches yesterday. It removes the oxidation that I don't think contact cleaner does.
by jerf | 2025-05-08 15:59:53+00:00
Microservices are the software architecture analog to Conway's Law. You can't help but introduce some sort of significant architecture boundary at the boundary between teams, and while that doesn't have to be "microservices" that's certainly a very attractive option. But on the flip side, introducing those heavier-weight boundaries on to yourself, internal to a team, can be very counterproductive.

I can't prove this scales up forever but I've been very happy with making sure that things are carefully abstracted out with dependency injection for anything that makes sense for it to be dependency-injected, and using module boundaries internally to a system as something very analogous to microservices, except that it doesn't go over a network. This goes especially well with using actors, even in a non-actor-focused language, because actors almost automatically have that clean boundary between them and the rest of the world, traversed by a clean concept of messages. This is sometimes called the Modular Monolith.

Done properly, should you later realize something needs to be a microservice, you get clean borders to cut along and clean places to deal with the consquences of turning it into a network service. It isn't perfect but it's a rather nice cost/benefit tradeoff. I've cut out, oh, 3 or 4 microservices out of monoliths in the past 5 years or so. It's not something I do everyday, and I'm not optimizing my modular monoliths for that purpose... I do modular monoliths because it is also just a good design methodology... but it is a nice bonus to harvest sometimes. It's one of the rare times when someone comes and quite reasonably expects that extracting something into a shared service will be months and you can be like "would you like a functioning prototype of it next week"?
by freedomben | 2025-05-08 16:01:19+00:00
Seriously, I think about this all the time, especially now that SaaS is so prevalent and unavoidable in many of our lives.

I think consumers just really have no idea what is happening behind the scenes. Especially with CI/CD most consumers only really notice something changed when there is a blatant new bug or a UI change. It would probably blow their mind to know that the software gets updated sometimes dozens of times per day without them even knowing.

My wife is an interesting example. She couldn't really care less about SaaS vs. Whatever, until Canva deploys a nasty bug that wrecks her work, causes her to lose changes, and subsequently deliver late. When I told her that my normal troubleshooting step would be reinstall the previous version and try again, and asked her how she would accomplish that with Canva, I think she finally got it.
by nicce | 2025-05-08 16:01:29+00:00
We don't have general system in place that would somehow prevent this. The world runs on capitalism and everyone needs food and roof. Whoever has the power to give them or take them, has the total power, and can play with the system more they have wealth. Social democracy is some sort of middle-ground but it is not enough, because it is not applied everywhere equally, and it is hard to define what is selfish and non-selfish.
by mmmBacon | 2025-05-08 16:01:46+00:00
It took about 1GW to train Chat-GPT4. If you look at the locations in the United States (>70% of all AI is in the US), there are only ~63 geographic regions you could put a 1GW data center. As AI models are growing at ~5x per year, it seems like the infrastructure is no in place to keep the AI models growing at that rate.

As companies like Google, Meta, and others look to nuclear power (it has the highest up time of any power source), I'm wondering how localities are going to react. Are people who are local to nuclear plants just going to be OK with these gigantic corporations consuming all this power in their backyard with no benefit to them while they take all the risk and impact of that power generation? I'm also wondering how these companies are going to deal with the excess nuclear waste. Ultimately it won't be Google or Meta dealing with the waste. How do we ensure that all the nuclear waste from AI is dealt with responsibly?
by ttfkam | 2025-05-08 16:01:49+00:00
"…by being cleverer."

Like harnessing the atom for enormous amounts of 24/7 power per unit volume of fuel and not emitting CO2 while we do it? Yes! Let's do that! And work on making reprocessing more affordable, so we don't even have to mine any more fuel (at least for the next 150 years).
by mahogany | 2025-05-08 16:01:51+00:00
I don't necessarily read it as condescending, but I do read it as presumptuous. What someone "should" do depends on many things. Maybe, because this is software in alpha stage, they should _not_ focus on this part of the code if it is minor compared to other obligations. Or maybe there are other reasons they've chosen not to do this (as was explained in an above comment).

IMO, a less presumptuous criticism would be phrased like "if you did X then benefits Y would happen", or "if you haven't, consider X", or even (the least presumptuous - make it a conversation!) "have you considered X?", rather than "you should do X".
by sxp | 2025-05-08 16:01:58+00:00
Edward Tufte had a good series of books on how to create high density infographics: https://www.edwardtufte.com/books/

However, the books are old and specifically call out the low resolution computer displays at the time. Does anyone have an updated list of references for high density visual information?

Bret Victor's https://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ was a good starting point for me.
by epistasis | 2025-05-08 16:02:01+00:00
I'm not sure if nuclear has always been a field where charlatans proliferate, but it's certainly true of the past few decades. The Summer plant in South Carolina was completely fraudulent, sending the power executives to jail for their fraud. Billions spent and nothing to show except a hole in the ground. Vogtle was slightly better in that they powered through to construction completion so that nobody cared about the deception and grift that resulted in a cost 3x that of estimates.

The startups have been bad too, with some disingenuously starting regulatory processes and then not even responding to questions or attempting to follow through.

South Koreas is the most developed nation that has had success building, and even they send people to jail for construction fraud.

There are undoubtedly many honest and earnest people trying to build new nuclear. But it's hard to tell who until after billions have been sunk and misallocated.
by nandomrumber | 2025-05-08 16:02:33+00:00
Explaine how nuclear waste is dealt with.

Detail how nuclear waste is continuously pumped in to the atmosphere. Or shredded and buried like wind turbine blades which are entirely waste with no recycling value.

Hint: it isn’t.

There’s so little of it, it’s still all predominantly stored on site at the power plants.

Highly radioactive reactive waste isn’t highly reactive for very long. And long lasting waste isn’t very reactive at all. Vitrified it’s chemically non-reactive.
by nradov | 2025-05-08 16:02:40+00:00
You're correct to an extent, but "the rich" also have a point there. As a taxpayer, the level of waste and incompetence in government spending on those problems is horrifying. It doesn't have to be that way. We don't need to spend billions of dollars and decades of time just to get minor infrastructure projects completed.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Abundance/Ezra-Klein/...
by sillystuff | 2025-05-08 16:02:41+00:00
> 70M implicitly allowing it by not voting.

> The root problem is the voters

The root problem is that we do not have an actual opposition party. The so-called Democrats are a right-wing, corporate/oligarch controlled party that engages in activities like enabling genocide. The Republicans are a right-wing, corporate/oligarch controlled party that engages in activities like enabling genocide.

I hope the so-called Democratic party completely implodes so we can, possibly, get a left-of-center party that will actually do things that the so-called Democrats only provide lip-service to, and that, only when the so-called Democrats are guaranteed to be unable to enact such legislation due to not having majorities needed.

I'd prefer that people withholding their votes from either lesser or greater evil right-wing corporate/oligarch, genocidal monster parties would instead vote 3rd party/independent, but I would not fault anyone for not voting for the so-called Democrats or Republicans.

As to blame for the current situation, remember, it was the so-called Democrats who did everything they could to make Trump the Republican presidential candidate, as they thought they would have a better chance against him with their extremely unpopular candidate, Clinton. And, that the so-called Democrats would rather lose elections than allow a non-corporate/oligarch controlled genocidal monster to be elected-- see how they treated Sanders.

* 'so-called' Democrats because they repeatedly engage in voter suppression during primaries to ensure their chosen right-wing pro-corporate/oligarch candidate will win. And, they repeatedly sue to remove from state ballots any candidates running on the left whether Greens, Peace and Freedom, or independent. In the last election, the Greens spent half of their campaign funds fighting these lawsuits so they could maintain ballot access. It was also the so-called Democrats with the Republicans who barred access to presidential debates of candidates who would challenge their right-wing, pro-corporate/oligarch, genocidal positions.
by chermi | 2025-05-08 16:03:07+00:00
PG&E is guaranteed a rate of return, meaning its profit margin is basically state-guaranteed. A large share of blame falls on CPUC and the structuring of the utilities. CPUC must decide whether they approve of rate before pge implements them, and I think it almost always does.

I'm by no means excusing pge, they were pretty clearly negligent and failed to meet their obligations. But it's a state-backed operation, which pretty much always means less punishment for failure to operate effectively.
by setgree | 2025-05-08 16:03:12+00:00
A friend who works for the FBI flagged this long ago as the origin story for Clinton's "but her emails!" woes. It's distinctly possible that if the NSA had just secured her Blackberry, there would never have been a president Trump. Funny how small things spiral out.

You might draw many possible lessons from this story, though. One is the lesson you draw, which is that the NSA should have secured her damn Blackberry. The second is that this was really about egos, and Clinton couldn't accept that she was less important, and deserved a less important phone, than Obama, so she went ahead anyway. A third is that if you want to be president someday, you can't cut corners, and you need to use whatever clunky tech the government gives you -- so that one day, you can be the boss, summon the head of the NSA into your office, and humiliate and then fire him in front of his peers. But Clinton didn't have that kind of patience: she had emails to send.
by queuebert | 2025-05-08 16:03:17+00:00
I agree with this. We had multiple windowing environments, all arguably superior in various ways, and we had multiple office suites, all with better technology than the Microsoft versions. Then I wonder how much worse off are we because Windows and Office came to predominate instead of one of the others? How much rent seeking has gone into building Gates' fortune? How much has been lost financially by innocent users to Windows security vulnerabilities?

On the handwriting thing, I see a general decline in my children's handwriting because they spend so much time typing. That bothers me personally, since I appreciate good handwriting, and I would think it spills over into other fine-motor skills tasks.
by tecleandor | 2025-05-08 16:03:40+00:00
Oooooouch, I missed that when checking their site, and that's extra shady. Especially when at the footing of the page you can see:

Neither Meanwhile Insurance Bitcoin (Bermuda) Limited nor its affiliates Meanwhile Services (Bermuda) Limited and Meanwhile Incorporated, are lawyers or accountants. They do not provide legal or tax advice. You are wholly responsible for obtaining your own legal and tax advice.

And everything incorporated in Bermuda, and regulated only by Bermuda laws, makes it very impractical as an insurance (go and claim whatever you want against them from your country, I don't think it will be easy) and very obviously a tax evasion thing.
by 9rx | 2025-05-08 16:03:41+00:00
> A government is an entity with authority to tell you what you have to do

If it is authoritarian, perhaps, but even that is still a matter of a group of people. Most seem to believe that government should be democratic. You may not find yourself in a democratic state, but that would only continue to contribute to what makes the day funny. Perhaps you didn't read the entire thread and are posting this without understanding the full context under which it is taking place?