MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by darth_avocado | 2025-05-23 03:41:53+00:00
The comments so far are surprising. Yea counting PRs and lines of code isn’t impressive, and yes you may also do them at your own company. Any engineer will tell you, if you push code often and continuously move it to production, regression is inevitable. In finance, at a scale that stripe operates, not making mistakes is very critical. Being able to do what the articles describes is very impressive in any engineering organization. Being able to do that as Stripe is even more impressive.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-23 03:42:48+00:00
https://salatainstitute.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/...

> In terms of emissions, we estimate that eliminating the EV tax credits would increase 2030 emissions by 20.3 million metric tons (mmt) vs. the 2030 baseline forecast; eliminating all the policies raises emissions by a total of 44.1 mmt.
by NoPicklez | 2025-05-23 03:44:12+00:00
Reality is complex and dynamic, and through all of that Harvard's endurance pre-dates the US, therefore I would expect it to endure a 4 year term of Government. Not to say with a 100% certainty, but I would expect it to with a greater degree of confidence than many other things, based on its history.

However I wouldn't extend that line of thinking to stock markets, superannuation etc.
by YZF | 2025-05-23 03:45:10+00:00
Out of the first 12 leaders to visit/meet Trump in this presidency half were European (and then we had Canada and Israel in the other half). The EU is the largest trading partner of the US (Just Germany is #5 on its own).

The US is still very much part of the west.

Anything is a possibility. I get it that there's some drama and people are upset. The US has challenges and Europe also has challenges.
by Irongirl1 | 2025-05-23 03:45:11+00:00
Snort

Not do well in future....hahahahah.

They don't officially have a future. And this is from a wannabe reporter..who once won a placement in a special edition of The Boston Globe. They gave up everything they are supposed to stand for and shot their supposed integrity in the face. The Buzzfeed/Gawker years finished them off. They should have paid for a mercenary team to rescue Daniel Pearl...instead the World watched his execution and expressed their sadness and shock PFFt!!!

Instead of investing in Timberland and ink factories-did you know ink sells for over $1k an ounce?-and whatever was growing laterally, they dug their heels in and now they are dead in all but name. Most of the "stories" they print are nothing more than ads and even the WSJ gutted itself after Murdoch bought them. The Personal finance section was one of the best with the best copywritten sales letter ever. They cut that too. But occasionally, I need a story and having to pile them up for several months to make the buy worthwhile is exceedingly annoying.
by tbrownaw | 2025-05-23 03:45:45+00:00
> historical drift from “AI alignment” referring to existential risk, to today, where any AI personality you don’t like is “unaligned.”

Alignment has always been "what it actually does doesn't match what it's meant to do".

When the crowd that believes that AI will inevitably become an all-powerful God owned the news cycle, alignment concerns were of course presented through that lens. But it's actually rather interesting if approached seriously, especially when different people have different ideas about what it's meant to do.
Ask HN: What HN posts inspired or changed your perspective the most?
by hungle9 | 2025-05-23 03:47:09+00:00
Hi HN, I’ve been reflecting on how some ideas—sometimes from just a single post—can really change how we live, work, or think. I'm curious:

What’s one Hacker News post (or discussion) that genuinely inspired you or shifted your mindset in a meaningful way?

Whether it's a technical insight, a founder’s story, a lifestyle choice, or a random rabbit hole—I'd love to read it. Bonus if you can share how it affected you.

Thanks for sharing!
by layoric | 2025-05-23 03:48:12+00:00
The video is just an entertaining overview, as indicated, I'm not the author of the video, it wasn't meant to be a deep dive. I linked the three related papers directly in there. I don't know how much more you are expecting from a HN comment, but this was a point in the right direction, not the definitive guide on the matter. This is a you problem.
by giardini | 2025-05-23 03:48:38+00:00
Yeah, the way the Democratic Party self-destructed was indeed enlightening and frightening. And they continue to point fingers at each other and present specious arguments why they failed in the last election.

Meamwhile the Republicans, while making headway, aren't doing it in a way that will last beyond the next Democratic administration. I'm speaking of the overuse of executive orders when legislation is what is required.
by mrbungie | 2025-05-23 03:48:56+00:00
What I understand from what GP was saying, is that AI Alignment today is more akin to trying to analyze and reduce error in an already fitted linear regressor rather than aligning AI behaviour and values to expected ones.

Perhaps that has to do with the fact that aligning LLM-based AI systems has become a pseudo predictable engineering problem solvable via a "target, measure and reiterate cycle" rather than the highly philosophical and moral task old AI Alignment researchers thought it would be.
by hollerith | 2025-05-23 03:49:00+00:00
I doubt it for 2 reasons.

First, I wouldn't expect middle-eastern immigrants to have already acquired enough political power in Sweden to make much difference in law making.

Second, the ban is one sided: although it will become illegal for a man to buy "custom" content from OnlyFans, it will remain legal for a Swedish woman to make money from such content. In contrast, from what I have heard (which I admit is all second-hand or third-hand information and could be wrong or completely misleading) middle-eastern societies tend to punish the woman more than the man for culturally-disapproved-of sexual expression.

>Sweden’s increasing intolerance to sex work

Buying the in-person services of a sex worker has been illegal in Sweden since 1999 (ditto pimping and operating a brothel). This new law can be seen as merely extending the existing long-standing ban to online transactions. "Pre-recorded" porn will remain legal: this new law bans only the making of a recording that has been made according to a customer's instructions.
by rhdjsjebshjffn | 2025-05-23 03:50:04+00:00
> You can well imagine how important predicting tides would have been for D-day landing.

Is this intended to communicate positivity or negativity?

Predicting tides was known to the ancients; it would be lovely to explore the hubris of the modern narrative.

Edit: fundamentally, if hacker news has taught me anything, it's that "downvote = makes me feel bad and doesn't want to answer questions". The entire concept of democratic news aggregation was a lie.
by queenkjuul | 2025-05-23 03:50:06+00:00
Fundamentally, mission critical low level code isn't the kind of software i want to write anyway. I don't find AI tools super useful for most of the same reasons as the author, but i do kind of get tired of the idea that if you're not writing systems in C you're not really programming.

I like writing front end code. I'm probably never going to have a job where i need or would even want to write a low level graphics library from scratch. Fine, I'm not red-eyed 3am hacker brained, but I'm passionate and good at what i do. I don't think a world where every person working in software has the author's mentality is realistic or desirable.
by brendangregg | 2025-05-23 03:50:26+00:00
Right, this kind of job can improve, and should improve. But right now there's talk of ending remote work entirely, without considering that people have been making the effort for years, hence sharing an anecdote. The bigger point is that remote workers are more accommodating than is assumed, and my anecdote is an example of that (even if it is too much).

One other factor I'm curious what people think: If you were offered 7-figures USD to do these kind of hours from anywhere in the world, would that make a difference?
by benlivengood | 2025-05-23 03:51:30+00:00
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ is the essay that crystalizes the reasons that Selection and Markets are not the forces we want to be aligning AI (or much else).

In short (it is a very long article) fitness is not the same as goodness (by human standards) and so selection pressure will squeeze out goodness in favor of fitness, across all environments and niches, in the long run.
by TheMongoose | 2025-05-23 03:52:15+00:00
I don't. None of that sounds useful to me.

I don't want a slop machine to purchase things for me. I manage my calendar just fine with a calendar app.

I don't need a swarm of agents to make up research results, I don't need AI to communicate nonsense on my behalf, analyze anything, and I damn sure don't want it to plan anything for me.

If I needed to report on something I'd use something like Excel or SQL to organize data. The internet has enough slop content, certainly don't need to generate more of that.

Absolutely don't need it to write garbage, security vulnerability laden, code for me. If I did for some reason a phone wouldn't be the right tool for that job anyway.
by peeters | 2025-05-23 03:52:21+00:00
Parks for a novel game design, gorgeous artwork and tactile pieces. Mid complexity.

Pandemic Legacy for one of the best experiences you'll have with the same group of friends over months (cooperative, play through once over 12-24 sittings). The game builds in complexity as you play so it starts reasonably simple (though the first season starts with the basic ruleset of Pandemic so if you've played that it's a head start but not necessary).

Kingdomino and Cascadia for quicker terrain building games, I consider these fairly similar though Kingdomino is quicker and simpler. These I can play with anyone.

Paperback if you already like word games like Scrabble etc, and want to dip into playing a deck building game.

The Crew if you like trick-taking card games, it's a co-op variant to games like Bridge or Euchre.

Carcassone is an oldie but goodie. Very social compared to many competitive games, as though it's turn based everyone wants to have their say for what you should do with your piece. Compared to e.g. Wingspan where you're largely ignoring/out of the loop for what's going on with everyone else all the time.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-05-23 03:53:49+00:00
That is certainly a perspective i didn't consider. It's been a long time since i last read the books. But i don't agree with you that that's all there is to Wonka.

>Wonka was never gratified or pleased when someone got hurt

No, but the author clearly intended that the readers should be.

>A sadistic and cruel business owner would not have hundreds of healthy Oompa-Loompas

Were they compensated for their efforts? Slave labour. (please don't be offended, it's a joke)

>or a worthy successor who was happy to take over the business after the glass elevator ride.

What of it? Everyone needs a successor. Otherwise when he gets old and infirm, the oompah loompahs and the squirrels will rise up against him and throw him down the garbage chute into the incinerator. Although he did discover immortality so that shouldn't even be a problem.

>Tell me, if a group of five innocent children and parents toured a real-world modern manufacturing plant or data center, what sort of Trade Secrets would they steal when they were dismissed at the end of a long day?

The article quotes Wonka where he asserts that his rivals would give their front teeth to be part of the tour, so he certainly thought that there were secrets to be stolen.
by Cogito | 2025-05-23 03:56:33+00:00
Thought I'd check the arithmetic for 2 two-digit numbers, and it works!

I expect 41+14 to be 12 (two right plus two up equals two right and two up).

Long addition in long form below uses:

'=' to show equivalent lines (reordering of terms (1+2=2+1), spliting numbers (41=40+1), adding single digits (1+4=22))

'->' for when the algorithm gives a digit

'<' for when we move over a column

41+14 = (40+1)+(10+4) = 40 + 10 + (1+4) = 40 + 10 + 22 -> 1s digit = 2 < 4 + 1 + 2 = 22 + 2 = 20 + 2 + 2 = 20 + 41 -> 10s digit = 1 < 2 + 4 = 0 -> done == 12

[edit] Just noticed the article has two different numbering systems, one where 10, 20, 30, 40 are clockwise and one where they are anticlockwise. In both, 1, 2, 3, 4 are clockwise. My addition is on the second, where 10s are anticlockwise (this is what is used in the addition table).

It still works in the alternative system (14+21 should equal 12)

14+21 =10+20+42 ->2 <1+2+4 =13+4 =10+3+4 =10+31 ->1 <1+3 =0 ==12
by linmob | 2025-05-23 03:57:41+00:00
Yet, there are a select few non-gui flatpaks. One I use frequently is Zola [0], a static site generator that I use because it's significantly faster in building my site with 'zola serve' than the native Alpine Linux package. All I had to do to make it convenient was aliasing flatpak run org.getzola.zola to zola.

[0]: https://flathub.org/apps/org.getzola.zola
by rf15 | 2025-05-23 03:58:02+00:00
When Mozilla got Pocket, they advertised it all over Firefox to increase adoption. Back then, I was like "but I already have a bookmark feature". Over all these years I have hidden the Pocket button away because for most people there's no strong incentive to switch from a normal bookmarking solution (and now, with only a hand full of websites in major use, even bookmarks have lost all meaning).

Good riddance?
by rixed | 2025-05-23 03:58:14+00:00
I haven't followed those discussions (assuming there have been any kind of public discussions) but I guess the justification behind this is that IA is such a strategic industry for the USA that no state should dare to interfere.

Like, say, the development of nuclear weapons. Wouldn't that have been awfull for the US people if, for instance, say the state of Nevada or the Marshall Islands could have banned nuclear tests..? /s
by Haemm0r | 2025-05-23 04:00:04+00:00
You don't need Flatpak at all to have these kind of usability issues, it is deeper than that: For example, if you mount a samba share in the Linux Mint Cinnamon file explorer it is just good to use it from there. Accessing files from the mounted share from "external" apps is a pita (shares are mounted to some obscure path(permission issues), the apps filepickers never have the information that a share was mounted, etc.). If you want usesful access to a samba share you have to mount it via terminal; This way at least the path to the share is short.
by tbrownaw | 2025-05-23 04:01:34+00:00
No, we are not on track to create a literal god in the machine. Skynet isn't actually real. LLM system do not have intent in the way that is presupposed by these worries.

This is all much much less of an existential threat than, say, nuclear-armed countries getting into military conflicts, or overworked grad students having lab accidents with pathogen research. Maybe it's as dangerous as the printing press and the wars that that caused?
by ggm | 2025-05-23 04:03:16+00:00
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

I totally hate the ontology of AI models. It's a constant for me: allowing these words to be come terms of art invites the mis-application of meaning into ordinary discourse.

Whatever it is they do, doing it less or more than humans isn't the point. They aren't humans, and its not a human behaviour, and trying to sneak it in as "like" is really a sin of commission: it's part of the message to make personhood assumed not tested.

Do people have rich fantasy life? Do they routinely mis-read and mis-hear, and mis-see? Sure! Thats what a mondegreen is. It's what a whole bunch of Insurance accident reports are: you literally didn't see the other car.

We functionally live inside a simulation of the world, created internally by the brain. we all know that. So at one level the CEO is being disingenuous.

I'm thinking about a carrot right now. it has a face. and hands. It's attached to the CEO of Anthropic in several entertaining ways. Does the carrot exist? No: it's a conceptual carrot. But I sure am thinking about it.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 04:04:11+00:00
> No, but the author clearly intended that the readers should be.

Damn straight, and as a demonstration of moral ethics for an audience of young children, Dahl exploits our instincts to be thrilled/pleased when someone who's really bad gets exactly what they deserve.

Key factors in each character's demise is that they didn't die -- they weren't really maimed, injured, or in pain, per se, and we were always left with hope in their recovery.

But they all "got their just desserts" in a literal way. Their character sketches were thoroughly drawn as corrupt, indecent, egged on by bad parents, destined for Hell essentially. So yeah, the audience is gleeful and cheers and we revel in this cartoon violence, and we experience it completely differently from Wonka's attitude [hopefully], and when we compare ourselves to the folks on the page, we get to know ourselves better.
by solardev | 2025-05-23 04:04:17+00:00
I find this book really helpful: https://www.refactoringui.com/

Along with reading Nielsen Norman articles on best practices and such.

For UI and widgets, I personally like MUI and find it better the Shadcn, but whatever, just start with something usable and polished enough, even if it's not the prettiest, and improve it later when you can hire a designer.

You might also be able to find some relative cheap freelance design just to get a basic look and feel and maybe a logo.
by noisem4ker | 2025-05-23 04:04:31+00:00
I'd be more worried about Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite, its variants which rely on Flatpak more, as their point is to experiment with a minimal immutable base OS with every user facing app installed as a Flatpak on top.

As long as Red Hat wants to stay in business selling RHEL, Fedora as a distribution is probably not going away nor losing development focus.
by mortos | 2025-05-23 04:05:31+00:00
I believe I've heard the newer Mazda 3s have added the navigation into the HUD for Android Auto and Carplay. It's not in my 2020 though which is annoying.

As for selling your data, yes absolutely. It goes to Connected Analytic Services which is an affiliate company of Toyota Insurance. Toyota Insurance Management Solutions (TIMS) is another name to look up. Subaru sells your data to them as well.
by somenameforme | 2025-05-23 04:07:56+00:00
Your linked site for some reason doesn't include fallout by default, nor does it seem to factor casualties from it. Turn on fallout + surface burst, and a 100MT bomb's deadly fallout range goes from the center of France (where the label is on their map) to the center of Germany and I suspect that's an extreme underestimation, especially the conic they give.

It's also possible that the NYTimes is conflating facts by accident. Your demo link only accounts for single big-blast effects but the way you optimize damage with nukes is lots of smaller bombs, often in a single bomb - MIRV is one name for this. The reason is pretty simple. We approximate the explosive range as a sphere and the volume of that sphere is proportional to the cube (^1/3) of the yield.

So if you increase the yield by 10x you only increase the explosive radius by something like 2.15x. On the other hand, detonate 10 bombs side by side and you increase the radius by 10x. This not only maximizes damage, but also works to further nullify any sort of anti-missile defense. And 100MT would be well more than enough to obliterate France.

You can also kind of intuit this by thinking about 100MT means. That's 100,000,000 TONS of TNT explosive capacity. That's about 1.5 tons of TNT for each and every person in France. That's just a stupidly massive absurd amount of destruction.
by farouk57 | 2025-05-23 04:09:37+00:00
With MCP and leading AI companies getting exponentially better, there is no more room for solo RAG apps. I predict there will be a shift where value will be placed in how well context can be conveyed to an agent. That's why I'm building Spydr, a place where you can build multi-modal contexts privately or "open-sourced"
by rendaw | 2025-05-23 04:10:24+00:00
What's the value of saying you were blocked but now you aren't?

The other case is you're saying it's a reminder. But that should be obvious from any ticketing system - the issue for what you're working on should be set to Blocked and the manager should get a status update email or be able to check it next time they're free.

I think the answer is some managers prefer to have people tell them things in a call.
by ggm | 2025-05-23 04:10:39+00:00
A number of posts made me realise the ratio of comment to post is toxic unless you understand yourself very clearly.

I now routinely delete posts on reflection, and I post a lot less than I used to, and I try to find interesting material to submit instead because I feel it is better to encourage input by being "productive" for want of a better word, than to fall into a semi constant sin of sniping, devils-advocating, well-actually..ing.

I'm not saying it made me happier, but I am certainly happer than I used to be. I have also applied this promiscuously across other social media (yes, this is one) online.
by metalrain | 2025-05-23 04:12:27+00:00
Having minute of downtime per year is quite a big tradeoff.

It makes sense for Stripe, they would lose lot of money when not operating. But in smaller companies you can choose to take more downtime to reduce engineering time.

Instead of skirting around doing gradual data transformations on live data, you could take service offline and do all of it once.
by hansmayer | 2025-05-23 04:12:54+00:00
Thats all wishful thinking, with no direct relation to the actual use cases. Are you going to use it to play games for you? Here is a much more reliable test: Would you blindly copy and paste the code the GenAI spits out at you? Or blindly trust the recommendations it makes about your terraform code ? Unless you are a complete beginner, you would not, because it sometimes generates downright the opposite of what you asked it to do. It is because the tool is guessing the outputs and not really knowing what it all means. It just "knows" what character sequences are most likely (probability-wise) to follow the previous sequence. Thats all there is to it. There is no big magic, no oracle having knowledge you dont etc. So unless you tell me you are ready to blindly use whatever the GenAI playing pokemon tells you to do, I am sorry, but you are just fooling yourself. And in the case you are ready to blindly follow it - I sure hope you are ready for a life of an Eloi?
by ghushn3 | 2025-05-23 04:13:52+00:00
The moment the OP said "they were anticapitalist!" like this was some sort of terrible black mark on their souls it became very clear the story being sold was one sided.

It reads very much like two parties got into one startup for different reasons. The OP wanted to make some money, others felt there were other motivations to pursue, OP stopped paying attention (or never had the trust of the other parties) and it all fell apart.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-23 04:14:35+00:00
Recycling a prediction from a year ago:

> Ultimately a lot of this generative tech stuff is just counterfeiting extra signals people were using to try to guess at interest, attentiveness, intelligence, etc.

> So yeah, as those indicators become debased, maybe we'll go back to sending something [...] all boiled down to bullet points.