MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by matus-pikuliak | 2025-05-20 13:47:58+00:00
To be honest, I am not sure where this bias comes from. It might be in the Web data, but it might also be overcorrection of the alignment tuning. They LLM providers are worried that their models will generate sexist or racists remarks so they tune it to be really sensitive towards marginalized groups. This might also explain what we see. Previous generations of LMs (BERT and friends) were mostly pro-male and they were purely Web-based.
by k__ | 2025-05-20 13:48:02+00:00
I guess the question is, what does this survey try to find?

I mean, a hot tub could be seen as bath, but it might not be related to cleanliness but more of a relaxation thing.

Going swimming in a public path that is full of chlorine might have cleaning properties too, especially if you don't swim in the children's pool, lol.
by xpl | 2025-05-20 13:48:27+00:00
Check out this Russian Telegram channel on AP https://t.me/usadminvisaprocessing/1

There are people who file collective mandamus lawsuits, so you might consider joining one of those groups.

However, from what I've seen, it could be a waste of money, as there isn't convincing evidence that it accelerates AP. These lawsuits usually take many months, and AP often resolves "by itself" before the lawsuit reaches a resolution.
by Netcob | 2025-05-20 13:49:07+00:00
I struggle with habits a lot, but this is one of the few that work for me. I think the kids call it "habit stacking"?

Basically, I have to brush my teeth and shower before going to bed. It's all one package, and I'm very efficient at it.

So it's at least once a day, more if I was sweating a lot.

Another one: brush teeth before leaving the house for the first time that day. ...that used to work better before working from home.

I've added a lot of other habits since then, using an overcomplicated system of deadlines and rewards.
by gloosx | 2025-05-20 13:49:20+00:00
I'm not dismissing onedrive here but I wanted to say monseur was cheating when he mentioned onedrive/sharepoint as real features of Excel application – they are not directly related to the essence of spreadsheet editing and can be substituted with any solution which does the job, even Dropbox itself.

>There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.

this is just silly, it really means "There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on exclusive Visual Basic macros"
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-20 13:49:27+00:00
Well, RLHF is nothing but synthetic correction in a sense. And modern models are trained on inputs that are heavily AI curated or generated. So there's no theoretical issue with it. ML training on its own outputs definitely can lead to runaway collapse if done naively, but the more careful ways it's being done now work fine.

I suspect in the era when base models were made available there was much more explicit bias being introduced via post-training. Modern models are a lot saner when given trolly questions than they were a few years ago, and the internet hasn't changed much, so that must be due to adjustments made to the RLHF. Probably the absurdity of the results caused a bit of a reality check inside the training teams. The rapid expansion of AI labs would have introduced a more diverse workforce too.

I doubt the bias can be removed entirely, but there's surely a lot of low hanging fruit there. User feedbacks and conversations have to be treated carefully as OpenAI's recent rollback shows, but in theory it's a source of text that should reflect the average person much better than Reddit comments do. And it's possible that the smartest models can be given an explicit theory of political mind.
by ramses0 | 2025-05-20 13:49:30+00:00
Back in the day there were a bunch of `x2y` programs[1], like html2pdf, xls2csv, rst2odt, jpg2png, png2jpg, etc...

You could imagine something like `any2zip`, or `any2tgz` or `iso2mp4` or something.

It seems like there could/should be some sort of virtual filesystem where you could say "cat inventory.xls.csv", or "wine.exe excel.exe inventory.csv.xls" (please bear with me on these examples). Effectively "$BLOB.format.format", where "." becomes a sort of "convert to this $TYPE".

Imagine being able to say:

`echo "# Hello\n\n * World" > README.md ; cat README.md.html"` (effectively invoking `md2html`) `printer README.md.html.pdf` (eg: `cat README.md | md2html | html2pdf | printer`)

...if you requested `README.md.pdf`, maybe it could intuit the intermediate `md2html2pdf` (HTML) portion?

I really wish local linux filesystems (for end-users) would at least match Apple's capabilities. eg: `$RECENT`, spotlight, auto-OCR. We've really regressed since the era of `locate`, but I'd _LOVE_ some sort of modern equivalent.

Imagine: `inotify`, `auditd`, just anything that can avoid full-disk scans during "normal end user" daily operation... wired up to `llm-summary $FILE >> sqlite.db ; `llava-describe $IMAGE >> sqlite.db ; etc...`

For bonus points, catch anything missed with some sort of full daily/weekly backup operation. We're on the cusp of a much more intimate "partnership" with the compute boxes underneath our desks, but so much is getting sucked into the void of "the network is the computer".

[1]: compgen -c | grep 2 | grep -v '2$' | grep -v '\.2' | grep -v '2\.'

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locate_(Unix)
by roenxi | 2025-05-20 13:49:54+00:00
Klitgaard is talking about accounting, ie, instantaneous currency exchanges where, by definition, the gain on one side of the exchange has to equal the outlay on the other. Your model doesn't look like an accounting model; I suspect you want to talk about something different from what he is talking about - and that you want to talk bout policy implications rather than truisms (which is a good instinct; just not what economists care about when they sit down to talk accounting identities).
by Lerc | 2025-05-20 13:50:24+00:00
The point that stood out to me as concerning was

"The carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average."

I'd be fine with as many data centers as they want if they stimulated production of clean energy to run them.

But that quote links to another article by the same author. Which says

"Notably, the sources for all this power are particularly “dirty.” Since so many data centers are located in coal-producing regions, like Virginia, the “carbon intensity” of the energy they use is 48% higher than the national average. The paper, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that 95% of data centers in the US are built in places with sources of electricity that are dirtier than the national average. "

Which in turn links to https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.09786

Which puts the bulk of that 48% higher claim on

"The average carbon intensity of the US data centers in our study (weighted by the energy they consumed) was 548 grams of CO2e per kilowatt hour (kWh), approximately 48% higher than the US national average of 369 gCO2e / kWh (26)."

Which points to https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...

For the average of 369g/KWh. That's close enough to the figure in the table at https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2024-01/egrid2022...

which shows 375g/KWh (after converting from lb/MWh)

But the table they compare against shows.

VA 576g/KWh TX 509g/KWh CA 374g/KWh

and the EPA table shows

VA 268g/KWh TX 372g/KWh CA 207g/KWh

Which seem more likely to be true. The paper has California at only marginally better than the national average for renewables (Which I guess they needed to support their argument given the number of data centers there)

I like arxiv, It's a great place to see new ideas, the fields I look at have things that I can test myself to see if the idea actually works. I would not recommend it as a source of truth. Peer review still has a place.

If they were gathering emissions data from states themselves, they should have caclulated the average from that data, not pulled the average from another potentially completely different measure. Then their conclusions would have been valid regardless what weird scaling factor they bought in to their state calculations. The numbers might have been wrong but the proportion would have been accurate, and it is the proportion that is being highlighted.
by Balgair | 2025-05-20 13:50:28+00:00
Guys, I think my company is literally going to try this. I'm not joking.

We fired ~1/3rd of the managers last month. We had a (poor) town hall about it with platitudes galore. I talked to my new boss (was a skip level boss before) and they were unconcerned, as we'd 'brought in a new vendor' to 'assist in the transition'. I've never heard of bringing in a single vendor to help after manager layoffs. Since I do AI stuff in the company, the remaining managers have been keen to talk with be about AI now and how to use it better. I'm not sure what is really happening (I think it's just internal politics mostly) but there is a >20% chance they're doing something this stupid.

Wish me luck, y'all.
by jihadjihad | 2025-05-20 13:50:31+00:00
> It _doesn't_ make sense. How is consumption on the income side of the equation? And even if that somehow did make sense, who is to say the consumption on the income side is the same as the consumption on the spending side such that they balance out?

The model they are using is a simplified macroeconomic model. In their model, they are simply saying that when you account for Income--the total amount of money earned across the entire economy--it can only fall into two mutually exclusive buckets. Either the income is related to Consumption (purchasing goods and services), or Saving (as you mention, deferred spending--money in banks, or surpluses in the budget for states etc.--anything that is not in the consumption bucket).

> who is to say the consumption on the income side is the same as the consumption on the spending side such that they balance out?

By definition, it has to be. The way national income accounting works is that you can look at things from the perspective of expenditures or income. Since GDP is total output and total income, the total amount of consumption is the same, which is why it drops out in the equation from their model.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-05-20 13:50:38+00:00
I keep wondering if its smart to just roll over an email address when it gets compromised, and limit your exposure, as well as force you to change your password while you're on every website ditching your former email.

I know some people use email tags, but maybe just rolling a new email might be better, followed by deleting unused dead accounts you will never use again.
by diggan | 2025-05-20 13:51:24+00:00
> anyone why JavaScript and typescript are the Lingua Franca of software engineering.

I mean, it obviously isn't, although for web development, I'd probably agree with you. But regardless, zealots who hold opinions like this, where there is "one language to rule them all" is why discussing with TS peeps is so annoying. In your world, there is either C or TypeScript, but for the rest of us, we tend to use different languages depending on what problem we're solving, as they all have different strengths and drawbacks. If you cannot see any drawbacks with TypeScript, it's probably not because there aren't any, but you're currently blind to them.

> Why would anyone want to use anything else for general purpose coding?

Because you've tasted the world of having a REPL connected to your editor where you can edit running code live and execute forms. Just one example. There are so many languages available out there when you control your stack. I understand using JavaScript for frontend web stuff, because you have no other options, and I personally have nothing against JavaScript itself. But for the love of god, realize there is a world out there outside of your bubble, and some of those languages have benefits too.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-20 13:52:14+00:00
Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price. Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days. Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways, and semis outcompete rail for network volume, ease of delivery, and adaptability to constraints.
by jerjerjer | 2025-05-20 13:52:27+00:00
> It took television about 50 years to hit stride and go beyond film, but it got there. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men achieved something not replaceable by the movie or the novel.

Can you elaborate on the differences between television and film? Especially considering the examples you cite. I'd agree that live broadcasting is a considerable departure from a film as a medium. Still, the shows you reference are very cinematic - longer, sure, but for me, they are as close to a film experience as possible.
by taneq | 2025-05-20 13:52:32+00:00
I asked for a large asteroid impacting the Pacific ocean. Interestingly the resultant tidal wave apparently heads directly to Honolulu, then to Terminal Island, then reverses course and visits Sydney before traveling overland through New South Wales and Queensland, causing some earthquakes in Papua New Guinea, and coming to rest in Tokyo Harbour.

Also I just realised I can talk to the asteroid. It understandably seems a little traumatized.

me: Hi! What brings you to this particular part of the ocean? asteroid: *hurtling through the atmosphere at tremendous speed, trailing fire* AAARRRRRGGGHHHHH! NOT BY CHOICE! Gravity's got me in its grip! Been floating peacefully through space for millions of years until your planet's pull caught me! CAN'T STOP NOW! *glowing brighter* Ocean impact in approximately 17 seconds! Nothing personal against this particular patch of water! BRACE FOR TSUNAMI! *increasing in brightness and velocity*

https://mused.com/map/sim/2225/asteroid-impact-event
by jayd16 | 2025-05-20 13:52:35+00:00
> But how long does it take to properly learn Unreal or Unity such that you can have an idea and turn it into a game without friction?

If you have enough game dev knowledge to make an engine...then it's seriously like a day to learn these things to begin to bang out a prototype.

They take a long time to master but if your goal is to work on the game its not in the same universe of turn around time.
by mk_chan | 2025-05-20 13:53:10+00:00
Following the paper, if you end up with a gender balanced workforce, it implies there is surely a bias in one of the variables - the candidate pool (like you say) or the evaluation of a candidate or other related things. However the bias must also reverse to equalize once the balance tips the other way or actually disappear once the desired ratio is achieved.

Edit: it should go without saying that once you hire enough people to dwarf the starting population of the startup + consider employee churn, the bias should disappear within the error margin in the real world. This just follows the original posted results and the paper.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-05-20 13:53:20+00:00
DEI in practice means racial quotas. It may not be meant that way somewhere down the line, but that is the reality. It is also a shield for certain kinds of animosity.

Ideas should also allow criticism, which DEI was notorioulsly bad for. So maybe the idea is indeed just bad.

Yes, Trump here uses simple populism, but it isn't only his achievement that it does work so effectively. And no, that isn't due to racism. Maybe we should rethink it thoroughly anyway.
by Jackpillar | 2025-05-20 13:53:39+00:00
In the context of an AI revolution influenced requirement for UBI, the political mobilization & effort required to sort the financial situation of Europe is exceedingly more attainable than the effort & mobilizations required to (A) passing a UBI bill, (B) raising taxes (lol c'mon), and (C) distributing said resources into a social safety net in the US that is not means-tested to hell and equally distributed and fought at every corner by corporate America.

We're the only developed western country on planet that doesn't have healthcare as a human right and you think our governments will pass a universal basic income?
by izacus | 2025-05-20 13:53:39+00:00
> I've always disliked economics because it never seems to make much sense. The first equation in the article -- the basis on which the entire premise rests -- just feels wrong.

That's because you're reading an econ 101 equation, similarly how basic physics blogs use spherical cows in equations to simplify them. Most of internet (and even media) discourse about economcs never grows out of this level - it's like having people debate physics of nuclear reactors while their knowledge is stuck on Newtonian level.

Or, as some academic once put it - first year in economics college you learn econ101... and the rest of the years you're taught all the ways that model doesn't apply to real life.
by lamename | 2025-05-20 13:53:40+00:00
Thank you for saying this, I agree with your point exactly.

However, instead of using that known human bias to justify pervasive LLM use, which will scale and make everything worse, we either improve LLMs, improve humans, or some combo.

Your point is a good one, but the conclusion often taken from it is a shortcut selfish one biased toward just throwing up our hands and saying "haha humans suck too am I right?", instead of substantial discussion or effort toward actually improving the situation.
by Y_Y | 2025-05-20 13:53:54+00:00
I thought this was something like a FUSE driver that would on-the-fly generate any file you tried to read, with some consistency. Like if you open stories/zombie-party.txt it will have some generative network make it, and cache it. If you later ask for stories/zombie-party.odt it can just do a conversion.

I vibe-coded a demo of such a thing, with the idea of making game assets like textures/outdoor/wall.jpg etc. You can do it easily enough, but you need to be patient, and not particularly discerning.
by thatnerd | 2025-05-20 13:54:00+00:00
I think that's an invalid hypothesis here, not just an unlikely one, because that's not my understanding of how LLMs work.

I believe you're suggesting (correctly) that a prediction algorithm trained on a data set where women outperform men with equal resumes would have a bias that would at least be valid when applied to its training data, and possibly (if it's representative data) for other data sets. That's correct for inference models, but not LLMs.

An LLM is a "choose the next word" algorithm trained on (basically) the sum of everything humans have written (including Q&A text), with weights chosen to make it sound credible and personable to some group of decision makers. It's not trained to predict anything except the next word.

Here's (I think) a more reasonable version of your hypothesis for how this bias could have come to be:

If the weight-adjusted training data tended to mention male-coded names fewer times than female-coded names, that could cause the model to bring up the female-coded names in its responses more often.
by skybrian | 2025-05-20 13:54:01+00:00
I think that’s best addressed by avoiding dependencies and looking for libraries with few indirect dependencies. There are lots of npms that advertise few or no dependencies as a feature.

Though, it is nicer if it’s on jsr.io because you’ll see Typescript source code in the debugger.

There’s nothing about starting over that prevents ending up with a whole new rat’s nest of dependencies, if you’re not careful.
by nico | 2025-05-20 13:54:31+00:00
Why do you think vibecoding and learning together with kids is putting less thought?

However, kids don't care too much about thought. They care a lot more about attention and fun

With these tools you get to the fun part faster and can give them a lot more attention

You also get to co-create with them and they get to express their creativity seeing results in realtime
by vidarh | 2025-05-20 13:54:39+00:00
I think there's lots of scope for improvements to terminals, but I feel like this is more a question of "nobody has asked for it".

There's been plenty of recent innovation in terminals (e.g. support for a variety of new types of underlines to enable "squigglies" for error reporting is an example; new image support is another), and adding a code to enable more detailed key reporting the same way we have upgraded mouse event reporting over the years wouldn't be hard, and these things tends to spread quickly.

With respect to "accidentally printing a line that's too long", you can turn off auto-wrap in any terminal that supports DECAWM (\033[?7h / \033[?7l ).

That it's "kinda slow" really shouldn't be an issue - it was fast enough for hardware a magnitude slower than today. Parsing it requires a fairly simple state machine. If can't keep up with VT100/ANSI escape sequences, your parser is doing something very wrong.

The difficulty of unicode is fair enough, and sadly largely unavoidable, but that part is even worse in a GUI; the solution there is to use code to measure the rendered string, and it's not much harder to get that right for terminals either. It'd be nice if unicode had done this in a nicer way (e.g. indicated it in the encoding).

For my own terminal, I'm toying with the idea of allowing proportional text with an escape code, and make use of it in my editor. If I do, it'll be strictly limited: Indicate a start and end column where the text is proportional, and leave it to the application to specify a font and figure out the width itself.

Worst case scenario would be that you send the escape, and the editor doesn't get an escape acknowledging it has been enabled back, and falls back on monospaced text and keeps working fine in a regular terminal. This way, evolving terminal capabilities can be done fairly easily with backwards compatibility.
by vacuity | 2025-05-20 13:54:58+00:00
> Or perhaps a different lesson is that if you want a better world to exist, choose to live it. Sometimes there will be those which do not share this vision and actively work against your choice.

So you need the power to abide by your choices and not others'. I think the colloquial understanding of "power" is somewhat different than I want to convey. Power is potential, the ability to affect or effect, control[0]. Violence can be powerful, because a dead foe can't hurt you. Nonviolence can be powerful, because a dissuaded foe can't hurt you. Who you are determines what you do. What you do reflects who you are. The path you are walking on, whether to your design or not, requires power to prevent straying.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/power
by Reason077 | 2025-05-20 13:55:15+00:00
> "Today, there are less passenger trains than back then"

I don't think this is true in Europe. Certainly in the UK, passenger rail volume since the 2010s has set records higher than in any previous years, exceeding numbers that were last seen before WW2. Today there are fewer miles of track than there were in that era, but modern signalling technology allows more trains to operate safely on the same tracks, and modern trains run much faster on average.

As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.