MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xgolwks | 2025-05-21 19:06:35+00:00
What the other commenters are forgetting is that this is the same Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast.

This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.

How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit? - Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion. - Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted. - And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.
by rafaelmn | 2025-05-21 19:06:43+00:00
If it's some small isolated part or personal project I guess it doesn't matter - but I've seen a mature codebase that was started that way - and it was among the worst codebases I've seen in 20 years (of similar scale at least).

Few people even knew how to use it or what monads were, it was a huge issue when onboarding people. When the initial masochist that inflicted this on the codebase left, and stop enforcing the madness, half of the codebase dropped it, half kept it, new people kept onboarding and squinting through it. This created huge pieces of shit glue code that was isolating the monadic crap everyone was too afraid to touch. Worst part was that even if you knew monads and were comfortable with them in other languages they just didn't fit - and it made writing the code super awkward.

Not to mention debugging that shit was a nightmare with the Result + Exceptions - worst of both worlds.

It's basically writing your own DSL by repurposing LINQ syntax - DSLs are almost always a bad idea, abusing language constructs to hack it in makes it even worse.
by jhanschoo | 2025-05-21 19:07:10+00:00
Really, the format of your email is dictated by the business norms of communication that you operate in. If your norms dictate that your emails must, say, be written in an extremely overwrought and formal manner that massages egos, then LLMs to generate and summarize might be the technology that brings efficiency while upholding these norms.

Speaking to the performative importance of cultural norms, many workplaces would not look kindly on certain white-collar roles if they wore a T-shirt to the office; even if it is more efficient, or comfortable to wear the T-shirt.
by jaaron | 2025-05-21 19:07:16+00:00
Great write up. Love to see more of this topic on Hacker News! We've been building in this exact space since 2023, though we jumped directly into 3D with real-time multiplayer from the start.

My take: The "not a game" positioning feels like surrendering before the real design challenge begins. With our first experiment (Retail Mage [1]), we deliberately created a hybrid between traditional game structure and AI improvisation. We released it precisely because we were getting similar feedback from folks that an early implementation was too open ended and didn't "feel like a game." While I think we proved our point, we also learned a lot (including some mistakes we made).

That said, I _also_ think we can build _more than games_ with this technology. I think we’re edging into a new genre or medium: more improvisational and participatory than either traditional games or film. Structure still matters in this space, though. Without it you're really in the fanfic engine or writing assistant space. That’s fine! But it's a different goal.

Honestly, I'm very interested in this space. I was just speaking on a panel about this Monday at GamesBeat in LA and a few of us have a new podcast about this topic "Playing With Inference" [2] with folks like Nick from AI Dungeon as guests.

[1] https://www.jamandtea.studio/news/making-retail-mage-a-new-a... [2] https://playingwithinference.com/
by godelski | 2025-05-21 19:07:22+00:00
I mean I agree but this also is acting like there's no alternative. Apple exists. Hell, Linux exists and is easy these days (see main comment).

It's just unclear to me if your comment is implying that we should just roll over. If so, I vehemently disagree. If not, I'm actually not sure what you're saying and sorry if I'm misunderstanding.
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-21 19:07:25+00:00
Yeah, Friedman would clearly agree that you can't have perfect knowledge but he argues that bad business decisions are punished with losses and firms' owners will fire bad managers or they'll lose their investments.

You're actually touching on why he argues against efforts to regulate negative harms, because the government has an imperfect ability to predict the outcomes and there isn't a great feedback mechanism.
by runarberg | 2025-05-21 19:07:47+00:00
Still, I don‘t know why that is relevant. Signatories have all agreed to establish a global court and grant jurisdiction accordingly. If the court has jurisdiction, it doesn’t matter whether a perpetrator is from a non-signatory country or not.

In this case, the signatory is the state of Palestine, jurisdiction has been established, and it affects anyone who commits specific crimes within that jurisdiction.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-21 19:08:41+00:00
I never said I hate him, I think his is massively over-hyped, and I just think it's insanity that people think that since he had success earlier in his life that everything he touches is gold. It's a common theme of people thinking any successful business person must be worth listening to in other aspects of life (see: people treating billionaires like they are genius'), a stupid theme but a common one.
by triceratops | 2025-05-21 19:09:23+00:00
> price conscious potential guests will choose

And we all know that everyone chooses the cheapest option for everything to the exclusion of all other factors.

He also ignores that prices for minority consumers go up because there are fewer businesses that cater to them.

> He's arguing that all of these prejudices are simply irrational preferences and will necessarily change over time

And there honestly isn't much evidence for this.

> In fact today you find that preference have indeed largely changed in society.

I'm arguing that preferences have changed because people were forced to interact across race barriers and found that, actually, it was fine. Absent that forcing factor, there's zero guarantee that anything would have changed.

He also ignores the harms done to the minority as a result of discrimination. All this talk about "freedom" - what about the freedoms of the minority?
by WD-42 | 2025-05-21 19:09:32+00:00
The problem is, until laptops sold at Walmart or Best Buy start coming with Linux pre-installed as an option, adoption will never happen. Installing an aftermarket OS is just an incredibly unrealistic expectation from the average user.

Microsoft knows this, and they will do everything they can to prevent OEMs from shipping anything other than Windows. Apple of course, forget it. Their profit comes from leeching off FOSS and selling it, they would never allow distribution of it directly.
by bravoetch | 2025-05-21 19:09:43+00:00
Depending on who is doing the valuation, I'm sure this is already a consideration. Like when Coinbase acquired Earn for $110m-ish. Was Earn worth that? Absolutely not. Since Coinbase and Earn shared investors, it was merely a convenient way for those investors to pay themselves out of the unexpected billion dollar cash pile Coinbase amassed in 2017.
by tim333 | 2025-05-21 19:10:34+00:00
Zitron is such a moaner. Just page after page on how everything is crap.

>The Business Idiot is the manager that doesn't seem to do anything but keeps being promoted, and the chief executive officer of a public company that says boring, specious nonsense about AI

The CEO being Aaron Levie who dropped out of college to start Box, now worth a few billion. I wonder how much the brilliant Zitron has achieved with the moanathons.
by cyanydeez | 2025-05-21 19:10:44+00:00
Just gotta build a search engine that properly contextualizes scams, bait & switch sites, SEO, and the rest, and you're back in business.

To do that, you probably still need humans to properly curate the dataset, essentially hire 100 librarians and setup a work flow for them to continually prune results.

Right now, everything is all batch processes. None of these LLMs use active feedback since there's no real models using updates.
by EdgeExplorer | 2025-05-21 19:10:57+00:00
The problem with social media is that it encourages influencers broadcasting to followers over friends mutually interacting and winning over contributing (Great post here about ordinary / competitive conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43080290)

So fix these problems.

1. No followers. Mutual connections only. Put a strict limit of 1000 connections in place to enforce this. No one actually has a mutual connection with more than 1000 people. This only hurts people trying to gain an audience. Heck, make it so if you haven't read someone else's posts in a year, they stop seeing yours. Do whatever it takes to prevent one-to-many connections.

2. No public content. No one wants the whole world to read their conversations with their friends. The only reason you would want that is if you want to build an audience.

3. No likes. No scores of any kind. If you show people a number, they will try to make it go up. No one tracks a score with their friends.

4. No newsfeed. Don't reward people for never shutting up. Maybe a chronological list of *friends* by most recent update and click into that to see all their updates.

5. No algorithm. Give people tools to find what they want to see; don't try to decide for them.

6. No re-post, no share, no forward, etc. Content lives in one place only, the account of the person who posted it, and it is only visible to who they said it should be visible to.
by yalogin | 2025-05-21 19:11:07+00:00
This is the only play for OpenAI. The AI service is going to be commoditized very very quickly and their moat will be gone. They will be doing vertical integration and push into everything. If people complained apple and google looked at apps and copied the functionality themselves what OpenAI will do will be much worse. Also when it took apple and google years to do it, OpenAI will do it very very quickly, in a year most
by dismalaf | 2025-05-21 19:11:37+00:00
No. People hype it but it's obvious we're hitting a wall with LLMs.

That being said, the "apps" that use LLMs coming out now are good. Not AGI good, but they do things, will be disruptive and have value.

And the money coming it could lead to new techniques and eventual AI. For now though, it looks like AI is transitioning into products and figuring out how to lower inference costs.
by namlem | 2025-05-21 19:11:50+00:00
Actually, it's elections that are fundamentally undemocratic. Democracy literally means "rule by the public", which elections are not. Elections are merely rule by elites which have the nominal consent of the public. In practice, this consent is mostly illusory, as voters have no incentive to spend hours of time and effort becoming well-informed given how dilute their individual votes are. So really, elections are rule by influential groups such as media institutions and organized voting blocs.

You cite the UK as an example, but it's even less representative than the US. Parties often win majorities in parliament with only ~35% of the vote.

Sortition meanwhile, takes a representative sample of the public and offers them the time and resources to carefully research and deliberate. It's much closer to the democratic ideal of direct rule by the demos.
by fatbird | 2025-05-21 19:12:17+00:00
Soft power is the smallest benefit.

You're leaving out a large part of the equation, which is that countries can trade with each other in the reserve currency, which becomes a neutral medium of exchange with respect to the parties. The value of holding US treasuries currently is that everyone will accept them. By having the world's reserve currency, the US becomes the owner of the world marketplace. It's not just about trade with the US. I export to the US, get USD which I convert to US treasuries, and now I have near frictionless trades with everyone else in the world.

One huge impact of this over the last 50 years is that the world is effectively lending the US liquidity at the lowest possible interest rate, which the US then extends as credit to American businesses, universities, etc., fueling a boom in industry, commerce and academia.

Another big impact is that holders of US treasuries are strongly incentivized to support and protect America, because as America falls, so does the value of those holdings. Before China declares war on the US, it looks at its huge pile of treasuries that will become worthless at the first shot, and says "maybe not". It also allows the US to affect other countries through its monetary policy--another incentive for others to play nice with the US.

It's kind of boggling how little this is understood, how much short and long-term prosperity the US has created for itself by doing this.
by asadotzler | 2025-05-21 19:13:02+00:00
Certainly the part of those investements wasted on cramming a whole PC into goggles that smash into your face with straps around your head and pretty much all of the Meta and Meta subsidized content to go along with that can be evaluated now, and not in 5 more years. The fact that Quest stalled out 2 years ago with only about 7M actives after tens of billions spent trying to make it go is pretty much all anyone needs to know about Zuck's metaverse investments. Now they're pivoting to glasses with a heads up display and pretending that was the plan all along because Zuck won't admit the cash bonfire that Quest and Horizon Worlds has been, about $100B sunk for only about $15B return with only a few million users.
by jxmorris12 | 2025-05-21 19:14:10+00:00
> Given the demonstrated risk of information leakage from embeddings, have you explored any methods for hardening, obfuscating, or 'watermarking' embedding spaces to resist universal translation and inversion?

No, we haven't tried anything like that. There's definitely a need for it. People are using embeddings all over the place, not to mention all of the other representations people pass around (kv caches, model weights, etc.).

One consideration is that's likely going to be a tradeoff between embedding usefulness and invertability. So if we watermark our embedding space somehow, or apply some other 'defense' to make inversion difficult, we will probably sacrifice some quality. It's not clear yet how much that would be.
by FiatLuxDave | 2025-05-21 19:14:50+00:00
Big powerful lasers can actually be quite noisy. Once I was talking on the phone with a friend who was working on one of the big lasers (don't remember which one, but it was in the bay area) and he said,"What? What? I'm sorry I can't hear you over the sound of my laser!". When he could hear me, I told him that was one of the coolest things I'd ever heard anyone say.
by brentm | 2025-05-21 19:15:15+00:00
They are according to WSJ:

> Jony Ive, a chief architect of the iPhone, and his design firm are taking over creative and design control at OpenAI, where they will develop consumer devices and other projects that will shape the future look and feel of AI.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/former-apple-design-guru-jony-iv...
by woah | 2025-05-21 19:15:34+00:00
A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition. Tentative ideas and explorations evolved into tangible designs.

The ideas seemed important and useful. They were optimistic and hopeful. They were inspiring. They made everyone smile. They reminded us of a time when we celebrated human achievement, grateful for new tools that helped us learn, explore and create.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-21 19:15:46+00:00
>He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist

Of course this rather misses a lot of the effects that cause racism to stay in place like redlining and actual acts of violence.

>"the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

Can also be supplanted by

>Ignorant racists can hang around longer than your lifespan.

Or are we going to forget shit like the Tulsa race massacre where black and integrated businesses were burned to the ground? There is quite an advantage to be segregated if the other option is having your shit burned. Things like integration laws are just one piece in a legal framework to ensure criminal acts don't occur.
by danlitt | 2025-05-21 19:17:05+00:00
I am not sure what you're trying to say here. I agree that the existing situation is the most likely one. So what? I am simply saying that even though it is the "obvious thing", it is unfair and unkind. Those two things are compatible, in fact they are the usual arrangement of things!

> Hard to imagine it working otherwise.

No it isn't! It's very easy to imagine crediting people in a different ratio than we happen to do now. You are seeing what it looks like - people mythologise their heroes, and then other people come in and say "they didn't do it all, you know". People are literally doing it, in front of you, in this thread. How can it be hard to imagine?
by mattlondon | 2025-05-21 19:18:27+00:00
I feel like history is repeating itself yes, but actually I was thinking more a out Google.

Everyone was saying "oh man - Google had all this tech and they sat on it and just couldn't move forwards, then they blew their lead and OpenAI came a long and smoked them!"... Now it feels like it is OpenAI who are repeating that story, blowing their lead they got with the original ChatGPT while that upstart Google schools them in model development and vertical integration.

Interesting times. Very interesting times. C'mon OpenAI, move the SOTA forward!
by triceratops | 2025-05-21 19:18:32+00:00
> The harm is to the agency of the owners

The status quo of discrimination caused harm to the agency of minority employees and shoppers. Why are "owners" more important than them?

> There is no harm to a grocery owner... except economic self-harm

So then there is harm. Economic harm is kinda the important kind of harm to a business owner. Every other "harm" is surmountable.

> Or the customers can move out to the countryside, a suburb, or a small town where they can only find white grocers

So what's the problem? They've added transaction costs for themselves to express their preferences.
by pier25 | 2025-05-21 19:18:38+00:00
> They are gambling that Jony has another iPhone in him.

I seriously doubt it.

If anything because Apple let him go exactly when they were looking for a new hit product like the iPhone.

But also because how he handled the Mac the years before he was fired. All his big decisions were just bad. The butterfly keyboard, touchbar, USB-C only ports, etc. Heck even the 2013 Mac Pro (the trashcan) was an engineering failure. They could never upgrade it because, according to Craig Federighi, they got themselves into a thermal corner caused by the design of it[1].

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2017/04/the_mac_pro_lives
by sandspar | 2025-05-21 19:19:12+00:00
Future AI will deserve a say in the design of its own body, right? Maybe it's not smart enough now, but as it dawns into personhood it'll likely gain some legal rights, including perhaps over its own body. Anyhow, as the AI's gain personhood there will likely be human-led movements to give them more rights. It'll be seen as gauche or gross to do things to AI without consulting it.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-05-21 19:19:18+00:00
The delta is pretty close. Walking is ~200 calories / hour, but sitting is ~100/hr, so the delta is 100/hr. So 4 hours of walking might be as little as an excess of 400. cf a gym workout of 500/hr is also an excess of 400.

IOW, the total calorie burn in a day that includes 4 hours of walking is likely relatively comparable to the total calorie burn in a day that includes an hour of gym time.
by sherr | 2025-05-21 19:20:13+00:00
Today I read a couple of book reviews in the Economist with Sam Altman as the subject. The books are :

The Optimist. By Keach Hagey Empire of AI. By Karen Hao

The reviews are positive for both books. The column itself is titled "Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem" and shows a few reasons people have had some problems with his behaviour. One quote from the article is :

"Ms Livingston fired him, but as Ms Hagey recounts, he left chaos in his wake. Not only was he overseen by a non-functioning board, he had also used YC equity to help lure people to OpenAI. She says some YC partners saw a potential conflict of interest, “or at least an unseemly leveraging of the YC brand for Altman’s personal projects”."

Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem https://archive.is/oANfs

"Two books tell a similar tale about OpenAI. It is worrying"
by _1tem | 2025-05-21 19:20:25+00:00
You misunderstood: balanced trade is about the sum across all countries, not necessarily between any two countries. There can be a trade imbalance between NZ and the US without an overall trade deficit in either country. The point is, that NZ might sell wine and buy fighter jets, but they have to sell enough wine to the rest of the world to pay for the fighter jets, then their trade is balanced. There’s no problem if they have an imbalance of trade with the US as long as it’s balanced overall.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-05-21 19:20:31+00:00
> "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff

I've recently figured this out a out the company where I work, after an embarrassingly large number of years. My manager pays lip service to "high quality code" to justify his endless torrent of nitpicks, but when it comes to his own stuff he hides some times serious problems. Like, seriously, I've found undeniable evidence that he was aware of the malfunctioning of a data collection system and instead of reporting/fixing, he made sure to make it harder for anyone else to find it.

He's very well respected, however, and has this incredible aura of professionalism.

This realization also explains why everything is done so poorly in my company. Hitting the ill defined requirements in letter but not in principle, and then blaming a different team when problems are uncovered, is more than enough.
by hagbard_c | 2025-05-21 19:21:14+00:00
You post shows up in medium gray on a light grey background so it seems the HN downvote brigade does not agree with your point. This action leads to them unwittingly agreeing with your complaint since the greying-out is meant to make your post harder to read. The more they disagree, the harder it will be to read your post adding veracity to its contents.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-21 19:21:57+00:00
Arguably HP/Palm's WebOS devices were ahead on every mark - easier to use, more featureful, smarter, better physical design than any iPhone of similar manufacturing date.

The difference was management choosing to stick with a platform for long enough for network effects to kick in.

If Apple has any advantages compared to other big tech, it's an ability to look past next quarter's financials.
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-21 19:21:58+00:00
Well redlining was government policy, and he actually addresses the perverse effects of government policy that enforce discrimination in the chapter.

He also specifically addresses violence as positive harm that the government has a duty to prevent.

I'd really encourage you to spend the 15 minutes to track down this chapter of Friedman's book and read it because it addresses most of what you're talking about.
by samtp | 2025-05-21 19:22:12+00:00
I'm certainly not saying that "nobody is even allowed to assume how he would have thought". What I'm saying actually has very little to do with Jobs at all.

I'm saying that as a new partner to someone, it's extremely weird to say that your old dead partner would be extremely proud you teamed up with me. If I were to marry a woman who lost her husband, it would be extremely weird and egotistical for me to tell people that her dead ex-husband would be "damn proud" that she married me.