MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vessenes | 2025-05-21 18:28:12+00:00
Illegal: Well, it's the law of the land in some countries to only hire men. World bank says 108 countries have some sort of law against hiring women in certain circumstances.

First order, I agree with you. But you're missing second and third order dynamics, which is exactly what I think Amazon was picking up on.

Workers participate in a system, and that system might or might not privilege certain groups. It looks like from the data that white men were more successful at getting high ratings and getting promoted at Amazon in that era. We could speculate about why that is, from institutional sexism / racism inside the org, to any other categorical statement someone might want to make, to an assertion that white men were just 'better' as contributors, per your example. We just don't know, but I think it would be interesting to find out. Think of it as applied HR research; we need a lot more of it in my opinion.
by bdangubic | 2025-05-21 18:29:06+00:00
Meta Ray Bans and Googles Project Aura are products that I absolutely want, but absolutely don't want to buy them from either of those companies, or any company as invasive as they are.

This! So much this! If a product from these companies could make my life 1,000,000x better I would still be in “thanks but no thanks crowd”
by thomastjeffery | 2025-05-21 18:29:07+00:00
There's a looming question you haven't answered: Are you OK with having a platonic friend that happens to be interested in you sexually? You haven't answered this question, but you seem to have strongly implied the answer, "no".

If that's the case, then maybe this is a good opportunity to reconsider. I for one have had many great platonic relationships with women that I am interested in sexually. Interest is not pursuit. If I had avoided every platonic relationship that could feel like a failed sexual pursuit, I would have missed out on a lot of great friends.
by mpweiher | 2025-05-21 18:29:15+00:00
> GE claims to be getting wins with BWRX 300.

The article is about such a customer, the Tennessee Valley Authority, filing for permission to build.

You might consider that a win.

Also from the article:

Earlier this month, the Canadian province of Ontario approved OPG to start construction of the first of four BWRX-300 units planned at the Darlington New Nuclear Project site.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/darlington-new-n...

You might also consider that a win.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-21 18:29:37+00:00
> People who lose their job need to take care of themselves.

This feels incredibly simplistic. Taxpayer dollars go into funding tons of research that has led to automation improvements. Why shouldn’t taxpayers get some sort of return on that investment? When the US government negotiates trade deals, the money the country “saves” could go anywhere, to anyone. Why does almost all of it go to companies and not taxpayers? If a company wants to offshore work, why do they get to keep all of the monetary difference for themselves, instead of paying a substantial portion back to the country? Privatize the profits, socialize the costs doesn’t have to be how we allow companies to operate.

“Help themselves” assumes that all the other factors are some sort of unchangeable natural laws, and not laws and regulations chosen. We could choose different rules that more directly returned gains to taxpayers, instead of vague trickle down type benefits.
Show HN: BemiDB – Open-source data warehouse with zero-ETL
by exAspArk | 2025-05-21 18:29:37+00:00
Hi HN! We're Evgeny and Arjun, and we’re building a simpler way for startups to do data analytics.

Since open-sourcing our Postgres read replica optimized for analytics (https://github.com/BemiHQ/BemiDB), we started hearing a familiar story. Teams would connect Postgres, feel relieved that they didn’t have to wrangle complex ETL pipelines, but then hit a wall as soon as they wanted to join data from HubSpot, Stripe, etc. They’d do hacky things like use Airbyte to sync data to their Postgres, so that it’d then auto sync to their BemiDB analytical database.

We want to remove the layers of data complexity that startups have to add when scaling, and that’s why BemiDB now also allows connecting any supplementary data sources. This makes it a zero-ETL data warehouse for companies that don’t want the typical heavyweight warehouses with expensive ETL’s.

Under the hood, we use Apache Iceberg (with Parquet data files) stored in S3. This allows for bottomless inexpensive storage, compressed data in columnar files, and an open format that guarantees compatibility with other data tools. We use Trino to help with table maintenance and compaction.

We embed DuckDB as the query engine for in-memory analytics that work for complex queries. With efficient columnar storage and vectorized execution, we’re aiming for faster results without heavy infra. BemiDB communicates over the Postgres wire protocol and is also Postgres syntax compatible.

We want to fully simplify data infra for companies that use Postgres and other data sources by reducing complexity (automatic data source syncs), using non-proprietary data formats (Iceberg open tables), and removing vendor lock-in (open source). We'd love to hear any and all feedback! Thoughts HN?
by detourdog | 2025-05-21 18:29:44+00:00
That the continuity that the human race has maintained is based on conservative values.

I think we disagree about some subtlety of how society builds on its efforts.

The hierarchy quote is actually about wredcoll comment.

I'm obviously a conservative person. That conservatism doesn't accept different variations for the same word. I don;'t accept the conservative has a special definition in the US.

All of the shmabolic things you mention as conservative failures are what I'm complaining about it. I don't see them as conservative values because they cost us all more money and waste resources. The examples you provide I don't accept as conservative.

This is maybe why we disagree.
by piskov | 2025-05-21 18:30:27+00:00
Russians have the famous meme for that [1] (just see the photo)

Literal translation is “my snot-nosed kid / my little shit”

https://neolurk.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%...
by Firehawke | 2025-05-21 18:31:44+00:00
I'm normally not one to attack the messenger and just attack the message, but lay off the crack.

99% of users don't want anything even remotely like this. The thought of a single database (even encrypted) that could contain random login/password information, personal information, etc. and easily exfiltrated by whatever new zero-day of the week is NOT pleasant in the slightest.
by ndiddy | 2025-05-21 18:31:56+00:00
Agreed, you can see this from how consumer-facing AI is advertised. It's never something like "I wanted to do X, now I can thanks to AI". It's always "I used AI to generate a cute image to send my son" or "I used AI to write a silly poem about my boss" or something. If it was truly valuable, they'd be showing off how it can solve problems that existed prior to AI being invented, not these fluff tasks that don't respond to people's actual needs or create any value. The only thing that AI can do that people are willing to pay for is cheating on school assignments, but obviously the AI companies don't want to use that in their advertisements.
by huijzer | 2025-05-21 18:32:08+00:00
> I absolutely despise comments like these, and you only see them on HN.

Unfortunately the progressives have been pushing the downplaying of powerful people quite hard for a long time under the guise of equality, so it’s more widespread than just HN. Even more unfortunately, equality is also one of the main ideas of communism. It’s how the government can get rid of dissenters and thus move power to itself. That’s why Marc Andreessen in the Lex Fridman podcast talked about how the government told them that they could give up their startup because it was already decided which companies would be allowed to operate. That’s not capitalism. And Marc knows it that’s why he felt he had to speak up.
by ddahlen | 2025-05-21 18:32:24+00:00
The minor planet center is the clearing house of observations of objects in our solar system. They have announced a new dwarf planet today.

This object appears to be in a very eccentric orbit (0.948), and with an H magnitude of 3.55, so it is likely hundreds of km in diameter. Ceres for reference has a H magnitude of 3.33 (smaller H is bigger diameter).

If you want to know what H means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_magnitude#Solar_Syste...
by vessenes | 2025-05-21 18:32:44+00:00
I don't think the word bias is well enough specified in discourse to answer that question. Or maybe I'd say it's overloaded to the point of uselessness.

Is bias 'an opinion at odds with reality'? Is it 'an opinion at odds with an ethical framework'? Is it 'an opinion that when applied makes the opinion true'? Is it 'an opinion formed correctly for its initial priors, but now incorrect with updated priors'? Is it 'an opinion formed by correctly interpreting data that does not accord with a social concept of "neutral"'?

All these get overloaded all the time as far as I can tell. I'd love to see tests for all of these. We tend to see only the 'AI does not deliver a "neutral" result' studies, but like I said above, very little assessment of the underlying to determine what that means.
by em-bee | 2025-05-21 18:32:58+00:00
not at all. "easy to disable" means you can easily find the place where and how to do it. "difficult to accidentally disable" means you can't disable it without intentionally going to the place and making that choice. of course there are cases where easy to change something also means easy to accidentally change it, and those are annoying. but they don't have to be like that.
by xlii | 2025-05-21 18:33:02+00:00
> The best package manager in the world, bar none. Compiling, linking, and platform difficulties disappear. The devops/devexp is next-level sublime.

I don’t know how are universes split but I’m in the wrong one for sure!

300Gb compile caches, 5 minute compilation, nix flakes with layer and careful adjustments for different arch and deployments, cargo slowing builds by 5 minutes every time because it insist on downloading full repo every time (and occasionally failing). API libraries maintained by some completely anonymous guy or lad from eastern country.

On top of it the bugs don’t get away. If your problem IS memory safety, then sure - chomp away. But I’ve seen u64 truncated to u32 because someone decided to thread it through JSON serialization and macro soup.

Every bear looks like a puppy when it’s a cub.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-21 18:33:14+00:00
It's going to be an entire OS.

This would cost 50 billion or so. But right now you probably interact with at least 3 or 4 oses per day.

Your TV, has one. Your phone has one, your laptop has one. And if you have voice assistants, they run a 4th distinct OS.

The future will have one OS that shares a session.

Two paths exist. 1. This runs primarily locally aside from a very small amount of data to share the session ( which you can disable). It's completely open source and modifiable.

If you want to roll a 3500$ super PC it'll be just as compatible with the OS as a 200$ one. Writing small automated tasks, everything from just asking with a voice command to wake up jazz,to running a custom C script, will be easy to do.

While I'm dreaming I want a new programming language which supports 3 levels. Plan English instructions ran though an LLM, something like Python and a systems level language like Rust. All "native" programs will be built in this framework.

Now, the negative path is this is all closed source, processed in some data center. "John, I noticed you said to Brian your feet hurt, new running shoes are 30% off , just say the word."

This is the far far more likely outcome. They're going to build an AI that's constantly with you, integrated in every device you own, and it'll all be to sell you stuff.

"Waymo, I would like to go home."

"Sure, but let's stop for milkshakes."

"Waymo, please , I'm tried."

"Understood, I've arranged the milkshakes to be dropped off an your apartment."

This technology could be amazing for accessibility, even real time sign language translation would change the world.

We'll get some of that, but the end goal will always be making as much money as possible. Ultimately selling us crap. Your awake for 16 hours today. You must be monetized every waking second.

Once they figure out how to get the science from Dream Scenario to work I'm sure they monetize sleep too
by hinkley | 2025-05-21 18:33:35+00:00
For most of us it was a misnomer because it was a lag button not a turbo button. It defaulted to on. If you turned it off it would make the machine slower, allowing certain programs to run properly instead of too fast for humans.

But we all have stories of a friend whose machine was slow because they hit the button not understanding what it does. For them it did become the turbo button.
by jrussino | 2025-05-21 18:33:53+00:00
> Maybe if I could stomach giving a llama bot access to email and calendar etc etc to have a real personal assistant it would be an attractive offering in a world that accepts being watched 24/7 by AI/billionaire overlords

I share this general point of view but take it further: I really want something in this direction (a quality AI assistant that can access my communications and continuously see and hear what I do) but it MUST be local and fully controlled by me. I feel like Meta is getting closest to offering what I'm looking for but I would never in a million years trust them with any of my data.

My wife has the first-gen raybans and they're great for taking photos and video clips of e.g. our kids' sporting events and concerts, where what it's replacing is a phone held up above the crowd getting in the way of the moment. But even with that I feel icky uploading those things to Meta's servers.
by dkarl | 2025-05-21 18:33:55+00:00
Fifteen years ago I worked with a guy who, in retrospect, was very similar to an LLM. He was extremely verbally gifted and a vacuum cleaner for information. He could speak brilliantly about any topic he had been exposed to. He was a great person to send to a meeting, because he was great at answering questions coherently with the information he had on hand, and he always managed to make your ideas sound smarter than you could yourself. Based on that, you might think he sounds like a gifted human, until I tell you about his major weakness: if you asked him about something he didn't know about, he would often speak just as surely, fluently, and compellingly about it. He hallucinated just like an LLM, and that's why he was stuck in roles without a high level of responsibility despite his verbal gifts.

He was neither arrogant nor self-conscious. He treated his hallucinations as if they were the kinds of simple mistakes other people made, like, oops, I thought I understood this but I don't, no different from oops, I forgot my umbrella.

I sometimes wondered if he had a specific condition that made him the way he was, but I never doubted that he was human, with "general intelligence."
Show HN: Tool to check how private the browser is
by flordaman | 2025-05-21 18:34:01+00:00
Hey!

I made a website that checks some metric on how well your browser hides or spoofs information websites can access. It is meant for beginners to use.

It is still in the beginning phases, so if you have any check you think is missing, or if you think I'm doing a check wrong, feel free to let me know (:

Also, if you don't like the design, please let me know, I suck at design work haha.

Thank you!
by thatcherc | 2025-05-21 18:35:00+00:00
I would recommend just trying it out! (as long as you have the disk space for a few models). llama.cpp[0] is pretty easy to download and build and has good support for M-series Macbook Airs. I usually just use LMStudio[1] though - it's got a nice and easy-to-use interface that looks like the ChatGPT or Claude webpage, and you can search for and download models from within the program. LMStudio would be the easiest way to get started and probably all you need. I use it a lot on my M2 Macbook Air and it's really handy.

[0] - https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp

[1] - https://lmstudio.ai/
by kshacker | 2025-05-21 18:35:05+00:00
Beefier. Bulkier. Quick google search says Intel 16" was 4.3 lbs whereas M4 16" is 4.7 lbs. Not a big difference you say but 1) it is going in the opposite direction where the newer product is bulkier and 2) imagine the years of thin-ness that would have been forced under a different regime.
by linguae | 2025-05-21 18:35:29+00:00
I don't think it would have, with the caveat that I'm only familiar with the BASICs of the 80s and 90s (my first language was QBASIC and I also learned Visual Basic 6); I wasn't around in the 70s and I know little about the BASICs of that era.

I think a major part of the appeal of VisiCalc was introducing the now-familiar spreadsheet UI to people. Yes, anything I could do in a spreadsheet I could also do with a general-purpose programming language, including BASIC. In fact, from time to time I use Python instead of Excel. However, spreadsheets are more accessible for non-programmers, and even for programmers there are many cases where the UI/UX of a spreadsheet is more convenient, just like how there are some tasks where I prefer LaTeX over Microsoft Word, and other tasks where the reverse is true.
by ilikepi | 2025-05-21 18:36:00+00:00
Many people (more than the average rate for the prior generations) _did_ have problems. Perhaps more importantly, the only way to address those problems when they arose was to replace not only the keyboard itself but the entire top case of the machine due to the way the parts were integrated. This process costed many hundreds of dollars when the machines were out of warranty, and the company eventually acquiesced to social pressure and lawsuits by creating an extended warranty program.

That's not to say your situation is unique...there are probably many machines out there that have not had problems, including one owned by my wife. But there are also an unusually high number of machines that did.
by tim333 | 2025-05-21 18:36:08+00:00
I kind of disagree in that I find AI features that I can use with the phone quite useful like being able to say what's that tree or how do I get to Croydon or such like. I don't feel any desire for the AI processing to be built into the device however, I'm quite happy to have it running on Google or whoever's servers and be able to access it from whatever device.
by ploxiln | 2025-05-21 18:37:05+00:00
I don't know why anyone would not include the "delivery" fee, I think it really is that cheap in many places in the US.

Here in NYC the "supply" charge is much less than half of the total bill. If I add up all the fees and surcharges and taxes etc, the total ends up around 35 cents / KWh, which I thought was rather high until I heard about California ...
by kybernetikos | 2025-05-21 18:37:19+00:00
All of the things you mentioned were available in phones before the first iPhone (assuming by ipod you mean mp3 player). In fact from a software point of view it was lacking a bunch of functionality and software ecosystem some competitors had.

In my view the reason the iPhone felt so new was almost entirely the incredibly responsive capacitive touch screen with a finger ui, everything I'd used before it did resistive and preferred pen for detail. Pen actually is better for detail so in some ways it was that more than anything else that turned the device from a creation device to a consumption device which was whole new way of thinking about smart personal devices.

Of course it was also sold in a decent package too where Apple did deals that ensured it was available with good mobile internet plans which were also unusual at the time.
by vlmutolo | 2025-05-21 18:37:37+00:00
To kill a mosquito, you need "a few tens of millijoules, delivered within a few milliseconds" [0], so let's say 10W. To destroy the Earth (so that it turns into scattered dust and never reforms) you need about 10^32 J [1]; if we assume this is applied over maybe 100s, the laser would be 10^30W.

So the log10 scale goes from 1–30, where mosquitos die at 1 and the Earth dies at 30. The 2 PW in the article is about a 15.3. The Vulcan 20-20 project (set to complete in 2029) will register at about 20PW, or a 16.3 on the mosquito-Death Star scale [2].

So on a log scale, we're over halfway to building the Death Star.

[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/backyard-star-wars

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-energy-w...

[2]: https://news.sky.com/story/worlds-most-powerful-laser-to-be-...
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-21 18:37:56+00:00
This quote is taken totally out of context from the chapter of the book it's from and is clipped to make it appear in the worst light.

Earlier in the chapter he says:

> On the contrary, I believe strongly that the color of a man's skin or the religion of his parents is, by itself, no reason to treat him differently; that a man should be judged by what he is and what he does and not by these external characteristics. I deplore what seem to me the prejudice and narrowness of outlook of those whose tastes differ from mine in this respect and I think the less of them for it

The chapter is discussing the appropriateness of government regulating negative versus positive harms and he makes the case that regulating negative harms is a short-sighted and ineffective means of achieving the policy aim of protecting minorities and that "fair employment" as imposed by the majority is not "free employment". In the same chapter he argues that "right to work" laws interfere with the freedom to engage in contracts. The arguments are far more subtle than Edward Zitron is making them out to be.

Importantly Friedman here and elsewhere refers to people who discriminate on the basis of skin as ignorant racists.

Throughout the book he makes the argument that if you remove the legal frameworks that enforced segregation, that people would over time choose to integrate as they found mutual advantage in doing so. Reasonable people can disagree with this assessment.

He finishes the chapter with this quote:

> On the other side of the picture, we should not be so naive as to suppose that deep-seated values and beliefs can be uprooted in short measure by law.

If anyone thinks that Friedman was a racist, they haven't honestly engaged with his writing.
by visarga | 2025-05-21 18:38:05+00:00
Maybe we just need models that can reference spans by start:end range. Then they can pass arguments by reference instead of explicit quotation. We can use these spans as answers in extractive QA tasks, or as arguments for a code block, or to construct a graph from pointers, and do graph computation. If we define a "hide span" operation the LLM could dynamically open and close its context, which could lead to context size reduction. Basically - add explicit indexing to context memory, and make it powerful, the LLM can act like a CPU.