MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kevlened | 2025-05-12 22:54:05+00:00
This critique deserves more attention.

Humans are capable of reproducing copyright illegally, but we allow them to train on copyrighted material legally.

Perhaps measures should be taken to prevent illegal reproduction, but if that's impossible, or too onerous, there should be utilitarian considerations.

Then the crux becomes a debate over utility, which often becomes a religious debate.
by 3dsnano | 2025-05-12 22:55:01+00:00
Prior to the LLM age, I found it very difficult to program while on LSD or psychedelics. I just could not sustain the logical inference needed to keep track.

However, using a voice dictation program combined with a usb foot pedal and cursor, I have overcome this impasse in an interesting way.

What was once the Ballmer peak, I should perhaps rename the Pickard Pinnacle. What a time 2B alive.
by const_cast | 2025-05-12 22:56:07+00:00
The only reason this worked is because your situation was exceedingly simple.

The trouble is you are not educated enough to tell what is simple and what isn't. A cough could be a cough or it could be something more serious, only a "real" examination will reveal that. And sometimes even that's not enough, you need an examination by a specialists.

I'll tell you a story. Once upon a time I got pain in my balls. I went to a doctor and he felt around and he said he didn't feel anything. I went to another doctor and he felt something, but he had no idea what it was. He said could be a cyst, could be a swollen vein, could be an infection - he didn't even know if it was on the testicle or on the tube thingy.

Then I went to a Urologist. You can tell this man has felt up a lot of balls. He felt me up and said, "yup, that's a tumor" almost immediately. He was right, of course, and he ended up being the one to remove it too. Since I caught the cancer pretty early the chemotherapy wasn't too intense.

Point is, expertise matters when things aren't straight forward. Then, experience and perspective gets to shine.
by fch42 | 2025-05-12 22:57:20+00:00
You can booked timed tickets at https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/visit-the-co... but when it's open on weekends, one can also often just walk in. It's a great place to visit. Entrance is free.

As far as I'm aware, the Barbican Conservatory (Greenhouse) will close for refurbishment at a point next year though. When you go currently, they'll have details of the plans for public consultation. So see it while you can (or then again in 2030 or so).
by __d | 2025-05-12 22:57:29+00:00
My experience with retro computers is that things start to fail from around the 10-15 year mark, yes. Some things are still good after 30 years, maybe more, but .. capacitors leak, resistors go out of spec, etc, and that means voltages drift, and soon enough you burn something out.

You can replace known likely culprits preemptively, assuming you can get parts. But dendritic growths aren’t yet a problem for most old stuff because the feature sizes are still large enough. No one really knows what the lifetime of modern 5/4/3nm chips is going to be.
by sourdoughness | 2025-05-12 22:57:35+00:00
My understanding of this idea is that once the universe reaches a state of maximum entropy (this is the “heath death” of the universe, where everything is a uniform, undifferentiated cloud of photons, then time stops being meaningful because there can be no change from moment to moment. In a sense, time _is_ the change from low to high entropy - if you don’t have any entropy gradient, you can’t have any time either.
by Spooky23 | 2025-05-12 22:57:36+00:00
You don’t know that unless you study it. Better pedestrian barriers, improved sight lines, or warning technology in cars may reduce certain categories of suicidal acts.

My relative was a fire chief in a city with a popular bridge for jumpers and was involved in the response to the overall problem. Changing the sidewalk design, fencing, funneling people to locations with emergency phones and a few other things saved a few dozen people who intended to jump.

The whole point of our profession to to look at problems and solve them. Zero is difficult, but you can attack those numbers and make progress.
by anyfoo | 2025-05-12 22:57:36+00:00
There are many things to say about this, but one of those things is that I think you are making the assumption that an (e.g.) C programmer who does not want (or even cannot) get into OCaml would somehow be better for this highly specialized, high-performance, and high-correctness-affine use case, than someone who does. And I'd question that assumption.
by K0balt | 2025-05-12 22:59:02+00:00
What I’ve seen that drives my ideas on this are:

I believe a professional skill is an important educational goal, and insofar as a person is capable and interested they will more likely thrive with a professional skill.

But: professional skills tend to require a lot of dependencies and connections, can be heavily reputation based, and you can find yourself in a dead end of many kinds.

Having a trade gives you an opt-out so you can always move laterally and reposition yourself, probably to get back into your profession or a related one. Also, it creates a way to take a “break” to avoid burnout. And being skilled in trades, you can easily “earn” tens of thousands of dollars a year as a homeowner by not having to pay a premium for life’s demands unless you want to.

Just being able to credibly walk away is a huge advantage in negotiation. And even if you won’t, knowing that you could, really could, is a huge boost to well being.

It all boils down to plotting a course based on options rather than only constraints. Empowerment.

Thing is, most people won’t use that fallback, but it still provides a great advantage. With a fallback, you can take risks that can position you ahead of more timid strategies. Same as owning a little land with a simple cabin on it, outright.

For a few thousand dollars or even less, the worst that can happen is that you might have to go “home” and recoup. You always have a place to be. Even if you rarely go there.
by n8henrie | 2025-05-12 22:59:32+00:00
Much of modern medicine's expertise is focused on areas that reimburse well (in some part because those industries subsidize the research).

I would not expect most physicians to have a deep fund of literature-backed knowledge to draw from regarding exercise. Telling someone to do an exercise probably doesn't compensate well.

That said, I'm also pretty negative about the availability of rigorous literature regarding much of nutrition, dentistry, podiatry, physical therapy, etc... you know, the things that affect the health of most human beings that have ever lived.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-12 22:59:45+00:00
You need tests either way. It's hard to write a test that checks behavior but misses a wrong-type. Simply running the problematic code will most likely throw an exception.

The type deduction is not so automatic in most languages, TS included. Rust has the most automatic one I've seen, and of course that kind of language needs static typing. But still, it's more explicit than needed for a typical web backend.

SQL type autogen is limited to full rows, so any query returning an aggregate or something isn't going to work with that. Even for full rows, it's eh. Usually I just see that encouraging people to do local computations that should be in SQL.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-05-12 22:59:52+00:00
Question is what it's for. A proper transport layer on the map would be valuable to me. Even without timetable data. That's even in relations on openstreetmap already.

Next improvement might be to highlight lines based on frequency of service. Still possible to precalculate with little need on device.

Routing ain't easy. That's true.
by dgroshev | 2025-05-12 23:01:04+00:00
Two less mentioned sides of the Barbican that I love:

- how much design work was put into it. So many of it, from little bits and bobs (an awning, an electric socket, a doorframe), to the overall layout are unique to the area they are in and aren't copy-pasted elsewhere! It creates a coherent, but varying ensamble that is vibrant and alive, and is not just a grid of repeated elements.

- relatedly, how deeply organic the maze of the Barbican is. Contrast the raw concrete of the Barbican with the flowing lines of the Walkie-Talkie: one has an organic and smooth shape, but is really a 3D grid of repeated blocks; the other is made entirely of exposed raw concrete, but you never know what you will see around a corner. In this sense, the Barbican is more organic than most modern architecture. It's a place of wonder and surprise.

I love the Barbican.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-12 23:01:25+00:00
Still, another two big questions are:

- To what extent AI will actually be helpful in solving the climate crisis?

- To what extent the power generation growth fueled by AI will be critical to solving the climate crisis, and conversely, how badly we'll be screwed without it?

"Degrowth" is not an option. It hasn't been for a long time now. We can't just "social solution" our way out this problem anymore.
by easterncalculus | 2025-05-12 23:01:34+00:00
> Honest question- Would a full IPv6 implementation across the board, hurt Tailscale's M.O. and bottom line, assuming all routing worked properly (a big assumption, to be sure)?

Despite what people say, absolutely. Tailscale's moat is the centrally deployed NAT traversal solutions built with an easy-to-use interface and (somewhat) friendly pricing model. At one point they wrote a blog post (looks to be deleted) basically saying that IPv6 and direct connectivity in general is 'bad actually' or something along those lines.
by lisper | 2025-05-12 23:02:01+00:00
> a system with 2 planets with intelligent lifeforms

That is an extremely unlikely scenario because both intelligent life forms would have had to evolve before either of them developed space flight. It took homo sapiens 4 Gyr to evolve in the first place but only 100 kyr to develop space flight after that. So the odds are slim to none.
by achrono | 2025-05-12 23:02:15+00:00
Let me answer those questions with actual evidence.

To begin with, this very case of Perlmutter getting fired after her office's report is interesting enough, but let's keep it aside. [0]

First, plenty of lobbying has been afoot, pushing DC to allow training on this data to continue. No intention to stop or change course. [1]

Next, when regulatory attempts were in fact made to act against this open theft, those proposed rules were conveniently watered down by Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and the US government lobbying against the copyright & other provisions. [2]

If you still think, "so what? maybe by strict legal interpretation it's still fair use" -- then explain why OpenAI is selectively signing deals with the likes of Conde Nast if they truly believe this to be the case. [3]

Lastly, when did you last see any US entity or person face no punitive action whatsoever despite illegally downloading (and uploading) millions of books & journal articles; do you remember Aaron Swartz? [4]

You might not agree with my assessment of 'conspiracy', but are you denying there is even an alignment of incentives contrary to the spirit of the law?

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/trump-fires-head-us...

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-for-u-s-gover...

[2] https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/04/30/big-tech-watered-do...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-signs-deal-with-co...

[4] https://cybernews.com/tech/meta-leeched-82-terabytes-of-pira...
by godelski | 2025-05-12 23:03:34+00:00
There's a risk but there's also great reward if it is done properly. The only way to maximize utility of any individual player is to play cooperatively[0]. A single actor might get a momentary advantage by defecting from cooperation, but it decreases their total eventual rewards and frankly it quickly becomes a net negative in many cases.

That said, I'm not very confident such a situation would happen in reality. I'm not confident current industry leaders can see past a quarter and nearly certain they can't see past 4. Current behavior already indicates that they are unwilling to maximize their own profits. A rising tide lifts all ships, but many will forgo the benefit this gives them to set out to explore for new and greater riches and instead are only able to envy the other ships rising with them. It can be easy to lose sight of what you have if you are too busy looking at others.

[0] Simplified example illustrated by Iterative Prisoner's Dilemma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur3Vf_ibHD0

[0.1] Can explain more if needed but I don't think this is hard to understand.
by anonfordays | 2025-05-12 23:03:47+00:00
You'd think those who disagreed would do more than flag and move on. My original flagged post:

>Hiring on merit can increase representation of underrepresented groups.

I got whiplash reading this. We were told for years by leftists that meritocracy was inherently White supremacist and racist.

>The idea that leadership saying "we want to increase representation of underrepresented groups" converts to people illegally hiring worse candidates because of their demographics is... odd.

It's not "odd," it's exactly what happened: https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/1734374423124176944

There's some strange gaslighting/narrative shaping going on in this thread.
by zzzeek | 2025-05-12 23:03:51+00:00
> Over the last two years, we’ve more or less run out of benchmarks where AI isn’t better than humans.

this whole "benchmarks" thing is laughable. I've been using Gemini all week to do code assist, review patches, etc. Such impressive text, lists of bullets, suggestions, etc., but then at the same time it makes tons of mistakes, which you then call it on, and it predictably is like "oh sorry! of course!" yes of COURSE. because all it does is guess what word is most likely to come after the previous word. is there a "benchmark" for "doesn't hallucinate made up BS?" because humans can do very well on such a benchmark.
by aiaiaiaiaiaiai | 2025-05-12 23:06:17+00:00
I love vim and but I am playing with this stuff too...

There are a couple of neovim projects that allow this ... Advante come to mind right now.

I will say this: it is a different thought process to get an llm to write code for you. And right now, the biggest issue for me is the interface. It is wrong some how, my attention not being directed to the most important part of what is going on....
by threeseed | 2025-05-12 23:06:26+00:00
a) Enterprises have almost entirely moved away from self-hosting software. GCP Marketplace is fine but I would probably also look at a Kubernetes option as many companies have GKE clusters.

b) It won't be 5x faster though and I wrongly recommend you don't take a marketing attitude when selling this type of software. Because it will be mostly technical engineers and architects deciding on this and we aren't stupid. I have run GPU accelerated Spark clusters for years for enterprise companies and you will be able to accelerate the query part of the pipeline but that's like 20% of what a typical job does.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-12 23:07:10+00:00
>Scoffing at $75k for a kid's first job out of high school is so completely out of touch with reality.

I'm scoffing at a kid needing to work 60 hours a week in order to earn an income barely above the median. I'm scoffing at the idea that people think 70k is liveable in high COL areas without sharing multiple roommates.These aren't things we should normalize.

If you really think this isn't bad, you're the ones out of touch with how expensive it is to survive these days.
by bcantrill | 2025-05-12 23:07:57+00:00
I really don't care about how prestigious academics view (or viewed) ATC, but for whatever it's worth when our paper was accepted in 2004, was just under 13%. That is bluntly too oversubscribed for the practitioner (whose job is to ship systems, not win paper popularity contests -- or adjudicate those popularity contests by serving on program committees). In some ways, if ATC wasn't thought prestigious, it's even worse -- it means that practitioners lost our conference for nothing at all.

A final note: given that OSDI is on your list of prestigious conferences, the way the program committee was conducted in 2010 (which I outlined in my ATC keynote[0]) should be particularly galling.

[0] https://speakerdeck.com/bcantrill/a-wardrobe-for-the-emperor...
by cogman10 | 2025-05-12 23:08:40+00:00
> My other pet peeve with EBM is that it does a poor job of understanding that different interventions work for different people

This has not been my experience with doctors throughout the years. In fact, I'd say the opposite has been true.

In my experience, particularly when diagnoses are trickier, doctors are more likely check the efficacy of the current treatment and change things up if it's not working out.
by ty6853 | 2025-05-12 23:09:02+00:00
Lol they all got bid to infinity during the covid mania, that's why I resorted to building a house myself in the first place -- if buying a rundown built house or even a shitty trailer were cheaper I would have done that in the first place.

I built this place for ~1/3 the price of anything else available because even a completely burnt out husk of a trailer is more expensive than DIY building a house due to the weird dynamics of the housing market that places a gigantic premium on being the guy who takes all the risk of connecting utilities and getting a permitted residential structure.

Your thesis that I can't sell an actual house for the price of all the unmortgagable burned out trailers that sell like hotcakes is interesting but false. I don't expect this dynamic to change much until most of those ~0% mortgages expire or a massive new supply of housing emerges.
by bcantrill | 2025-05-12 23:09:59+00:00
You made this comment twice, so I guess I'll reply to it twice, but the reality is that the acceptance rates of ATC was very, very low (again, under 13% in 2004). Low acceptance rates actually do indicate a shortage of good publishing venues (certainly relative to the number of submissions), but it would be interesting to look at the ATC acceptance rate over time; if it was much (much) higher in its final years, it would be easier to accept your assertion.
by Retric | 2025-05-12 23:11:01+00:00
We can very quickly and reasonably cheaply ‘solve’ global warming without AI. Wind, solar, batteries + existing hydro and nuclear can hit a 95% clean electricity grid with capacity to scale in EV’s and heat pumps.

Electricity + home heating + cars is not 100%, but cutting emissions in half means you double the time before reaching any given threshold. For many problems the last 10% is the most challenging but we get 10x as long to solve it and 10x as long to implement mitigation strategies.

That’s what makes climate change critical, the next year is more important than what happens 10 or 20 years from now.
by p1mrx | 2025-05-12 23:11:36+00:00
> Scientists expected the outermost layer of Venus’ crust would grow thicker and thicker over time

I recall watching this NOVA episode in 1995 where scientists had no idea whether the lithosphere is thick or thin. Seek to 36 minutes: https://archive.org/details/VenusUnveiled/NOVA.S22E10.Venus....
by colonial | 2025-05-12 23:12:20+00:00
Just spitballing, but assuming the fake stars are added in a "naive" manner (i.e. as fast as possible, no breaks) you could distinguish the two by looking for the long tail usually associated with organic traffic spikes.

Of course, the problem with that is the adversary could easily simulate the same effect by mixing together some fall-off functions and a bit of randomness.
by xp84 | 2025-05-12 23:12:32+00:00
On the off-chance someone at Apple reads this, I'll repeat my perennial beg that Apple stops popping up 'Give me your (local admin) password right now' dialogs randomly throughout the day because the computer has a hankering to install updates or something.

Anyone with basic skills can whip up a convincing replica of that popup on the Web, and the "bottom 80%" (at least) of users in technical savvy would not think to try dragging it out of the browser viewport or switching tabs to see if it is fake or real.

The only protection against this kind of stuff is to NOT teach users that legitimate software pops up random "enter your password" dialogs in front of your work without any prompting. That's what these dialogs are doing.

Display a colorful flashing icon in the menu bar. Use an interstitial secure screen like Windows does. Whatever. But the modern macOS 'security' UI is wildly bad.
by goji_berries | 2025-05-12 23:13:07+00:00
Consider a bank making decisions about loans. For the bank, making lending decisions optimally means reducing prediction errors*(cost of errors) minus the cost of making predictions (Keeping things simple here). The cost of any one particular error, especially the denial of a loan when eligible, is typically small for the bank, but very consequential for the applicant. So the applicant may be willing to pay the bank money to increase the accuracy of their decisions.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-12 23:14:00+00:00
Anti-science? Speaking of failing to offer supporting evidence or arguments...

You can claim that dramatic impact is more difficult to attain without being anti-science. There is no iron law that says we must make dramatic impact, whatever that means.

There are a number of potential causes for the recession of progress that one could suggest. For example, someone suggested the absence of low-hanging fruit. This raises the question of what constitutes "dramatic impact". If it means "deepening of the state of knowledge", then I don't quite buy this one, since impact is measured relative to difficulty and the state of knowledge. A refinement or deepening of a good theory may be all you can hope for, which is a testament to the success of the theory. If it means "overturning old theories", then that seems silly. Science isn't about overturning theories. It is about refining our understanding of the world. We might overturn less accurate theories along the way, but that's not the goal. It's a side effect.

Another possibility is that deepening the state of knowledge is becoming more difficult and prohibitive. Still another is that education has become too homogenized, preventing a diversity of fresh perspectives from entering the discussion (Feynman remarked as much; he said he didn't expect any major advanced in science in the near future precisely for this reason).

In any case, none of these positions are "anti-science" or "anti-public research".
by K0balt | 2025-05-12 23:15:50+00:00
It’s all about the degree of independence. There are a lot of places that you can’t find work as a data scientist, and. Being a data scientist does little to directly solve problems your family might encounter if your career gets eaten by AI or a pandemic. I’m not suggesting working in the trades vs a profession.. by I do advocate competence in a trade in addition to your chosen profession, with some exceptions.
by rjurney | 2025-05-12 23:15:58+00:00
When AI is cheap, why use juniors, regular software engineers or off-shore labor at all? AI replaces these things. Why not use the best available talent to oversee and guarantee the work of coding agents? To define requirements and translate them into maintainable code? This is the trend. It takes mastery to produce good, maintainable code from vague requirements using coding agents. This seems like value add a human will continue to provide.

I also see the blending of engineers and data scientists with product managers.
by nradov | 2025-05-12 23:16:57+00:00
Nah. Total PA numbers are increasing in many other developed countries as well, including Canada and much of Europe. We can have a discussion about whether this is a good idea, but first you need to stop lying and making things up.

https://capa-acam.ca/pa-profession/pa-facts

https://www.srh-university.de/de/folder/news/2025/04-25/erst...

https://www.bigregister.nl/over-het-big-register/cijfers/ver...