MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jononor | 2025-05-25 19:32:20+00:00
Happens all the time. Problems come quickly when the datasets used for evaluation are not clean, or the evaluation is incorrect - data leakage, problematic imbalance between groups, distribution shifts vs the actual production data. Or people just checking the average performance, but not typical or worst case. Have seen many people run in circles chasing metrics that are meaningless to the task they are supposed to be solving.
by neilv | 2025-05-25 19:32:55+00:00
You can speed up software development dramatically by simply copying the code that someone else was foolish/idealistic enough to store on GitHub, stripping out the copyright and licensing notices, and adapting it to your needs

The problem with that is that you don't want to get caught doing that directly.

So you need to hire a sleazy offshore firm to launder that for you.

Or (faster and cheaper) use a sleazy "AI" to launder it.

Google had too much class (and comfortable market position) to launch the sleazy "AI" gold rush.

But plenty of upstarts currently see an irresistible opportunity to get rich, by leveraging automated mass copyright violation, while handwaving "AI".
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-05-25 19:34:07+00:00
Is it polite to deprive readers of context necessary to understand what the speaker is talking about? I was also very confused by that part and I had no idea whom or what he was talking about or why he even started taking about that.

I searched for an actual paper by that guy because you’ve mentioned his real name. I found “Modern language models refute Chomsky’s approach to language”. After reading it seems even more true that Chomsky’s Tom Jones is a strawman.
by mmooss | 2025-05-25 19:34:11+00:00
The data I saw is that by the third generation, only a few percent speak the language of their grandparents' country, and most marry outside their nationality.

In the US, Italians, Irish, and Germans, as just a few examples, all were treated as unassmilated aliens. People say the same things, generation after generation about newcomers. If you moved to a country with a different language and culture, you might make an effort to learn the language but you would still think, read, etc. in your native language. Your kids would know both languages; their kids would of course speak the language of their surroundings.

What solves these problems is a fundamental belief in freedom for all. People don't need to speak your language to be your equal and be just as human, with the same rights as you.
by brudgers | 2025-05-25 19:34:16+00:00
I would like to do more creative things like make video games or something but I also need to pay rent and I’m worried that if I make something I enjoy doing my career again I will end up in the same spot of not enjoying it anymore

Like approximately everyone else, you have to have a day job.

The nature of day jobs is that even when your day job is doing something you love, you still resent it to some degree because it is a day job...the touring musician still has to ride in rented vans and stay in cheap hotels.

Which is to say that all a day job needs to do is pay for rent and ramen and a good day job allows you to do the things that feed your soul in your time away from it. That's it. Good luck.
by PatrikSlachta | 2025-05-25 19:34:27+00:00
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by const_cast | 2025-05-25 19:35:18+00:00
The people largely have been duped by populist messaging.

If you notice the people who defend Trump or his policies don't even really believe them. Half the time the defense is, "well he's not really going to do that" (Trump is a liar). Or, "that's not actually happening" (deporting citizens or permanent residents).

While these defenses are completely delusional, it at least highlights that most Trump supporters consider him untrustworthy. They support Trump because they're living in an alternate reality where everything is great and nothing bad has happened yet. Everything is always just around the corner, but they kick the can down the road in their head.
by coderatlarge | 2025-05-25 19:35:37+00:00
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released data on unemployment rates for recent college graduates (ages 22 to 27). The bank found that philosophy had an unemployment rate of 3.2%, less than computer science’s 6.1%, though computer science was more highly compensated.”

https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/college-majors-wi...
by alanke19 | 2025-05-25 19:35:49+00:00
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by interestoo | 2025-05-25 19:35:56+00:00
We were travelling for business from EU. My feeling was that those of us who were travelling most frequently were pulled, but apart from slight inconvenience it ended OK. We started placing bets who will it be this time :) I always had paperwork ready, letter from business I was visiting, hotel booking, phone number to business rep who would confirm my credentials, but I was never asked to produce them. Though, I don't know about travelling with family, I am not much of a touristy guy..
by vkou | 2025-05-25 19:36:22+00:00
Normalize it to a logarithmic scale, and the SWE is still quite obviously a wagie. But the gross and unconscionable concentration of power in a small handful of unelected oligarchs is not the relevant distinction here.

When ownership of things can keep you and your family fed, clothed, and sheltered in comfort, you're part of the owning class. If it can't, you're a worker. Maybe a skilled worker, maybe a highly paid worker, maybe a worker that owns a lot of expensive 'tools' or credentials, or licenses, or a company truck, or a trillion worthless diluted startup shares that have an EV of ~$50, but you're still a worker.

If you're the owner of a small owner-operated business, and the business will go kaput because you didn't show up to do work, you're also a worker. The line is drawn at the point where most of your contribution to it is your own (or other peoples') capital, not your own two-hands labour.

Now, if you're some middle manager, with no meaningful ownership stake - you are still a worker. You still need to go to work to get your daily bread. It just so happens that your job is imposing the will of the owners on workers underneath you.
by const_cast | 2025-05-25 19:36:57+00:00
You're delusional if you think the reason Trump has support is somehow because of Biden.

He has support because he's a populist leader that's going to tell you the country is failing and we need to burn it all down and, of course, it's brown people's fault. And that type of populist messaging really resonates with stupid, poor white people. Which is a growing fraction of the US as people get poorer overall.
by nyc111 | 2025-05-25 19:37:23+00:00
"It concerns the size of the largest sum-free set [0]. Take a (finite) set of integers, A. What is the largest subset of A such that no two entries sum to a third."

Yes, it seems to me we are focusing mainly about sets, not addition. Addition is secondary. Mainly I'm debating the title. The word "set" ought to be in the title too. I guess not a big deal.
by dehrmann | 2025-05-25 19:37:51+00:00
> its implementation of a “NextGen” air traffic control system to replace the current version may not be completed until 2034, even though the project was started in 2003.

Governments (and a lot of businesses) like to look at software as a one-time purchase, but it's really better too look at it as a liability and an ongoing cost. It'd be better to have a team make continuous, incremental improvements to the system than have "NextGen" last-gen replacement vaporware.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-05-25 19:38:11+00:00
Economic growth in the abstract doesn't help much, because a retiree is only on the consumer side of the equation. 2% compounded annual growth over 50 years will result in the average worker consuming a lot more stuff, and they're not going to be happy if they have to throw that all out and embrace a 1970s-era standard of living when they retire.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-25 19:38:43+00:00
A "Server" is just layman's speak for that big room with all the noise and blinky lights. Including all the hardware, networking and software that goes with it. Of course you're not going to run critical infra on a single server :)

Though I have to admit I have seen government operations where the "server" was an old dell optiplex desktop lying on its side in a broom closet without ventilation, a post-it with "IT SERVER DON'T TURN OFF", a spiderweb of cables running through the closet and the "server" fans screaming for air trying to keep everything cool in the enclosed space. I'm not kidding.

I mean, I know, government. Small local welfare-related org. Shoestring budget. Sure, that sucks. But at least you can make sure it's tidy and the cabling doesn't look like shit. Jeez. I didn't imagine I'd still see that in this century. Do people no longer take pride in their job? They hadn't even activated the "AC Power on" in the BIOS so after electrical maintenance they had to wait for the "engineer" to press the on button again.
by Tika2234 | 2025-05-25 19:39:13+00:00
Short answer is you not familiar with Windows but quite good with Linux. Hence the "not like" part. Plenty of Windows developers I know (that is way more than Linux developers statiscally) love Windows. The apps they designed and built simply way better or even non existent on Linux. The same reason too for them, they don't know Linux and near God-level tier with Windows from MFC to assembbly.
by RyJones | 2025-05-25 19:39:19+00:00
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I was a contractor for HHS for a year or so. When I started, there was a server farm built for a contract that was powered up and maintained; never used, it was broken up and sold for surplus. Just before I left, HHS thought they would like that program again, so us US taxpayers bought another tranche of computers to power up. I don't know the end of the story.

I could type more, but it would be a long and boring story.
by const_cast | 2025-05-25 19:39:49+00:00
I don't recall this ever happening and, if it did, it was not a big enough deal for anyone to care about it. Certainly not a single person I know who didn't vote for Harris said this was the reasoning.

The reality is she was much more intelligent, better spoken, and higher qualified than Trump. That's not the reason she lost, and anyone proclaiming otherwise is stupid. Yes, stupid.
by Modified3019 | 2025-05-25 19:42:04+00:00
Came across this post, which perfectly encapsulates a sort of pathological inversion of sunk-cost fallacy, where some people I encounter would happily let infrastructure rot and countless people suffer if it saves them pennies on their taxes, and are incapable of re-evaluating their position because “taxes bad” has somehow become such an ingrained/religious value that anything else is unconsciously and immediately rejected no matter the consequences.

https://old.reddit.com/r/goodnews/comments/1kuaasx/i_voted_f...

>>I posted this somewhere else ages ago, feel it's relevant

>I remember having a conversation with my ex's sister and their mum a few years ago, around election time. I try to not talk politics with people because it's a fast way to lose friends, but the topic came up between my ex and them over dinner and I just listened in.

>I remember them saying that the only thing they're interested in is tax cuts. More money for them. I had to chime in and ask what about the NHS, what about funding schools? They said they didn't care because they had private healthcare through their jobs (finance), so they don't need the NHS. The mum said her kids are through school so she doesn't care about funding schools, and the sister said she'll be sending her kids to private school one day. I was pretty gobsmacked at the brazen selfishness of it, and asked what if they lose their jobs - and therefore their private health care - or become unable to work, what if when you have kids you can't afford private school? Neither of them could grasp this hypothetical... it was as if I was speaking another language to them. They were just like 'but we do have jobs.' And what if you didn't? 'But we do.' It was just circular and they couldn't see themselves in any situation other than the one they were currently in.

>I can quite see why empathy is a hard concept for right wingers to grasp, it was like they just simply couldn't understand the concept. They weren't stupid either, and nor were they rich - the mum worked in admin for a finance company in the city, and the sister was being paid by the same company (mum got her in the door) to train as an accountant.

>I think about those two every now and then when I can't understand how the other side thinks. Because it seems we do literally think very differently.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-05-25 19:42:15+00:00
IMHO it's a matter of basic justice. If you're forced to pay an amount for pension funds that you cannot even chose and have no control over for your whole work life, then you better should get a an adequate pension when it's time. As for the example from the UK (not comparable to Denmark), I don't see why someone who worked their ass off their whole life should be poor because some parents are too poor to have children. That seems to be a different problem.

What's annoying about these debates is that the people who'd e.g. like to see pension cuts are either young and will change their mind later, or they are so rich that none of this matters to them anyway and the latter shouldn't even have a voice in this debate.
by foobarqux | 2025-05-25 19:42:18+00:00
The latter. Moro showed that you can construct simple language rules, in particular linear rules, like the third word of every sentence modifies the noun, that humans have a hard time learning (specifically they use different parts of their brain in MRI scans and take longer to process than control languages) and are different from conventional human language structure (which hierarchical structure dependent, i.e. roughly that words are interpreted according to their position in a parse tree not their linear order).

That's what "impossible language" means in this context, not something like computationally impossible or random.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-25 19:42:31+00:00
The state pension in most countries is simply a collective pension fund that you pay for during your working life (or your employer does on your behalf). The state owes you retirement because you paid for it. It's not a handout that others are paying for you; you actually paid for it your entire working life.

So, Denmark raising the retirement age is kind of a big deal. I imagine the Danish might be less than thrilled about that.
by J37T3R | 2025-05-25 19:42:45+00:00
It's like tech debt. It's an ongoing cost in a one and done environment, it's hard to see problems from the outside until there's catastrophic failure, and if there's a slow niggling annoyance of things getting worse over time the point where people notice enough to care is usually past the point of needing a refactor. So we get underspending where it matters, overspending where it doesn't, and the solution is always a redo.
by mmooss | 2025-05-25 19:42:48+00:00
> The em dash betrayed it

I think that's false. Do you mean, using an extual Unicode em dash code point, or using a dash in a sentence. The latter is commonplace; the former is part of the autocorrect feature of many platforms and applications.

> the wording is way too elegant compared to an average HN comment

Statistically, it's apparently about average. :)
by placardloop | 2025-05-25 19:42:49+00:00
Your comment stated “nobody is, at all, forced to use any of the AI tools”, which is entirely false - I’m looking at an email in my inbox from my VP right now saying everyone must use AI every day.

You said “None are installed by default or enabled by default anywhere” - this is also false. I’m looking at an installed by default (and uninstallable) AI browser addon on my work laptop right now.

It’s not hearsay, you’re either commenting in bad faith or you’re just clueless about what’s going on at your own company.

> There is absolutely no company-wide mandate

And now you’re just moving the goalposts.
by sgt101 | 2025-05-25 19:43:13+00:00
You can find the info here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

There was a steady rise in life expectancy at retirement age in the UK until 2020, then something happened and it's fallen significantly. My guess is that it will rise rapidly over the next 15 years and this will be regarded as some sort of triumph for the public health system (unless there is another pandemic of course).
by crop_rotation | 2025-05-25 19:43:30+00:00
> People are significantly more productive than say 50 years ago due to technological advancement. So where is all the money going?

People have far better lives considering all the things available to them compared to 50 years ago. Most people would not want to live life like how people lived it 50 years ago.

> It's not normal that a single person can legally own tens of apartments and get a third or each tenant's salary without providing any value to society. It's not normal that companies can own residential properties, they have no use for them other than extracting money from people.

This is definitely a problem but I don't think the only one.
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by s5fs | 2025-05-25 19:43:59+00:00
Ex-cobol guy here, the work was a blast! I was working on the Lawson erp for a non-profit, mostly customizing the software for their specific use case. I loved it because the tools were crazy, the language limited, and the system itself was high value to the org. Debugging took forever but the fixes were often really small changes. I often had to go into the database (oracle) and clean up the data by hand. Such fun!

I crave novelty and have a love for bad technology. I was an early nodejs adopter and loved es4 but newer versions of the language is too easy to use lol!
by tialaramex | 2025-05-25 19:44:15+00:00
That's fair, there's a bunch of LDAP at the large organisation I work for - and yes even if in some cases the technology today no longer has any idea it's descended from an X.500 system it's very obvious when you see O=Foo OU=Bar that we're looking at the exact same directory concept.

I was thinking about the global directory rather than individual local X.500 instances but I didn't say that explicitly and I should have.
by npteljes | 2025-05-25 19:44:48+00:00
I have trouble with the notion "understanding". I get the usefulness of the word, but I don't think that we are capable to actually understand. I also think that we are not even able to test for understanding - a good imitation is as good as understanding. Also, understanding has limits. In school, they often say on class that you should forget whatever you have been taught so far, because this new layer of knowledge that they are about to teach you. Was the previous knowledge not "understanding" then? Is the new one "understanding"?

If we define "understanding" like "useful", as in, not an innate attribute, but something in relation to a goal, then again, a good imitation, or a rudimentary model can get very far. ChatGPT "understood" a lot of things I have thrown at it, be that algorithms, nutrition, basic calculations, transformation between text formats, where I'm stuck in my personal development journey, or how to politely address people in the email I'm about to write.

>What if our „understanding“ is just unlocking another level in a model?

I believe that it is - that understanding is basically an illusion. Impressions are made up from perceptions and thinking, and extrapolated over the unknown. And just look how far that got us!
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by sfink | 2025-05-25 19:46:02+00:00
So superconductivity is a laminar flow of electron goop?

Ok, it's different in that liquid flows through pipes and electrons flow through crystal lattices or whatever, so electrons go between and around the material while liquid is bounded by it.

It makes me speculate that electron flow through a metal is sort of like liquid flowing through a compressible boundary tube, whereas flow through a non-metal has rigid walls. Non-metals reject the electrons, metals allow them to play Spiderman and hitch a temporary ride (if you'll forgive the overly particle-centric analogy.)

If resistivity is determined by the equivalent of turbulence, though, I've no idea what the graph against temperature should be. Do electrons travel faster when there's less resistance?