MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by klabb3 | 2025-05-21 18:50:24+00:00
> The next major device will definitely be AI-first.

Everything so far that has been named X First has been marketing woo woo, and in practice only meant "we're thinking about this use case a little more than before". Such as mobile-first, and cloud-first.

In either case, sure, it's very possible that device hardware will change. But in what way is hard to say. Will the on-device chips be more powerful to support local inference? Sure.

> Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone [...] is bound to be a complete failure in the end.

Yes, kind of. The problem with all existing platforms including web is that they're build in a way that is adversarial to interop. Apps are siloed, and the only possible birds-eyed view is the OS itself. But, GUIs are not built for machine interop. Vision models to navigate UI will be flaky at best for the foreseeable future (and forget about voice, it's an extra modality at best and is way too limited). On web frontend, it's the same story. On backend, the web has been adversarial for a long time, with fingerprinting, rate limiting, anti-scraping, paywalling etc, which has been supercharged in the last year or two.

Essentially, the products and systems we use every day are a poor fit for interop with AI, so I suspect we'll see two parallel futures: (1) interop and semantic GUIs being integrated into platforms, web and app ecosystems (this is what MCP is IIUC). This will fail for the same reasons as web 2.0 failed (the adversarial nature of tech business models - opening up APIs is not incentivized), not to mention the investment required to build a new OS and (2) vision models to do tasks on behalf of humans with some mediocre agent-loop-thing on top of existing hot garbage pool of already flaky apps and sites. This won't necessarily fail, but it will mean platform- and large data owners (Google, MS etc) will yet again end up on top, since they control the access to the birds-eye view (much like Siri or Google Assistant). It is also the most noisy, flaky and data-intensive surface area to use for interop, meaning the products will be slow, bloated and feel like bonzibuddy for years.

Doesn't mean AI won't transform businesses and white-collar work. It certainly already does. But, the AI selling point for consumers (current ability - not "future potential"), is kind of like how Google Search and Maps was a decade+ ago. Sure, it provides amazing utility, but most of the time you're looking at memes, playing games and watching TV shows. AI in those products is mostly a continuation of ongoing enshittification.
by rubslopes | 2025-05-21 18:50:30+00:00
> I might be over simplifying things, but with infinite resources, they should be able to do better.

I don't think you are. The problem really is execution. I don’t need anything beyond what AI can already do—I just need an assistant that understands what I want and uses the right tools. I’m baffled that we still can’t get a reliable summary of emails, notifications, or appointments. If you give me the data in text format, I can paste it into ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude and have a much better dialogue than with any current phone assistant. Somehow, trillion-dollar companies still haven’t solved that.
by mattlondon | 2025-05-21 18:50:52+00:00
> You don't hear anyone touting AGI anymore do we?

Apart from, y'know, DeepMind - remember those guys? The ones with the SOTA models at the top of the leaderboards? The ones who just launched Veo3 and blew everyone away?

It feels like OpenAI has kinda jumped-the-shark at this stage. They don't seem to be especially competitive any more, and all the news coming out of them is tinkering at the edges or acquisitions that no-one really cares about.

When are they going to start competing on actual AI again?
by RC_ITR | 2025-05-21 18:51:33+00:00
Just to stem pointless debates before they flame up - both these acquisitions appear to be primarily if not exclusively for stock.

Sure, if you want to get into theoretical finance, OpenAI could have sold these new shares for cash, so technically there's no difference, but OpenAI is only spending opportunity cost cash, rather than fiat.

OpenAI's fiat likely still goes to the things you'd expect, like training models and paying for inference.
by fidrelity | 2025-05-21 18:51:38+00:00
Reading Faust in school left a lasting impact on me and an appreciation for the language as a tool of art.

I believe many are not even aware of the amount of proverbs coming from that classic:

Des Pudels Kern - the poodles core/crux of the matter

Gretchenfrage - the essential question

... And many more that I won't bother trying to translate.
by therobot24 | 2025-05-21 18:52:03+00:00
>> In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result'

> I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.

Can you help me understand this. Like the purpose of using logic to deduce decision making is because there's a fundamental structure in assuring the result from those deductions is accurate (or enough to continue manipulation of the problem data). When you try to predict market reaction to a decision and ascribe harm or success based on the decision you're creating causation out of correlation, often incorrectly. Again, not an expert in economics, but when i view theories of free market forces and how they're part of the logic of business decisions i can't help but think the people using this information are assuming their knowledge and logic aren't fundamentally flawed and as a result are essentially just guessing without thinking they are.
by api | 2025-05-21 18:52:09+00:00
I don't tend to see Europe as egalitarian. I think it's more equal below a certain point, but there also seems to be a glass ceiling above which status tends to be inherited and class mobility is much harder than in the USA. It looks to me like an aristocratic society whose peasantry is held at something more like a developed middle class level rather than a subsistence level. It's a much more comfortable peasantry but it's still a peasantry in that a peasant will never become a member of the elite (or rather it's much harder for this to happen).

That's how it looks to me, but it's not necessarily reflected in the statistics:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/social-mo...

Canada is, for example, supposedly more mobile than the US, yet when I look at Canada I see a country with absolutely insane real estate prices (relative to median income) in most major cities (worse than most of the US outside SF and maybe NYC) and much lower salaries for professional jobs like engineering. I really wonder how that comes up as having better mobility. It might be harder to end up in the gutter in Canada, but it also seems like it's much harder to rise above working to middle class due to high housing costs, high taxes, and structurally low salaries.

Maybe someone from Canada or Europe can correct me -- if salaries are so much lower and costs are high, how can someone accumulate enough wealth to accomplish class mobility for themselves or their children?

Don't get me wrong -- I think some things are better in Europe. I think the parliamentary system is mostly better than our winner take all two-party duopoly tire fire, for example.
by bilbo0s | 2025-05-21 18:52:24+00:00
From a security perspective, you shouldn't be using anything you don't control from the bottom up. That includes Windows and Signal. Full stop.

But in a pragmatic world, we can't have that level of security. You're reduced to deciding where you are willing to tolerate the security weaknesses. Obviously, no software or hardware will be 100% secure. But absent having an existential state level need to roll your own, you just have to pick from what's out there and accept that none of it is fully secure.
by evanjrowley | 2025-05-21 18:52:33+00:00
>Preparing for meetings isn't something that requires AI, nor is research, unless, of course, you don't really give a shit about the actual content of what you're reading or the message of what you're saying, just that you are "saying the right thing."

Is that not the function of the CEO? Pep talking the board of investors while everyone else does the work?
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-21 18:52:36+00:00
Except Friedman wasn't a racist, and the quote is cut specifically to make it appear that way. In the very same chapter Friedman argues that discrimination based on skin color is irrational and wrong. Edward Zitron is lying in his framing.

In the same chapter Friedman literally 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.
by godelski | 2025-05-21 18:52:43+00:00
> Care about your customers and what problem they are trying to solve and be involved in figuring out how to make solving those problems a profitable endeavour.

This is, in fact, what I'm arguing for.

What I mean by "the product" is making sure it is solving what customers need. And to be clear, by "customer" I mean the people that actually buy it, not share holders.

> All code is throwaway, all code is worthless, solving real needs, wants and pain points for customers is the real source of value.

It is not. You can replace code, but you cannot just throw it away and continue to solve problems. That by definition makes it not worthless.

And again, I fully agree we should focus on needs, wants, and pain points. What I'm trying to argue is if you'll forgo that for making profits. Clearly this is what big tech companies are doing. They're shoving in things that are half baked, people don't want, and solve no problems. But they do it because it increases share prices. I'm saying, don't do that
by gruez | 2025-05-21 18:53:19+00:00
>There's the problem. Economics is the science of explaining tomorrow why the predictions you made yesterday didn't come true today.

Plenty of economists' predictions hold up. Turkey's unorthodox economic theory that higher interest causes inflation did not pan out, and when they hiked interest rates inflation duely dropped. Most prices drop with increased supply and increase with decreased supply. There are some goods that buck this trend, but that's incorporated into economic theory. Moreover your comment implies that economists shouldn't try to explain when their theories don't match up. This seems entirely antithetical to science? Astronomers used to be believe in geocentrism. Is it bad for them to explain why their geocentrist predictions not hold?

>We don't call people who successfully predict things "economists", we call them planners.

I can't tell whether this is satire. For me, "planners" invoke either bureaucrats of command economies, which have a pretty lousy economic history, or people on zoning boards. Neither are "people who successfully predict things".
by h2zizzle | 2025-05-21 18:53:37+00:00
>Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up.

I'm unconvinced that it's him so much as MS' entrenched position as a contractor, and ZIRP. There are a lot of companies whose number go up for whom number should no no go up, but it did, because they had first dibs at the money printer trough.
by bobthepanda | 2025-05-21 18:53:40+00:00
What is in the SDR is public information, so if you wanted to track them, it's not that hard. https://www.imf.org/external/np/fin/data/rms_sdrv.aspx

Part of the problem with a currency basket is figuring out which currency basket weighting you actually want to use, and maintaining it. USD just exists.
by butshouldyou | 2025-05-21 18:53:48+00:00
Every reply is talking about how wind doesn't make sense, how its uneconomical, or how its a nuisance. I can offer an opposing take:

My father has been using wind power in a semi-suburban area in the Uk for close to 20 years now. They have a large wind turbine now but had a much smaller one for a long time. Outside of cookie-cutter estates, there's sufficient tree and building cover that its barely visible to the neighbors. It provides most of their home power.
by _hcuq | 2025-05-21 18:54:06+00:00
When I got my first job in 1986, the company had a tool that allowed non engineers to write code. Of course it didn't work. They could write code, but it ended up as a buggy, unreliable, unmaintainable mess. It turned out it was a good sales tool, get our technology into the company, then we would get paid to write the programs.

Then the were the the MS Access and Excel amateur efforts. I worked at a company that for years had a very profitable business replacing in house MS Access spaghetti with our well designed application.

Aaaand..... here we go.... deja vu all over again....
by jcranmer | 2025-05-21 18:54:17+00:00
Plenty of things! The resulting pointer may not be pointing to an object that is currently live, for example. It may not even be pointing to an object that makes any sense in the language's object model. It might be pointing to a return address on the stack, for example. Or a constant in the constant pool. Or a saved register in the middle of a computation that corresponds to no variables in the original program.

In short, the moment you enable integer-to-pointer conversions (assuming your target has a flat address space), you create pointer provenance problems whose only resolution is that some things have to be UB.
by sneak | 2025-05-21 18:55:01+00:00
e2ee works fine for Signal group chats; there is no reason it couldn’t be implemented on Discord group chats.

That’s not the issue. The issue is that Discord believes they deliver value through aggressively censoring their platform. e2ee prevents that.

e2ee also doesn’t prevent a user from storing their long term keys on the server to be retrieved on new devices and decrypted locally so they can access message history. e2ee does not require PFS.
by ddahlen | 2025-05-21 18:55:23+00:00
Depends on the albedo, if the H magnitude is a good measurement, then it is probably between 300-700km. These are rough bounds, its highly dependent on how reflective it's surface is (albedo).

With an orbit somewhere around 28k years, it reached perihelion in about 1931, at 45 au from the Sun.
by alexisread | 2025-05-21 18:55:26+00:00
>>>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.

Not to weigh in on the quote, but as to this opinion statistics might disagree, and is kinda the basis for positive discrimination: https://ncase.me/polygons/
by listenallyall | 2025-05-21 18:56:11+00:00
> measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society.

This seems specious, I mean, when? And how?

The article seems to contradict you, given that it is mostly focused on tech companies that do in fact spend billions in product development and tend to delay huge profits. Amazon, famously, was universally praised for its various innovations in e-commerce (i.e. benefit to society) while not making a profit for what, 25 years? The current business press gushes over "big data", the metaverse, AI, whatever, despite many such projects actually losing billions of dollars before being shut down or vastly reduced.

I'm not claiming these companies do actually benefit society, but Wall Street and the press is often willing to overlook immediate profit for the promise of long-term dominance (and the rewards that come with that) and in the meantime, they will at least promote the possibility of future societal benefit to justify their position.
by triceratops | 2025-05-21 18:56:31+00:00
> people will by financial necessity begin to do business across the color line

If the majority remains anti-integration then people will, by financial necessity, be forced to keep businesses segregated. A hotel owner who wants to let black guests stay will lose most of their white clientele. It's basic logic. Friedman says so himself in his example of the shop owner who would like to hire black clerks.

> He argues that it is always more expensive to be a racist

But then in the passage I originally quoted he says it also harms the business owner to not be a racist. Isn't that contradictory?

In the Quaker thing, did the free market win out? Or did communities become larger and more anonymous, and fashions changed so that telling Quakers and non-Quakers apart merely by appearance became impossible? That can't happen with minorities of a different skin color.
by harryvederci | 2025-05-21 18:56:43+00:00
I'm not the one you asked, but maybe this is helpful:

I learnt Janet after learning Clojure, and it all felt very natural. So a possible approach is to grab a beginner Clojure book/tutorial first, run some of the examples, and then see how far you get with Janet.

Not everything is the same, but you'll find that out along the way, and the people in the Janet Zulip chat are always super helpful.

Also check out https://janetdocs.com for some examples.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-21 18:56:56+00:00
With AI that processes periodically-captured screenshots, the threat is an order of magnitude greater. It’s always been possible for companies to indiscriminately copy data, but cost and risk of detection have made doing so an expensive and risky proposition. AI flips that on its head and makes it possible to target individuals and groups with incredible precision and reduces the volume of data that needs to be transmitted to almost nothing.
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-21 18:57:06+00:00
Friedman is arguing that it isn't the job of professional manager to use other peoples' money to set social goals. He argues that society broadly should establish social norms and that government should regulate negative externalizes like pollution.

He was never saying just do what the fuck ever you can to flip a buck. The article quoted by Edward Zitron is Friedman responding to Nixon trying to shame companies into not raising prices during an inflationary period.
by api | 2025-05-21 18:57:58+00:00
That cult is real, but I also must point out that Trump is one of the most unpopular presidents after his first 100 days in history.

He is not and has never been broadly popular beyond his cult of personality. He's just been pitted against an opposition party that is a moribund gerontocracy utterly unwilling or unable to field likable candidates, and the US electoral system is structurally a two-party oligopoly that makes it impossible for anyone else to disrupt this situation.
by proc0 | 2025-05-21 18:58:04+00:00
What the article describes is an approach to gaming similar to how software apps in general are approached. This doesn't work. Games are inherently about a challenge, they are not just interactive software where you press buttons and things happen.

> Other mediums don’t have this expectation. What would it mean for a book9, show, or movie to be deemed too easy? When expanding our view from traditional games to entertainment in general, the real issue to tackle isn't difficulty. It's boredom. Luckily, the tools we use to prime the player can also be leveraged here.

Yeah, no shit. Games provide a challenge and often require skill. If you take these elements away it's like making every piece the queen on a chessboard. The whole point is to provide a system that has goals and rewards and some way to navigate the space in order to get to the goal. When this space is challenging and requires skill, that's basically a game.

The problem we have is that "game" is not well defined, and people confuse this with interactive software with pretty pictures. This is why so many AAA games are failing to create good products, because they have changed the product from something that provides a challenge, to an interactive experience with an online store.

As far as LLMs and AI. I think it will revolutionize gaming once you have realtime inference at a sub-frame speed. The model will have to produce the action for the next frame, and if that model is smart enough to generate novelty in behavior, then genres like RPGs will never be the same again. Right now inference requires powerful machines running in parallel and results served over TCP (not even UDP which would be faster).

The best way to use AI right now is just for some generic art that you can add to the background, or generic filler text you want to slap somewhere.
by verdverm | 2025-05-21 18:58:32+00:00
Typically you have to confirm additions and cancellation is just a press of ESC key. Ctrl+z is available too.

Even when the code is not 100% correct, it's often faster to select it and make the small.fix myself than to type all of it out myself. It's surprisingly good about keeping your patterns for naming and using recent edits as context for what you are likely to do next around your cursor position, even across files.
by csallen | 2025-05-21 18:58:38+00:00
You're most likely to get credit by being unique and irreplaceable. In other words, if the work would not have happened without you. If someone else could have been easily hired to do the work you contributed, and if in that case the work would have been largely indistinguishable from the work you did, then you're essentially fungible.

IMO you still deserve credit. And in fact you still get credit. But that credit comes in the form of monetary reward and (hopefully) recognition from your team and peers, rather than in the form of fame.

All of which… seems sensible to me? Hard to imagine it working otherwise. Interestingly, the movie industry has normalized "end credits" which play after a movie ends, and which lists literally everyone involved, which is quite cool. But the effect is still the same, the people up top get 99.99% of the credit.

(Ofc the "system" is imperfect, and fame/credit can be gamed by good marketers. But it's also not a "system" that any one party invented, it's just sort of an organic economy of attention at work.)
by kortex | 2025-05-21 18:58:45+00:00
Then you need central coordination, either a single central server containing the counter, or something like Snowflake where you have multiple counters, each assigned orthogonal blocks ahead of time (that need to coordinate with a central server).

UUIDs/ULIDs/etc are fully distributed, you can have two clients assign an ID without coordinating with ~0% of collision.