MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rainsford | 2025-05-10 22:51:35+00:00
The problem with relying exclusively on private investors to fund research is that the incentives steer investment towards research that seems likely to deliver a return on investment. This is fine for driving incremental development on presumably marketable ideas with short time horizons, but it's absolutely terrible for supporting the kind of foundational work that lacks obvious application on day 1 but is nevertheless essential to real innovation.

Private companies used to understand and value this and fund relatively open-ended research arms without the requirement to deliver immediate investor value. As investors have become more and more myopic, government funding has been essential to keep foundational research alive.

As just one example, think about the Large Hadron Collider. It's pretty expensive with no immediate commercial application, no ROI focused private investor in the world would support it. But it's an essential tool for conducting research into the very foundations of physical existence with who knows what implications for human progress. I'm good with the "European mindset" approach to those kinds of problems since private investors would certain drop the ball if left up to them.
by trevor-e | 2025-05-10 22:51:39+00:00
When I worked in the travel tech industry several years ago, it was basically unfair to compete against Google Flights. We just accepted they didn't have to pay for marketing and had infinite compute to work with, and had to differentiate in other ways. They could operate the business at a loss and not really care because it was still good for Google as a whole to have user's travel data. They built a great product but didn't have to play by the rules everyone else had to follow.
by pastage | 2025-05-10 22:51:54+00:00
It is not that simple and sure I gained from that deregulation. We got to export lots of knowledge and tech to the US. I remember people coming back and just shaking their head at the competition, it was easy money for a decade. You still are suffering because of the telecommunication regulations like last mile internet.

You are free to link something about consolidation and how that is bad and only because of Clinton. I think this is a case where your local situation makes it hard to understand.
by sillyfluke | 2025-05-10 22:52:50+00:00
Why would you assume I'm in any way partial to this technology? If AI is being used to tackle medical domains, it stands to reason they would try to use it to overcome what the GP considers to be important constraints, especially since the guy in question also runs an AI company.

And what part of "I have no idea how realistic that would be personally" implies that I think it can be done without the danger of hallucinations.
by rsynnott | 2025-05-10 22:53:04+00:00
I mean, even if none of that were true, the valuation would still make absolutely no sense. If you, as an investor, have decided to make an investment that makes no sense at all based on the fundamentals, why would you turn around and go "the fundamentals I was previously ignoring have gotten somewhat worse, I should sell this"?

(Interestingly, people _do_ do this to _some_ extent, though. Notably, Trump's joke of a social media company took a significant temporary hit on releasing bad financials, even though of course the financials are completely irrelevant to the valuation; it has revenue of less than a million per quarter and a market cap of over five billion.)
by AlexandrB | 2025-05-10 22:53:27+00:00
Just to pick one of these: google Flights sucks. It had a better competitor - Hipmunk - which went under because Google ate their lunch by integrating flights search into the main search product. Don't know how many of these Google products have similar stories, but it's probably a non zero numbers.

What we're getting, in many of these cases, is an inferior product that drove out better competitors through Google search integration.
by derektank | 2025-05-10 22:54:09+00:00
Also worth considering that this only includes internal R&D, not R&D acquired through acquisition of smaller biotech firms (known as in process R&D). VC investment in biotech startups is, at least in part, built around the assumption that acquisition by a larger pharmaceutical company is a viable exit strategy. To take the example of Eli Lilly, I think they spent an additional 10-20% of their R&D budget on IPR&D in 2024, though this obviously can fluctuate more year to year. They acquired Morphic, which produces a pharmaceutical that treats IBS, and Scorpion Therapeutics, which produces a precision oncology treatment, this year and I'm guessing neither spent much on consumer sales.
by sarchertech | 2025-05-10 22:54:22+00:00
And that’s fine as long as the person using it has a sophisticated understanding of the technology and a company isn’t selling it as a “therapist”.

When an AI therapist from a health startup confirms that a mentally disturbed person is indeed hearing voices from God, or an insecure teenager uses meta AI as a therapist because Mark Zuckerberg said they should and it agrees with them that yes they are unloveable, then we have a problem.
by kureikain | 2025-05-10 22:56:51+00:00
Yes, exactly this. Mailwip has 2 features to discover this

1- Mailog(opt-in, disable by default): Once enabling you can choose the detail of logging to see the delivery status. 2- Spam digest: (opt-in, disable by default). We will send a daily summarize if there is email we flagged and didn't forward to you.
by gjm11 | 2025-05-10 22:57:21+00:00
Here's a possibly-too-highbrow explanation to complement the nice simple one in the OP.

"As everyone knows", you get a Sierpinski triangle by taking the entries in Pascal's triangle mod 2. That is, taking binomial coefficients mod 2.

Now, here's a cute theorem about binomial coefficients and prime numbers: for any prime p, the number of powers of p dividing (n choose r) equals the number of carries when you write r and n-r in base p and add them up.

For instance, (16 choose 8) is a multiple of 9 but not of 27. 8 in base 3 is 22; when you add 22+22 in base 3, you have carries out of the units and threes digits.

OK. So, now, suppose you look at (x+y choose x) mod 2. This will be 1 exactly when no 2s divide it; i.e., when no carries occur when adding x and y in binary; i.e., when x and y never have 1-bits in the same place; i.e., when x AND y (bitwise) is zero.

And that's exactly what OP found!
by cgio | 2025-05-10 22:57:49+00:00
I hope this Pope does not go with a similar approach. This encyclical, in the face of challenges of the Industrial Revolution, focuses almost explicitly on how socialism is unnatural (note that he does not even try to call it unchristian). The argumentation hinges on an appeal to emotion with the iconography of the poor father who worked years for a small parcel of land. The solution proposed is let the rich get richer, let’s just ask them to be fair, with some intervention from the church, which is ipse dixit just to protect a convenient and isolated principle of natural order.
by viraptor | 2025-05-10 22:58:42+00:00
It's both over and under diagnosed. But you're overplaying some areas like people have no idea what they're doing. For example:

> Often fidgets with or taps hands or feet or squirms in seat

This is not describing typical kid behaviour, but self-stimulation. They're massively different. There's normally a follow-up discussion about the answers to that basic questionnaire.

If you watched that talk, take a moment to follow up with this one from Russell Barkley which addresses what's wrong with Robinson's views https://youtu.be/5jOwjbwU41o

> And more importantly, why do you have 'ADHD'?

Genetics and occasionally brain damage from accidents. That much has been proven in many studies - it's very much inherited.
by egypturnash | 2025-05-10 22:59:23+00:00
> Honest folks aren't recording.

Honest folks who want to be able to cover their ass later on are.

Honest folks who are working for dishonest people and are planning to be a whistleblower are.

Honest folks who have Recall on are. Possibly against their will if they haven't found out how to turn it off, or it's a work machine where they're not allowed to do so. Maybe they're not if Microsoft actually has enough interdepartmental communication for the "no screenies please" signal to make it all the way to Recall. It'll be hilarious if they don't.
by londons_explore | 2025-05-10 23:00:38+00:00
Access to the click stream is the big bit.

Ie. Knowing which users clicked which search results.

Without the click stream, one cannot build or even maintain a good ranker. With a larger click stream from more users, one can make a better ranker, which in turn makes the service better so more users use it.

End result: monopoly.

The only solution is to force all players to share click stream data with all others.
by Lerc | 2025-05-10 23:02:55+00:00
It it not counter intuitive and the decision extends far earlier than the first displays.

A raster image onscreen is displayed in the order that the data appears when written down. It stands to reason that a data depiction should be in the same orientation as the display orientation. Displays were created by people who read from left to right, top to bottom. If the displays did not follow that order. images would be flipped or rotated when displayed in a data form.

The first pixel written to the display is in the top left because we read from the top left. If writers of another language had have popularised the text, perhaps things might have been different.
by palata | 2025-05-10 23:03:56+00:00
> it's a case of a huge amount of effort to deal with arbitrary differences between distros

That is not at all a problem for open source stuff: build your project correctly, and let distros do their job. Still, open source projects are too often doing it wrong, because nobody can be arsed to learn.

> as well as fighting with distro policies that would rather ship the software with known bugs than allow two versions of a library to exist on the system.

Sounds like if you need this, you're doing it wrong. If it's a major update (e.g. 2.3.1 to 3.0.0), it's totally possible to have a new package (say `python2` and `python3`). If your users need two versions of a library that are in the same major version (e.g. 2.3.1 and 2.5.4), then you as a developer are doing it wrong. No need to fight, just learn to do it properly.
by habinero | 2025-05-10 23:06:34+00:00
That's absolutely not true. It's like saying autism didn't exist before the 90s. It did, it just wasn't recognized.

I got diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago as an adult. I grew up without all of the things you mentioned and I've always had it, I just didn't know.

What I did know is I was having to put a lot more effort into things other people found easy, I was weird about certain things like watching movies without something to occupy my hands, and sometimes everything was too much.

Did I cope with it? Sure, by developing a lot of anxiety and drinking a LOT of caffeine.

I cannot express how much easier and more pleasant life is now that I have a framework to hang those behaviors on. Yeah, medication helps a lot, but it's being able to plan around potential problems that's the real winner.
by garethsprice | 2025-05-10 23:06:36+00:00
As someone who grew up in the UK and emigrated to the US then got an ADHD diagnosis in my late 30s, and seeing how my friends’ kids in the US and UK differ in support, it is because in the UK you are just considered an absent-minded student who should apply themselves better, but in the US there’s a whole (albeit profit-motivated) network of resources. It wasn’t even raised when I was a kid in the UK I may have ADHD, and I wish it had been.
by tbct | 2025-05-10 23:07:01+00:00
David Autor was recently interviewed by Martin Wolf on the effect of AI on jobs. The question of if its fair to compare a possible economic shock on knowledge work to the China shock in manufacturing. He had two responses to the question:

1. The geographic dispersal of knowledge work should allow retraining of displaced workers, in opposition to the loss of manufacturing jobs which centre around single employer towns.

2. The china shock resulted in a sudden drop in prices, whereas AI would lead to efficiency gains.

The second point, to me, feels more pertinent, and mixed with the first could allow for a freeing up of labour, ideally into higher value add work. I think the time horizon is also worth speaking about here, as most economists will be thinking in 5-10 years where we can expect substantial improvements in models, but barring new model architecutre, it seems doubtful that we'll see some sort of emergent intelligence from LLMs.

Post-ASI, knowledge labour necessarily has zero value, at which point the challenge is to design an equitable society.

The full interview is fairly interesting in itself: https://www.ft.com/content/4e260abd-2528-4d34-8fa4-a21eabfd6...
by attemptone | 2025-05-10 23:07:05+00:00
I'm not sure what your comment is trying to convey. From my experience Meditations is basic and doesn't offer any substance. Popular Stoicism has a lot of legitimate criticism and is very often misused and glamorized in right-wing spaces. So the label "right-coded" seems appropriate.

All in all your comment caused some confusion. I know a handful of "extreme" left-wing, liberal arts people who are enamoured by "Fanged Noumena" whose author is the infamous nrx, 'hyper-racist' father of accelerationism Nick Land. So the politics don't seem to be the problem.

My gut instinct was that you have fallen for the meme/propaganda, as I have seen similar talking points being repeated on other sites. Maybe you can give me a more detailed explanations of what you're trying to get at.
by Gabrys1 | 2025-05-10 23:08:01+00:00
On Android, the OS exposes an API allowing the app to control whether it's visible on the screenshot and screen capturing tools (like screen mirroring to your TV). If the app disallowes screenshots (it's called FLAG_SECURE) your screenshot/stream will have a black rectangle instead of the app image. This is usually requested by bank apps and paid content apps like Netflix.

I assume there are provisions for the same thing in all the other supported systems. Everyone without such support will get no video on the affected meetings.
by yawnxyz | 2025-05-10 23:08:40+00:00
I’ve been toying with building remote MCPs on Cloudflare workers. I came in with the idea that “you could probably use REST APIs for everything” then implemented both REST, and MCPs side by side. Also built an SSE and a “streamable http” version.

For building apps that call the server, using the APIs was way easier.

For building an LLM system for figure out what API tool calls to make, it’s quite a bit of work to recreate what the MCP folks did.

I think MCPs are a huge time saver for wrapping AI around a bag of tools, without having to hard code every API call and interaction.

If anything, I think using MCPs is a massive convenience and time saver for building and prototyping LLM + tool calling apps.

Also for SSE vs Streamable HTTP, I don’t think “streamable” uses SSE at all? I think the problem they were solving for was the annoying long lived SSE connections — you can definitely see the difference on Workers though, switching away from SSE makes the workers way faster for multiple connections

Edit: the experience of building on Cloudflare and Claude is extremely frustrating; Claude is unable to output errors properly, can’t edit config inside the app, and has to be restarted constantly. Cloudflare stops working properly on SSE connections randomly, and throws bizarre errors every now and then.
by techpineapple | 2025-05-10 23:08:49+00:00
Also - We kind of have everything. The only thing we don’t have, and actually the thing that’s getting worse is our basics are more expensive. I think that’s why AI is sold as the end of scarcity. Because the one big thing everyone for sure wants, and the one big thing tech kind of can’t solve. It can give you endless entertainment to click through - and oddly that may be the only thing AI ends up good at, but It can’t make manhattan cheaper to live in.
Show HN: CodeNow, a Collaborative Coding App
by solumos | 2025-05-10 23:09:56+00:00
I was doing a lot of Leetcode this winter, and got the idea of building something like it that used wasm in the browser rather than having to manage the complexity of executing remote code securely on a server.

Once I figured that out, I thought it would be neat to make it collaborative, like Coderpad — that part was a bit tougher, but it mostly works now, using WebRTC.

I'm not sure whether other people will think this is cool, but I had fun building it and learning more about wasm + WebRTC.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-05-10 23:10:00+00:00
> But Revlimid is also, I soon learned, extraordinarily expensive, costing nearly $1,000 for each daily pill. (Although, I later discovered, a capsule costs just 25 cents to make.)

That daily pill is 25mg. You can buy 5g of Revlimid's active ingredient for $352.

> https://www.sigmaaldrich.com/US/en/product/aldrich/901558

200 doses at less than $2/ea.

If you want to get adventurous, you can probably buy 1kg from China or India for $900. Find a university or commercial lab with HPLC and LC/MS and run your own QC for a few hundred bucks. Store the powder in a vacuum-sealed container in a refrigerator. You're set for life.

I've done this sort of thing before, and a lot of people are doing it for GLP agonist drugs. (To say nothing of sports doping, nootropics, etc.)

Sometimes you've gotta take matters into your own hands.
by OJFord | 2025-05-10 23:11:30+00:00
Are any TLDs in use in their own right?

I ask because .va is presumably for Vatican, so 'vatican.va' is kind of redundant, they could just use 'va' right? (You might need an 'http://' or a fully-qualifying '.' suffix in a browser, which I suppose is an argument against doing it, but still.)
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-10 23:11:52+00:00
A distro is an OS. it is responsible for the security of the system. third party packages running on it securely is also its responsibility. Right now, that responsiblity is offloaded to users, expecting them to add the right keys and repos.

If you look at Windows, MacOS, Android, iOS, virtually any other mass-adapted OS, the OS provides authentication and integrity services for all packages, including third-party packages and programs.

Providing a framework where developers can attest their software and ensure it is trusted is a bare-minimum expectation for a modern OS.

The Git tracking part isn't an issue, what they should instead do is Git track CA root and intermediate certs and setup a website or workflow where details like the developer, the security checks done, the permissions and privacy implications of the software are attested by the distro and a certificate is issued.

The ideal state is such that all software not developed on that system should not be allowed to run unless its authenticity and integrity are validated and the admin/user signs off on the authenticated properties of the software.
by akudha | 2025-05-10 23:13:50+00:00
Let’s assume all of this is done in good faith (which is debatable) and genuine love to bring manufacturing back to America. If you were in charge, how would you do it? What is the long term plan here? Even with massive capital, it is near impossible to set up factories and train workers overnight or even in a few months.

Are there any incentives to make household items here? How is it possible to compete in price with the Chinese factories? If the plan is to use 100% automation and robots, that defeats the purpose of creating jobs, right? I genuinely don’t understand this whole thing.
by echelon | 2025-05-10 23:14:01+00:00
We need a better word than "duopoly" to describe what Apple and Google are. They're just as bad as a monopoly - and they're impossible to compete with.

Both Apple and Google need to be disrupted here. We should be able to see lots of healthy verticals for every single one of these product categories. They shouldn't accrue to two players and be impossible to dislodge.

I propose the word "Googolith" to describe {Google, Apple, Amazon}, though it's not a great attempt. We do need some kind of word or language to describe these anti-competitive titans that are impossible to innovate against. The word "monopoly" gets shut down, but the control they wield may as well be monopolistic. There's no choice and there's no competing. They're practically nation states.
by theptip | 2025-05-10 23:15:06+00:00
> In the best case, killing these will force consumers to move to Apple.

I think there are better options than you suggest.

The whole doc suite can be had from Microsoft. Maybe folks need to ten bucks a month for something that used to be free, but it’s not like we fundamentally lose capabilities.

This is a completely different order of magnitude than banks going under, where people were impacted to the tune of thousands or millions of dollars when they lost their homes.
by classichasclass | 2025-05-10 23:15:24+00:00
There was a specific reason with the TI: Tramiel was still smarting over how they screwed him with calculator chips. Meanwhile, their home computer unit was suffering millions of dollars in losses due to greedy mismanagement and the VIC-20 was driving the 99/4A into the ground as a practical loss leader. As far as Tramiel was concerned, even acknowledging the 99/4A's existence was too good for them.

Payback, as they say, is a b*tch.
by joe_the_user | 2025-05-10 23:15:37+00:00
This seems like a workable idea but just electric cranes lifting and lowering weights seems like a simpler approach and I think that has already been proposed.

My guess is there are many ways to balance the grid and the biggest is the utilities not wanting pay.

One thing to consider is the America power grid is in poor shape already and utilities are aiming to avoid modernizing. IE, adding storage to the grid would involve the double of cost of the actual balance equipment and the fixing the old equipment that needs fixing anyway. And utilities are looking avoid both cost.
by aappleby | 2025-05-10 23:15:57+00:00
MurmurHash/SMHasher author here. While I don't doubt this passes BigCrush etc, I do find it very surprising that it does.

The state update function is effectively "a = rotate(a, constant) + b; b = rotate(b, constant) + constant;" and the output derivation is "output = (a + b) * constant".

That update function is _barely_ nonlinear, and the output derivation is linear. The output would probably be slightly better as "(a ^ b) * constant".

The slow_loop thing to guarantee 2^128 period is probably not needed - anyone with an application that cares about a period that high is probably going to choose a more robust generator (a few rounds of hardware-accelerated AES in counter mode is your best bet there)

The use of the Z3 prover is neat and I should read up on that more.
by const_cast | 2025-05-10 23:16:15+00:00
This is true, but elephant in the room: many people also work long hours because they want to, because it is comforting for them.

Humans have a tendency to do whatever it is they know best, whatever is in their comfort zone. There's some people who purposefully work more than is necessary because they're "scared", so to say, of going home. Maybe they are lonely at home, or maybe they're not and their family is a source of stress.

Either way, it's a form of self-destructive behavior. If you're lonely, then delving deeper into your work is only going to make it worse. Because, ultimately, solving problems is uncomfortable. If you're always comfortable, we might interpret that as you being stagnant.

Yes, solving marital problems is uncomfortable. So is spending time with your rebellious teen. And so is going to the bar and cold-approaching people you don't know. But choosing not to dedicate time to these things doesn't make them go away, it just makes them grow behind your back. And that's how people get blindsided with divorces, for example.

Anyway, long rant, point is: lots of people willingly do the easy thing, working, to avoid the harder stuff. And they may not even realize that's why they're doing it.