MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnea | 2025-05-02 19:20:34+00:00
I thought it was a good read.

It's refreshing to hear someone acknowledge that there are differences between biologically male and female people. Like the author expresses, this shouldn't be controversial, and the assertion is in no way anti-anything. How a person feels about their sexuality is a totally different thing, in a totally different category, from their biological gender. I liken it to arguing that there is no such thing as a person having a natural hair color, because they choose to dye their hair a different color.

It was also refreshing to hear the author express that females do indeed possess sexuality, and that human sexuality guides a lot of behaviours, including female behaviours, especially behaviours involving interfacing to the "other" gender.

Accepting the physical reality that humans are comprised of two sexual genders (with some small percentage of people having phenotypes that are intermediary between these two), and allowing for people to express their sexuality in whatever way they choose or whatever way feels right for them, are in no way mutually exclusive, or even antagonistic.

WRT the before-after photo, again I agree with the author in the sense that it depends on what you're looking at. For me, a biological male, while the person's body is certainly more muscular and thin in the after photo, I would have to say his face looks more naturally shaped and "attractive" in the before photo. The after photo face looks almost skeletal and stretched compared to the smiling nicely rounded face of the before photo. All of this is, of course, a matter of opinion.

Maybe (MAYBE) women are looking more at the cute face, and men are mostly considering which body they'd prefer to pin to the mat?
by xg15 | 2025-05-02 19:20:40+00:00
> Many users download our app to solve a specific problem (car issues), use it once successfully, then naturally don't open it again until needed months later. Low daily engagement doesn't mean low quality - it means the app successfully solved the user's problem!

What level of Enshittification is it if you actively penalize other apps for not enshittifying enough?
by ipaddr | 2025-05-02 19:20:44+00:00
An American company following the laws does not get the scrutiny that another company working with a hostile government to eliminate your way of life does. Why would they? Are they somehow equal because they both can be downloaded in the social app category in the play store?

That's like asking why can I buy things from facebook marketplace but can't use my American credit card on vk.com?
by duskwuff | 2025-05-02 19:20:47+00:00
> Some things are redundant - how many flashlight apps, weather apps, ChatGPT wrappers, etc are needed?

For what it's worth, the wording Apple uses in their App Review Guidelines [1] is:

> 4.3(b): Also avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated; the App Store has enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, drinking games, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already. We will reject these apps unless they provide a unique, high-quality experience.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
by edent | 2025-05-02 19:21:22+00:00
There are several threads on Reddit. For example https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1kalae8/chatgpt_in...

Perhaps everyone there is LARPing - but if you start typing stereotypical psychosis talk into ChatGPT, it won't be long before it starts agreeing with your divinity.
by diggan | 2025-05-02 19:21:51+00:00
As someone who read quite a bit about Rams and what he has done, what football teams are named after him or not would probably go pretty far down on the list of stuff I'd like to know.

If anything, this makes the documentary sound even better in my head, as then they haven't wasted run time on useless details that aren't about his philosophy of design or him as a person.
by danans | 2025-05-02 19:22:35+00:00
Americana/Roots music is a vehicle for people across the world to express themselves in a shared musical language of common people.

For many cultures of the world, the most prominent musical genres are either highly parochial or highly corporatized (the latter also being the case in the USA).

Americana/Roots music still sits in place apart from those other genres, and while this probably limits the possible financial success of its practitioners, it preserves its authenticity and therefore it's broad appeal.

That raises the question, why doesn't every other form of authentic folk music around the world have the same broad appeal? Why aren't musicians all over the world taken up, say, Indian or Chinese folk music in total (vs borrowing themes or instruments)?

Because even Americana/Roots music has been a major source of the waves of US cultural and economic imperialism that have flowed over the world, from at least the early days of jazz and and definitely in the days of blues, rock, r&b, and rap.
by EsotericAlgo | 2025-05-02 19:22:43+00:00
This reminds me of an oft recommended book "Digital Apollo". One of the driving topics is the human interaction component and the difference in designing a fully automated system versus one that is designed with an operator that can intervene. If I recall correctly, the book presents a dichotomy between the rocketeers and pilots (automate entirely and strap people on for a ride vs design a system controlled by a human).

I think they both have their place, but I think acknowledging it as a system design choice is so helpful even in basic business processes (how will I handle exceptions, how will the person remember to handle a rare exception).

I find myself thinking of this problem frequently. We have lots of modern words for it like observability but I think that removes one a bit from the actual problem.
by Y_Y | 2025-05-02 19:23:04+00:00
My new startup idea: malicious compliance as a service

You forward us complaint emails and we create some AI slopscript that fulfils the least compliant interpretation of the rule it can think of.

The goal would be to use automated nonsense to try to frustrate MBAs who have managed to burrow all the way to the brain of a tech giant and are now burdening humanity with their folly.
by jknoepfler | 2025-05-02 19:23:05+00:00
Formality is about preserving objectivity. You don't submit papers to a peer-reviewed journal watermarked with a purple dinosaur in a suit for the same reason you don't submit a complaint to a court watermarked with a purple dinosaur in a suit. Scientific publication (despite its many flaws) is about the content of the publication. Everything else - tone, style, grammatical nuance - is prescribed by a style guide because it is otherwise irrelevant.

There are certainly bad judges that hide behind "the authority vested in them by the court," but reductively asserting that formality is about maintaining authority misses the point (and the operating philosophy behind creating a fair and impartial court) by a country mile.
by bastardoperator | 2025-05-02 19:23:14+00:00
Let's do the math, the population of the US is roughly 340M, Trump got 77M votes in 2024. That is 22.65% of Americans. So nowhere near half, not even a full quarter. Approx 174M are eligible to vote, so not even close to being half because more than half of the population doesn't, won't or can't vote.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-05-02 19:23:31+00:00
Yup. My dad retired as a bird colonel and went to Baylor, then OCS. And I think Colonel Day who lived across the street came from a random university in Iowa. But my dad had more than 10 air medals, a couple DFCs, multiple-award silver star, bronze star w/ V and Colonel Day had the most amazing array of ribbons topped with a CMH. So another way is to kick ass and get a lot of awards. Though I don't know if that gets you into the General ranks. I think there's an assumption that Generals have to be pretty politically aware and people who rack up the medals and awards may be "opinionated." I mean... there's a reason John McCain retired as a Captain and not an Admiral, despite family connections.

Which is to say... I think you're onto a general rule, but like everything else there are exceptions.
by andrewla | 2025-05-02 19:23:37+00:00
Cases 1 & 2 are manageable through url parameters since there is shared infrastructure on both ends. These can be done without any user visible workflow changes.

Case 3 feels the most like a legitimate use case. Even with url parameters, there's no way for Disqus (or whatever) to know that a.com's user is the same person as b.com's user since those are independent entities. It is still solvable, but not in a zero-click way, by having a round-trip redirect (like an OAuth flow), to associate my user on the blog with my user on the commenting platform. But that does require that the blog track my session, which is not a requirement in the current world.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much I like having #3 work in general -- that a blog commenting platform can implicitly know what blogs I'm visiting, and potentially even having a blog on which I have no account implicitly having access to my account on other blogs, feels a bit intrusive to me. I'd rather have that integration at the level of a browser extension that modifies user agent behavior rather than something that happens without my permission.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-05-02 19:25:13+00:00
> Why does Amazon using the software cause the community to decline?

It doesn't - at least directly.

> You're producing it with the intention of it being used. Why does that suddenly become a problem when it gets used on a large scale?

You're setting up a cause and effect here that I never put forward. It isn't the use itself that suddenly becomes problematic.

The behavior is the issue. If everyone else pitches in and you don't, you come out ahead. It's the game theory behind cooperative behavior. If only you abstain the community isn't necessarily worse off, but if everyone abstains then it is (ie compared to if they all contributed). The optimal outcome for the group as a whole is for everyone to pitch in.

I do get where you're coming from. Legally speaking it's quite silly for someone investing money not to proactively prevent this from the beginning.

This isn't about the legality though. It's about social responsibilities. Entities with more resources - individuals, corporations, and even governments - are generally held to higher standards in the public eye. The legal system alone is not sufficient to make society a nice place to live.
by duskwuff | 2025-05-02 19:25:56+00:00
> These things are easy to get, the idea is to at least slow down the deluge of scam apps and barely working "vibe coding" apps.

When you add bureaucratic hurdles to a process to try to slow down abuse, you often find that abusive users are more willing to navigate that process than legitimate ones. (We've seen this with email spam already - spammers are perfectly willing to set up DKIM and DMARC, and have stronger incentives to do it correctly than legitimate senders.)
by deepsun | 2025-05-02 19:26:02+00:00
> We don't serve 120V to homes, we take 240V and split it.

Ackchyually, we deliver 120V to the poles, not 240V. Then transformers at the poles near the homes split it to two 120V phases, 180° apart. So the difference between +120V and -120V becomes 240V. But the pole wires are still 120V.
by n8m8 | 2025-05-02 19:26:12+00:00
It seems more like they valued quantitative data in the form of A/B testing higher than their "vibe checks". The point I took away from the paper is in the context of LLMs, quantitative A/B testing isn't necessarily better than a handful of experts giving anecdotes on if they like it.

In my experience, smart leaders tend to rely on data and hard numbers over qualitative and anecdotal evidence, and this paper explores this exception.

I'm disappointed they didn't address the paper about GPT integrating with ChatbotArena that was shared here on HN a couple days ago.
by whodidntante | 2025-05-02 19:26:48+00:00
I am simply comparing them on a political spectrum of progressive, left, right, etc.

This is independent of lawsuits. There are a number of news outlets that have settled lawsuits - ABC, CNN, CBS (imminent), Newsmax, to name a few. Yes, Dominion was a large one. None of these change where these news outlets sit on the political spectrum.

The original discussion has to do with political bias and whether the government should be funding politically biased news organizations. NPR is a politically biased news organization. So is FOX. So are all of these organizations. Only NPR gets government funding.
by ignoramous | 2025-05-02 19:26:53+00:00
Got this Urdu song https://suno.com/song/4c5837c9-26ae-430e-839d-3cdf8d8cbcb0 (https://archive.vn/pLMHD) and it is hauntingly meaningless, which makes it ... unique? Lyrics doesn't seem to be Suno's strong suit (and Urdu particularly has a rich poetry tradition), but it won't remain as ridiculous for long. Exciting times!
by kadushka | 2025-05-02 19:27:48+00:00
I've never ever thought about needing a therapist. Don't remember anyone in my circle who had ever mentioned it. Similar to how I don't remember anyone going to a palm reader. I'm not trying to diss either profession, I'm sure someone benefits from them, it's just not for me. And I'm sure I'm pretty average in terms of emotional intelligence or psychological issues. Who are all those people who need professional therapists to talk to? Just curious.
by mrandish | 2025-05-02 19:27:56+00:00
Personally, I have little interest in typing a text prompt and getting a complete song as an output. However, I will gladly pay serious money for a tool that interactively collaborates with me in a granular, iterative process of generating, adjusting and mixing individual instruments and sections toward a finished multi-track song project.

Allow users to creatively engage by providing suggested starting places in the form of BPM, key and chord progressions or as brief audio and/or MIDI sketches. For example, let me give the AI a simple sketch of a couple bars of melody as MIDI notes, then have it give me back several variations of matching rhythm section and harmonies. Then take my textual feedback on adjustments I'd like but let me be specific when necessary, down to per-section or individual instrument. Ideally, the interface should look like a simplified multi-track DAW, making it easy for users to lock or unlock individual tracks so the AI knows what to keep and what to change as we creatively iterate. Once finished, provide output as both full mix and separate audio stems with optional MIDI for tracks with traditional instruments.

Targeting this use case accomplishes two crucial things. First, it lowers the bar of quality the AI has to match to be useful and compelling. Let's face it, generating lyrics, melodies, instrumental performances and production techniques more compelling than a top notch team of humans is hard for an AI. Doing it every time and only in the form of a complete, fully produced song is currently nearly impossible. The second thing it does is increase the tangible value the AI can contribute right now. Today it can be the rhythm section I lack, tomorrow it can fill in for the session guitarist I need, next week it can help me come up with new chord progression ideas. It would be useful every time I want to create music, whether I need backing vocals, a tight bass riff, scary viola tremelos or just some musical inspiration. And nothing it did would have to be perfect to be insanely useful - because I can tweak individual audio stems and MIDI tracks far faster than trying to explain a certain swing shuffle feel in text prompts.

Seriously, for a tool anything like what I've described, I'd be all-in for at least $30/mo if it's only half-assed. Once it's 3/4-assed put me down for $50/mo - and I'm not even a pro or semi-pro musician or producer, just a musical hobbyist who screws around making stuff no one else ever hears. Sure, actual music creators are a smaller market than music listeners but we're loyal, not as price sensitive and our needs for perfection in collaborators are far lower too. Plus, all those granular interactions as we iterate with your AI step-by-step towards "great", becomes invaluable training data - yet doesn't require us creators to surrender rights to our final output. For training data, the journey is (literally) the reward.
by andrewla | 2025-05-02 19:28:00+00:00
These flows all feel very dangerous to me because they potentially allow a site to access information about me that I have not explicitly allowed.

Take the web hosting example; naively if I visit any site hosted by that company, can they detect that I have an account and am logged in to my hosting account? That feels like a dangerous amount of leakage, and you're relying on the hosting website to make the correct restrictions rather than having it structurally embedded in the user agent.

The shared payment system feels even worse -- is it then possible for a random website to get a payment through this system, or extract information about my payment account?
by ivape | 2025-05-02 19:28:07+00:00
It's argued that God had a plan (all-knowing). The compelling argument to read the Old Testament in full before the New Testament is that this whole thing was a deliberate sequence. That's if you are willing to entertain the notion on a literary level (forget about belief). Take the story of Samson for example, one argument is that God showed that humans would persecute a man whom humanity couldn't even contemplate could have gotten his powers from God. It's a setup for Christ.

You can distill if you are looking for moral teachings, but you can't if you want to know this guys (that guy up in the sky) full plan, in which case you have to entertain that it was a sequence of events. It's very weird, but almost makes going through the whole Bible fascinating as a serial drama. One thing led to another.
by gtirloni | 2025-05-02 19:29:09+00:00
> That being said, your Optometrist might not recommend this behavior.

Indeed, my ophthalmologist recommended against it explicitly as, according to him, that would contribute to making the situation worse and I'd need new glasses sooner. So I try not to wear them as much as I can. It does feel weird to get that advice from an ophthalmologist.
by brudgers | 2025-05-02 19:29:16+00:00
Pedal steel is perhaps the most Americana of instruments; there were few pedal steel players better than Jerry Garcia, and few bands with larger repertoires of Americana than the Grateful Dead.

In the 1970’s, the Grateful Dead weren’t played on country radio. Indeed they were barely on radio at all anywhere until Touch of Gray in the mid 1980’s.

And then only because of MTV…which in the early days refused to air videos by black musicians.

Nashville was no different from the rest of US pop culture industry then. And is no different today. Americana still fares much better there than EDM, Punk, and Rap.
by nataliste | 2025-05-02 19:30:34+00:00
I'm not on GLP1 agonists or TRT. I eat primarily legumes, grain, and dairy. I don't go to the gym. I lift using $30 resistance bands and get my cardio from running and a rowing machine that I used my annual discretionary budget on. And I don't need the rowing machine. He's right.

Humans do homeostasis very well. If you stop exercising at all ("rest days"), your brain normalizes that and creates inertia against resuming exercise. Like all good habits, the point is to make it automatic and the default rather than a choice.

Once you start exercising and make it a non-negotiable daily habit, it becomes progressively harder to stop exercising than to start. Most people that fall out of exercise habits do so primarily because of injuries rather than the failure of the habit itself. You just have to prioritize it ahead of or even alongside other habits (e.g. exercise while watching TV, take the stairs) until it becomes automatic.
by oezi | 2025-05-02 19:31:08+00:00
A key issue seems to me that they didn't do a gradual rollout of their new models and don't have reliable ways to measure model performance.

Worse, I would have believed they are running many different versions based on the expected use case of the users by now. I mean power users probably shouldn't be handled in the same way as casual users. Yet, everyone had the same bad system prompt.
by CactusEng | 2025-05-02 19:31:39+00:00
Cactus | https://www.cactus.is/ | Multiple Roles | REMOTE | Full-Time and Contract

Cactus is a strategy, design, and engineering firm that builds physical and digital products for some of the world's leading healthcare clinics. Fully remote with teams based in the US and Brazil, we're hiring for a variety of software engineering roles (https://www.cactus.is/careers).

- Backend and Fullstack: Python and JS, SQL/PostgreSQL and NoSQL tools (GCP experience a plus)

- iOS and Android: Swift and Kotlin/Java

- Frontend: React, JS, and a variety of data viz and interactive libraries

- Engineering Managers: to lead our client projects and teams

Email careers@cactus.is with your name, github/code samples, and resume or LinkedIn. It's a plus but not required to have past experience working with healthcare tools and standards like EMRs, HIEs, HIPAA, FHIR, interoperability, etc.
by lexandstuff | 2025-05-02 19:31:50+00:00
That's similar to asking why does everyone need a GP? Most people experience some kind of mental health challenge in their life.

Your 2nd question is much more interesting to me. Why is it so hard to find a good therapist?

It's no surprise to me that people are turning to ChatGPT for therapy. It does a decent enough job and it doesn't have a 2-year waiting list, or cost $300 a session.
by milesvp | 2025-05-02 19:32:19+00:00
I feel like you're being disingenuous with your choice of franchise. 30 years ago there were much worse toys. There were capsule machines that randomized what toy your quarter would give you. There were toys that you could buy random assortments at the toy store (M.U.S.C.L.E was one if I remember correctly). You could buy trading cards too. It's not that kids are marketed to (which is arguably its own problem), it's that the randomization is really not good for creatures that utilize associative memories (not sure if other intelligence avenues will be as susceptible to near misses, but likely it's a feature of intelligence in general to be stupid about randomness). And this has only been ratcheted up in the last 30 years.

What you may be missing, if you don't have kids, is just how insidious modern arcades are. They really opened my eyes in a lot of ways to the problem in general, since I just avoid a lot of the other modern invasive gambling mechanics. Most of the games are now just thinly veiled gambling machines. There are a few classics, like pacman still, and they eat quarters, but they are not programmed to randomly modify the game itself. Claw machines these days all have their claw strength randomized and is unknowable value that changes from play to play. And almost all the games I see at kids venues have some similar mechanic.

But it's not just the arcade. The rise of skinner boxes have become ever more weaponized (for lack of a better term?) in the last 30 years, as data collection has become cheaper and easier. I can't even imagine gacha mechanics in any of the games I played 30 years ago. Like, here, send Nintendo a dollar, and you can get a code for a better sword in Dragon Warrior? I would have mailed that dollar faster than you can imagine (I then would have shared the code, so of course this wouldn't work, but still, I would have sent the dollar). And for what? so they can make the games even harder?

This is a real problem beyond just teaching kids to ignore marketing. I don't have a solution other than trying to shield them until they're old enough that they're less likely to develop real addictions.