MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by michtzik | 2025-05-26 01:09:58+00:00
> What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?

The 1/6 number is made up. Here's an example source: https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2023-1-in-6-people-globa...

The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".

If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile": https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/i-keystat.htm

Obviously there's a sense in which a woman who's had children and now can't is "infertile" (though FAR more than one-sixth of women experience menopause). But it's not the sense being used by you and your parent commenter in this thread.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-26 01:10:54+00:00
I think nearly all of it is starting with people not wanting to pay taxes (who blames them?) and reasoning backward from there. It doesn't seem like an attempt to have a consistent non-hypocritical worldview so much as an attempt to justify wealth hoarding which capitalism encourages and happily provides ideological tools for. Nevermind that by allowing ourselves to be split from each other and our extended family support structures, we are all becoming more vulnerable and in need of the very societal support some would rather withhold.

It's all incredibly short sighted and selfish.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-26 01:11:43+00:00
> Maybe LLMs do teach us something about language... that language is complicated.

It certainly teaches us many things. But an LLM trained on as many words (or generally speaking an AI trained on sounds) in similar quantities of a toddler learning to understand, parse and apply language, would not perform well with current architectures. They need orders of magnitude more training material to get even close. Basically, current AI learns slowly, but of course it’s much faster in wall clock time because it’s all computer.

What I mean is: what makes an ALU (CPU) better than a human at arithmetic? It’s just faster and makes fewer errors. Similarly, what makes Google or Wikipedia better than an educated person? It’s just storing and helping you access stored information, it’s not magic (anymore). You can manually do everything mechanically, if you’re willing to waste the time to prove a point.

An LLM does many things better than humans, but we forget they’ve been trained on all written history and have hundreds of billions of parameters. If you compare what an LLM can do with the same amount of training to a human, the human is much better even at picking up patterns – current AIs strongest skill. The magic comes from the unseen vast amounts of training data. This is obvious when using them – stray just slightly outside of the training zone to unfamiliar domains and ”ability” drops rapidly. The hard part is figuring out these fuzzy boundaries. How far does interpolating training data get you? What are the highest level patterns are encoded in the training data? And most importantly, to what extent do those patterns apply to novel domains?

Alternatively, you can use LLMs as a proxy for understanding the relationship between domains, instead of letting humans label them and decide the taxonomy. One such example is the relationship between detecting patterns and generating text and images – it turns out to be more or less reversible through the same architecture. More such remarkable similarities and anti-similarities are certainly on the horizon. For instance, my gut feeling says that small talk is closer to driving a car but very different from puzzle solving. We don’t really have a (good) taxonomy over human- or animal brain processes.
by closewith | 2025-05-26 01:12:11+00:00
I can imagine why the breastfeeding rooms were empty if your comments are indicative of your attitude in work.

Nothing about your example is an overreach of unions. In fact, it is a perfect example of the value of organised labour.

In honour of recent comments by dang, I won't be as direct as I'd historically be and instead invite you to think about - in the grand scheme of things - how accessibility, including expressing mothers, may be a societal and absolute good.

As a secondary exercise, maybe it's worth thinking about the ethics of presence sensors.
by skydhash | 2025-05-26 01:12:32+00:00
> Solving problems is the point of writing code.

No one does it in isolation. The goal of having a common formal notation is for everyone to share solution unambiguously with each other. We have mathematical notation, choreographic notation, music notation, electric notation,... because when you've created something, you want to share it as best as possible to others. If not, you could just ship the end result and be done with it.

So no the point of writing music is not to hear it and enjoy it. To do so you just find an instrument and perform. You do not to do anything else. But to have someone else to do it, you can rely on their ear, their sights and their memory to pick things up. Or you just use the common notation to exchange the piece of music.
by lmm | 2025-05-26 01:12:48+00:00
> The obvious one that comes up in every discussion is thinking that unions will protect their jobs from being outsourced to other countries. People like to layer various more palatable explanations on top of this to make it sound better, but when you ask them if the employees who receive the outsourced jobs should get the same union protections you usually get their real motivation: They want to keep the jobs local to their own market and exclude foreign labor supply in order to improve demand for their services (and therefore their leverage, and therefore their own wages)

Bear in mind it's completely normalised for companies to charge higher prices in one market than another, and put barriers in place to make sure customers in the more expensive market can't just pay the lower price. So all the union is doing here is bringing it closer to a level playing field.
by fy20 | 2025-05-26 01:13:47+00:00
I live in a country where summers are warm and winters are cold. One idea I've thought about is why we don't just have massive water tanks under our houses.

Energy can be dumped in during the summer for cooling, and taken out during winter for heating.

It would be more efficient that ground source geothermal as it's a closed loop system, so heat won't leak away.

My house needs around 2500kWh per year, so you'd need a tank of around 100,000 litres. That is 8x8x1.5 metres - basically a small basement. To get that energy out youd need to heat it to 60c in the summer, and it would cool to 30c in the winter. You could even do that with passive water flow, no heat pumps needed.
by monkeyelite | 2025-05-26 01:13:50+00:00
> You are left with all the jobs the others don't want.

I don’t think this is quite right. You may be left out of the very first choice jobs at the junior level, but it doesn’t mean you’re getting the bottom portion of jobs.

I’m glad I went to school, I was on the fence. It improved my career, but i also know I could have found work my whole life without it.

There’s a whole economy out there full of opportunity.
by marc_abonce | 2025-05-26 01:14:09+00:00
Despite the title, I found most of the advice to be just as useful to me from the other side of the pond.

In particular something that I've been struggling with, that I didn't know how to phrase before, is this idea of simultaneously having to fit in and stand out. [1] That's hard because they kind of seem like mutually exclusive concepts at first and it can really depend on the company whether is something unique in a good way or a bad way.

[1] https://fanaka.readthedocs.io/standing-out/
by ilya_m | 2025-05-26 01:15:02+00:00
> in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement,

I'm looking at the official statistics, and this is not what they say:

The government pension is the main source of income for 47% of retirees vs superannuation's 33%. Moreover, the proportion of those relying on the pension has increased between 2020 and 2022 by 3 pts.

https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/employment-and-unem...
by danpalmer | 2025-05-26 01:16:13+00:00
This was a hypothetical, but I've seen plenty of codebases like this. There's going to be some cruft in there, but even just the baseline for a service capable of releasing, with feature flags, safely, with canaries etc, to XXk-Xm requests per second and <XXms per request, with no downtime, is quite a lot.
by alterom | 2025-05-26 01:17:01+00:00
They don't even have to have the same price if the seller just effectively returns the ticket back to the system.

Then it's up for grabs.

There's no guarantee for the buyer that an out-of-band payment will get them the ticket (someone else can get it), and there's nothing that forces them to send an extra payment once they do get the ticket.
by KPGv2 | 2025-05-26 01:17:09+00:00
I don't think it implies such a thing:

definition "generous":

• (of a person) showing a readiness to give more of something, as money or time, than is strictly necessary or expected: she was generous with her money.

• showing kindness toward others: it was generous of them to ask her along.

• (of a thing) larger or more plentiful than is usual or necessary: a generous sprinkle of pepper.
by strcat | 2025-05-26 01:17:22+00:00
Including GPLv3 code within a GrapheneOS release would make GrapheneOS more restrictively licensed than the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). GrapheneOS is meant to be usable everywhere AOSP can be used. It's meant to permit making a locked down device if desired. It's not what we want for GrapheneOS ourselves, but we want organizations using it to be able to make that choice. Some organizations won't use devices which can be unlocked, so GrapheneOS would never be usable for them if it prevents having a locked device variant.

There are permissively licensed text-to-speech implementations including ones more modern than eSpeak NG. We haven't had time to properly review them, fork one and integrate it into GrapheneOS. Text-to-speech is fully usable on GrapheneOS, but the app needs to be installed. Including text-to-speech in the OS with it pre-configured and working out-of-the-box is a planned feature. It can take a long time to get planned features implementations, particularly if we need to make hard choices about what to use as we do in this case. We aren't sure which app we want to use yet. These decisions are very difficult to ever change since users have an expectation of things not changing or especially breaking their existing setups. It's not something to be taken lightly.

We don't need to include GPLv3 code in GrapheneOS to provide text-to-speech. We just can't use one of the implementations, eSpeak NG, which is also largely written in C code that's not particularly modern or battle hardened. Since this would be something enabled by default and exposed to untrusted input, we would greatly prefer something more security oriented.

Android 1.6 added SVOX Pico as a text-to-speech implementation. SVOX Pico was a dead project for ages and was replaced by a closed source Google TTS app. SVOX Pico turned out to have all kinds of memory corruption bugs and it was a major issue for our hardening features when it was still around, often crashing or having corrupted output due to memory protections. It had lots of use-after-free bugs, etc. It was eventually removed from AOSP due to being a major security issue. By then, it was also a terrible text-to-speech app compared to mainstream options. We couldn't justify keeping it around. This was also before we had a fork of TalkBack (screen reader) included in GrapheneOS. After we added TalkBack, we've looked for a text-to-speech implementation we can use but the existing options were missing Direct Boot (Before First Unlock) support and had licensing issues for their code and/or language support.
by JackYoustra | 2025-05-26 01:18:01+00:00
Many issues here, as in a lot of SSC stuff, I'll pick one for fun

> Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation.

Prices didn't use to change persistently upward! That's an industrial revolution time. Stagflation is pretty well and conventionally understood by monetary econ at this point.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1Jg6G
by hackinthebochs | 2025-05-26 01:18:08+00:00
There's a reason Max Planck said science advances one funeral at a time. Researches spend their lives developing and promoting the ideas they cut their teeth on (or in this case developed himself) and their view of what is possible becomes ossified around these foundational beliefs. Expecting him to be flexible enough in his advanced age to view LLMs with a fresh perspective, rather than strongly informed by his core theoretical views is expecting too much.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-05-26 01:18:28+00:00
>just an illusion

It's true. And we're all living the best years we're got left ... starting -now-. It's sad that so many people wait -so long- (when they may not even make it).

So whatever it costs, when we can afford it, we must -take the time- to live them -now-. The wheels will keep turning without us for a while. That time will never be lost.
by CliffyA | 2025-05-26 01:18:30+00:00
I've been working on a programing language to read and write Excel spreadsheets. Or more accurately I've been writing a custom programming language and porting my library to it, so I can transpile it out to other languages.

Currently it is being transpiled to C++ and C#

https://github.com/NumberDuck/NumberDuck-CPlusPlus

https://github.com/NumberDuck/NumberDuck-CSharp
by xwolfi | 2025-05-26 01:18:31+00:00
An LLM will get ... what exactly ? The ability to reorder its sentences ? The LLM doesn't think, doesn't understand, doesn't know what matters more than not, doesn't use what it learns, doesn't expand what it learns to new knowledge, doesn't enjoy reading that book and doesn't suffer through it.

So what is it really gonna do with a book, that LLM ? Reorder its internal matrix to be a little bit more precise when autocompleting sentences sounding like the book ? We could build an nvidia cluster the size of the Sun and it would repeat sentences back to us in unbelievable ways but would still be unable to take a knowledge-based decision, I fear.

So what are we in awe at exactly ? A pretty parrot.

The day the Chinese room metaphor disappears is when ChatGPT replies to you that your question is so boring it doesn't want to expend the resources to think about it. But it'd be ready to talk about this or that, that it's currently trying to get better at. When it finally has agency over its own intelligence. When it acquires a purpose.
by andjar | 2025-05-26 01:18:54+00:00
notd - A lightweight outliner built with PHP, JavaScript, and SQLite: https://github.com/andjar/notd

I'm building a simple outliner focused on core functionality: hierarchical notes, backlinks, file attachments, and todo management. The goal is portability and longevity - it runs in phpdesktop as simple php, js and sqlite without compilation or complex frameworks.

I have been a happy user of LogSeq, but the current major rewrite, intended to enable real-time multi-user collaboration, introduce a lot of complexity and I am now more worried about the longevity of that project.

Built with assistance from Cursor, Gemini, and Jules, so vibe coding. Still early stage but functional for basic outlining needs.
by creato | 2025-05-26 01:19:06+00:00
> we'll reach a crunch point that puts governments under immense pressure to increase taxes (probably on megacorps & the wealthy) more in order to fund welfare.

I don't see how even that helps. What you need to fund basic welfare is a large supply of basic goods (shelter, food, medical care). The basic problem with retirement of a lager generation than subsequent generations is a lack of labor/productivity. Those basic goods don't really respond well to just throwing money from tech companies/rich people at the problem, you need people to work to provide those goods and services.

The only way taxes help is if they discourage "unproductive" economic activity (SWEs and financial planners) so much that those people start working as nurses and construction workers instead.
by atdt | 2025-05-26 01:19:36+00:00
The level of intellectual engagement with Chomsky's ideas in the comments here is shockingly low. Surely, we are capable of holding these two thoughts: one, that the facility of LLMs is fantastic and useful, and two, that the major breakthroughs of AI this decade have not, at least so far, substantially deepened our understanding of our own intelligence and its constitution.

That may change, particularly if the intelligence of LLMs proves to be analogous to our own in some deep way—a point that is still very much undecided. However, if the similarities are there, so is the potential for knowledge. We have a complete mechanical understanding of LLMs and can pry apart their structure, which we cannot yet do with the brain. And some of the smartest people in the world are engaged in making LLMs smaller and more efficient; it seems possible that the push for miniaturization will rediscover some tricks also discovered by the blind watchmaker. But these things are not a given.
by timschmidt | 2025-05-26 01:20:14+00:00
> The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".

It's this very new language from approximately the 17th century. And if you think real hard, you might find that you're a person who's experienced things too. Wow.

> If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile"

The phrase that particular source uses is "impaired fecundity" which makes perfect sense. No clue what you're on about. If someone is born with two legs and through some "experience" loses one, we might refer to that person as having "impaired mobility". Crazy.

What causes you to post such insanity? Isn't it embarrassing?
by kevinventullo | 2025-05-26 01:20:31+00:00
Maybe I am missing context, but it seems like he’s defending himself from the claim that we shouldn’t bother studying language acquisition and comprehension in humans because of LLM’s?

Who would make such a claim? LLM’s are of course incredible, but it seems obvious that their mechanism is quite different than the human brain.

I think the best you can say is that one could motivate lines of inquiry in human understanding, especially because we can essentially do brain surgery on an LLM in action in a way that we can’t with humans.
by bediger4000 | 2025-05-26 01:20:34+00:00
Wow if only my public schools had displayed the Ten Commandments, I might not have gotten pregnant as a teenager and turned 21 in prison doing life without parole.

Or maybe I'd have decided that, just like the Pledge of Allegiance, which was obviously a perfunctory ritual, the Ten Commandments were nonsense, to be ignored in order to retain my sanity.
by triceratops | 2025-05-26 01:21:04+00:00
Young workers will produce more regardless because people don't stop being innovative. The incentive to produce more is that economic surpluses improve the standard of living for everyone, including young workers.

Is it better that retirements are funded by this surplus from the increased productivity, or by direct taxation on the income of young workers? Income growth doesn't keep pace with productivity so it's an easy answer.

Taxing the income of current workers to directly fund current retirees is the real "snatching away what you produced". If more national pension plans invested in broad-based stock indexes instead they wouldn't need to take more and more money out of young people's pockets.

Capital ownership entitles you to its returns. Young workers typically don't own a lot of capital. So it comes down to either retirement plans owning it, which means young workers also get its returns when they retire. Or a small wealthy elite could own it all, and everyone else gets left out, reduced to moving a dollar from an youngsters pocket to a retiree.
by abetusk | 2025-05-26 01:21:48+00:00
Ticketing organizations have solved these problems some of which, I'm sure, do exactly as you propose, so it's not like it's an insurmountable problem but, besides wanting to hear a proposal, my point was that these are common tasks that are not as clear cut to solve as one might imagine.

To go into more detail, you're proposing training staff to recognize a valid ID, both from all 50 USA states and international passports, including any other official ID. This increases costs for consumers and vendors in addition to creating friction for entry. This also precludes people from attending that don't have ID or have trouble finding ID that isn't recognized by the venue.

I've seen some online vendors do ID validation but, from personal experience, I've found them to be invasive and have a high error rate.

All these methods have a high friction and might not really address the core issue of scalping.

Someone else proposed that these events are tantamount to international or domestic flights, where the expectation is that ID requirements are invasive and security is high. Maybe that's just the answer. If you want to see Taylor swift, have your passport ready, only purchase a ticket for yourself and go through high levels of security to gain entrance into the venue.
by linkage | 2025-05-26 01:21:52+00:00
As with most things, there is a happy medium here. Ditching poetry for the new and shiny uv made my day-to-day experience an order of magnitude better, especially because I had to introduce Python to an existing monorepo. Being able to inline dependencies as Python comments made it possible for a completely non-technical person at my company to run an AI-generated script that used Pandas with just one CLI command. Had we picked poetry, I would have to spend half a day setting up a proper Python environment on his machine.

You can also go too far and pick a JS web framework with 17 users that hasn't been battle-tested in production. You'll then waste time solving problems that have already been solved by users of React/Vue/Svelte instead of shipping working code.
by pfista | 2025-05-26 01:22:42+00:00
Working on a new tool to automate busy work and save time for founders, engineers, support reps, and marketers.

Most ai apps are focused on reading and synthesizing data, but none are great at “write” actions across apps.

We’re focused on making the simplest and easiest way to use ai to control your apps and get things done

https://stride.systems
by DaSHacka | 2025-05-26 01:23:12+00:00
> Having a camera staring at me while I talk to somebody -- yea I'm gonna pass on that.

My fear is this is a choice you or I can't make; it's up to the whims of others who may choose to use these products.

Time has shown again and again that average people don't exactly value their autonomy or privacy when technology's involved, I have no doubt it'd be the same way with literal live-streaming cameras attached to people's faces.