MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epistasis | 2025-06-14 15:14:41+00:00
Another way to look at it instead of "they don't care" is "they have nothing they can offer."

We have progressed fantastically on the common medical conditions, but once you get into more rare stuff it gets a lot harder. Doctors have huge breadth of knowledge, but the sum of human medical knowledge could never fit into a human brain, even within a specialty, and even then there's so much we are not even close to understanding or knowing.

And for rarer stuff that is just getting discovered and learned about, there will only be a few specialists who are the ones figuring it out. That's why you go to lots of doctors that offer nothing, then a hint directs you to the doctors that are in the cutting edge of expanding knowledge.

Even if we financially incentivized each and every doctor to spend hours or days trying to find out what's going on with a patient that the doctor can't help with their current knowledge, it's quite likely that doctor could never help on the basis of a single patient. Medicine advances through discovery in groups of people and transferring knowledge from the results of one patient to others, incrementally. A single patient is far less likely to lead to advancement than a doctor having a group of people with similar symptoms.

The financial incentive for this discovery comes from research hospitals that collect these difficult cases, and obtain federal research grants from the National Institute of Health that allows them to do research and publish papers and share the knowledge. The proposed budget for the US drastically slashes this, greatly reducing our ability to advance medicine. And in advance of the budget cuts, the NIH is in violation of current contracts stopping payment, resulting in massive waste as research dies on the vine.

So what I'm trying to say is that the logistics of advancing medicine require grouping patients, and the place where that happens is at research hospitals, not at the local community doctor for everyday care. And our society is choosing, consciously or unconsciously, to drastically reduce access to that type of care.
by bumby | 2025-06-14 15:15:42+00:00
It does read to me that many people view this with the same lens we apply to private companies.

As an example, some of the bloat is intentional because it buys down political risk. It would be more efficient to have a program like SLS done within a single NASA center. But that also makes it easier to cut funding because there are a limited number of constituents affected by those cuts. This is exacerbated by long timeline projects that don’t align with shorter political timelines. By spreading the project to many centers, it adds inefficiency but also ensures the survivability of the project. To an extent, there has a a good chance there never would be audacious projects if they were run with maximum financial efficiency. So you’re stuck with the choice of an efficient project that never gets completed or inefficient one that does. As a taxpayer, I’m not thrilled with that dynamic but I understand why it exists
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-06-14 15:16:34+00:00
You might be right to some extend, but not entirely. For example, there have been almost no incidents in AWS where one customer would be able to access the data of another customer because of AWS fault. The cases so far like Superglue etc. were very limited and IMHO AWS security is quite solid.

So I would say there is a difference between AWS architects and engineers (although I know first hand that certain things are subobtimal, but...) and those of several other companies who have less customers but experienced successful attacks (or data loss). Even if you take Microsoft, there is huge difference in security posture between AWS and Azure (and I say this as a big fan of the so-called "private cloud" (previously know as just your own infra)).
by bertails | 2025-06-14 15:18:47+00:00
> It is fundamentally a business problem, rather than a technical problem, but it has impact on development speed, so it's secondarily a technical problem.

Yes it is a "fundamentally a business problem" but we believe it can be solved with technology. We think we have a more systematic way to adopt and deploy model-first knowledge graphs in the enterprise.

> But think about the red tape that introduces.

We are very intentional about UDA not becoming more red tape. UDA lives alongside all the other systems. There will never be a mandate for everything to be in UDA.

But we sure want to make it easy for those teams who wants their business models to exist everywhere, to be connected to the business, and to make it easy to be discovered, extended, and linked to.

(I'm one of UDA's architects.)
by gus_massa | 2025-06-14 15:18:57+00:00
I finally got level 3!

> yes this game is more about moving fast

That's fine, if you prefer that.

> About placing the towers - this is actually part of the game and should not be too easy ;)

It's makes the game harder without adding fun. I strongly suggest to change that.

I'm using the trackpad in my notebook. Are you using a real mouse?
by wredcoll | 2025-06-14 15:19:51+00:00
No, calling yourself a "deep thinker" obviously has no virtue. Expressing sympathy, empathy or respect often is. The point is that words are actions just as much as bodily movements and there are good ones and bad ones.

Beyond that however, how we act is, to some degree, dependent on how we think we should behave, and consistently using certain types of self definition will affect that. Someone who consistently identifies themself in a certain way is, at least ever so slightly, more likely to behave that way.
by cletus | 2025-06-14 15:21:38+00:00
I realize scale makes everything more difficult but at the end of the day, Netflix is encoding and serving several thousand videos via a CDN. It can't be this hard. There are a few statements in this that gave me pause.

The core problem seems to be development in isolation. Put another way: microservices. This post hints at microservices having complete autonomy over their data storage and developing their own GraphQL models. The first is normal for microservices (but an indictment at the same time). The second is... weird.

The whole point of GraphQL is to create a unified view of something, not to have 23 different versions of "Movie". Attributes are optional. Pull what you need. Common subsets of data can be organized in fragments. If you're not doing that, why are you using GraphQL?

So I worked at Facebook and may be a bit biased here because I encountered a couple of ex-Netflix engineers in my time who basically wanted to throw away FB's internal infrastructure and reinvent Netflix microservices.

Anyway, at FB there a Video GraphQL object. There aren't 23 or 7 or even 2.

Data storage for most things was via write-through in-memory graph database called TAO that persisted things to sharded MySQL servers. On top of this, you'd use EntQL to add a bunch of behavior to TAO like permissions, privacy policies, observers and such. And again, there was one Video entity. There were offline data pipelines that would generally process logging data (ie outside TAO).

Maybe someone more experienced with microservices can speak to this: does UDA make sense? Is it solving an actual problem? Or just a self-created problem?
by Keyframe | 2025-06-14 15:21:38+00:00
Having dealt with same problems for years now (we call our UDM - Unified Data Model, heh), I was under the impression this was an over-engineered Datamart++; It's not though. Calling UDA a datamart would be like calling K8S a bash script, which might be related but wildly different in scope.

I am definitely interested to read more and implement it myself as well. Would also be more than happy to skip the whole GraphQL end of it.
by margalabargala | 2025-06-14 15:21:55+00:00
I see this view sometimes and it really annoys me.

The number of doctors and nurses that attempt to keep people chronically ill rather than curing them if possible, is essentially zero. People get into that field frequently because they actually care, and people that actually care are the most likely to not follow a vague profit incentive that actively hurts people.

Similarly, most medical researchers would love to cure diseases, and actively seek out jobs where they do so and will object if asked to suppress curative research.

To the extent that what you describe exists, it is limited to MBA people at insurance companies and big pharma determining what gets funded for research. While exceptions always exist, the incidence of that attitude among the people actually doing the work is very close to nil.
by rorylaitila | 2025-06-14 15:23:05+00:00
No, because context and use defines the meaning. To the data team, a "Movie" might mean a file on disk. To the finance team, a "Movie" might mean a contract to a studio. To the Customer, a "Movie" is something they watch. That each of these contexts can use the term "Movie" does not actually mean they share anything in common. We could have called them "Files", "Contracts" and "Watchables" instead.

When people embark on 'universal' data definitions, conversations of the type "But is it reaaalllly a Movie??" are an endless source of confusion.
by SageThrowaway | 2025-06-14 15:25:08+00:00
(Throwaway since I was part of a related team a while back)

Service Control (Chemist) is a somewhat old service, been around for about a decade, and is critical for a lot of GCP APIs for authn, authz, auditing, quota etc. Almost mandated in Cloud.

There's a proxy in the path of most GCP APIs, that calls Chemist before forwarding requests to the backend. (Hence I don't think fail open mitigation mentioned in post-mortem will work)

Both Chemist and the proxy are written in C++, and have picked up a ton of legacy cruft over the years.

The teams have extensive static analysis & testing, gradual rollouts, feature flags, red buttons and strong monitoring/alerting systems in place. The SREs in particular are pretty amazing.

Since Chemist handles a lot of policy checks like IAM, quotas, etc., other teams involved in those areas have contributed to the codebase. Over time, shortcuts have been taken so those teams don’t have to go through Chemist's approval for every change.

However, in the past few years, the organization’s seen a lot of churn and a lot of offshoring too. Which has led to a bigger focus on flashy, new projects led by L8/L9s to justify headcount instead of prioritizing quality, maintenance, and reliability. This shift has contributed to a drop in quality standards and increased pressure to ship things out faster (and one of the reasons I ended up leaving Cloud).

Also many of the servers/services best practices common at Google are not so common here.

That said, in this specific case, it seems like the issue is more about lackluster code and code review. (iirc code was merged despite some failures). And pushing config changes instantly through Spanner made it worse.
by specialist | 2025-06-14 15:25:12+00:00
Exactly.

For my part, I keep repeating (reposting) this refrain:

"Inequity is just math, not a moral statement. It's inevitable without some kind of proactive redistribution."

(Any feedback on my phrasing? I always appreciate better word smithing.)

It takes a long time for these kinds or counterintuitive notions to percolate thru society. But eventually they stick.

FWIW, Scott Galloway is really good at honing and refining his talking points over time.
by twodave | 2025-06-14 15:26:41+00:00
I totally agree. Especially with Fusion it’s very easy to establish core types in self-contained subgraphs and then extend those types in domain-specific subgraphs. IMO the hardest part about this approach is just namespacing all the things, because GraphQL doesn’t have any real conventions for organizing service- (or product-) specific types.
by esafak | 2025-06-14 15:27:11+00:00
That's a fair question. I don't know that the theory of mind mentioned here is the same as an internal monologue. I think one could model other people's minds without conducting an internal monologue, by visualizing it, for example. Maybe the anendophasiacs in the audience can enlighten us.

The author also has a Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@michaeltimothybennett
by samwillis | 2025-06-14 15:27:20+00:00
I spent an afternoon vibe coding a game with them (10 + 6). We took it in turns describing what to build, and I did my best to explain that the AI was interpreting our instructions and writing to code. They could see the code changing and sort of understood the concept from that.

Key thing I tried to emphasise what that this whole process was new and that before November last year wasn't possible.

They really got it, my younger son is very excited about the idea of build games that follow the stories he comes up with (he's recently been spending time writing stories on a iPad, inspired by his novelist mother). We're going to spend more time experimenting together over the summer holidays.

Kids are curious sponges, I don't think you need to spell out to them exactly how it works, just show them and their curiosity takes over.

I know at school the teachers have been using image GenAI in English lessons with my older daughter, using it in lessons about descriptive language. They have had the kids experiment with describing things and getting images back. I was quite impressed to hear they were doing that, it's a great way to introduce the concepts in the context of a topic they are covering.

On the general topic of tech we have always (from as soon as they could hold a device) let the kids play computer games, and experiment themselves with tablets. But we've had the internet locked down, and not let them have things like YouTube Kids, it feels too close to social media, and serve explained the dangers of that to them. So very pro exposing children to tech, but no social media at all. I think in time we will try and explain the danger and downsides of AI, but it's all so new, there's not much to cover yet, particularly as we are still developing our own opinions.
by thomascountz | 2025-06-14 15:29:07+00:00
OP appears to be using an iOS device, so I was curious to see if this could be replicated using Shortcuts and Automations.

It can! And you can send yourself an SMS, or, as I've done in this example, send a notification, which will persist in Notification Center, if you wish.

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/8cda97aa69174e44b434c3dba7a...
by jasperry | 2025-06-14 15:29:50+00:00
The smell of coffee is not the molecules in the air; the molecules in the air cause you to smell something, but the smelling itself is a subjective experience. The same for the signals in our brain; that's an objective explanation of the cause of our experience, but the subjective experience in itself doesn't seem to be able to be broken down into other things. It's prior to all other things we can know.
by wpm | 2025-06-14 15:30:47+00:00
I think more accurately, Apple’s, while imperfect, A-tier editor passed away in 2011, and no one replaced him.

It has been a downward slope since then after the momentum dissipated after his death.

Turns out, I didn’t like the operating system Apple made. I liked the OS Apple made while being curated and directed by Steve Jobs. His taste matched mine in a lot of important ways.

I have no tastes in common with Alan Dye.
by motorest | 2025-06-14 15:30:59+00:00
> Incidents like this repeatedly happening reveal that’s mostly a myth. They aren’t much smarter, their standards are somewhat wishful thinking, their accomplishments are mostly rooted in the problems they needed to solve just like any other company.

I think you're only seeing what you want to see, because somehow bringing FANG engineers down a peg makes you feel better?

A broken deployment due to a once-in-a-lifetime configuration change in a project that wasn't allocated engineering effort to allow more robust and resilient deployment modes doesn't turn any engineer into an incompetent fool. Sometimes you need to flip a switch, and you can't spare a team working one year to refactor the whole thing.
by kazinator | 2025-06-14 15:31:04+00:00
The main problem is that consciousness is not well-defined, and not in a way that is testable.

Even without that, we are probably safe in saying that much of life is not conscious, like bacteria.

Even humans in deep sleep or under anesthesia might not be conscious (i.e. subjectively report not being able to report experiences to account for the time, and reporting a severely distorted sense of the elapsed interval).

It appears that life is not a sufficient condition for consciousness, so aren't we getting ahead of ourselves if we insist it is a necessary condition?
by ganoushoreilly | 2025-06-14 15:32:23+00:00
It's not even that. The biggest difference is by being sworn in, they now have Legal authorities and rights awarded to military personnel, but are also subject to the UCMJ. Depending on how they structure the program they may be able to get Title 10 and 50 coverage and possibly others. This drastically changes what they legally can or can't do on behalf of the USG. There's more to this than people realize. It's also not all that new. In the past they had "Consultants" deeply integrated into agencies to solve the same issues.

Palantir, Crowdstrike, many others pretty much started inside the govt and were built around classified information as a means to get their advantage. It's not right, but It's definitely something that happens. Source: I was there for it with both orgs and even back then everyone though Dmitry formely from CS was a dick. I still have the mousepad that Palantir created for the office in lieu of a training guide (just a bunch of printed shortcuts / commands).
by ALittleLight | 2025-06-14 15:32:27+00:00
I have a 3 year old who uses AI by talking to ChatGPT's advanced voice mode. He enjoys talking to it and we also use image generation to generate images he's interested in.

He also likes to translate words into different languages - he uses Alexa for this, constantly translating stuff into all the languages he knows about, and he learns that other languages exist when Alexa misunderstands him and translates into a new language - e.g. yesterday he was asking Alexa to translate "eat spinach" and it misunderstood him as asking for "Eat" in "Finnish", and now he knows there's a new language he can translate to.

One thing that comes up a lot in our household is which things in the house are intelligent and which are not. For example, I once heard my son asking the fan to turn itself on, which seems pretty reasonable since some things in our house do respond to voice commands, and sorting out which do and which do not is not intuitive. There's a similar issue in the car sometimes. When our car's audio system is connected to a phone, my son can control what music is playing by saying "Okay Google, play labubu", but when we are listening to the radio, it doesn't work, and sometimes he will try to either command or ask us to control the radio (e.g. "restart this song"). Difficult concepts to explain to a child that we do control what plays on the phone but not on the radio and why.

Another AI activity we've done is vibe coding. My son is a big fan of numbers and countdowns, and asking Claude to generate a webpage with colorful numbers counting up and down and buttons to click to change the numbers and animations and so on works really well.
by liuliu | 2025-06-14 15:32:33+00:00
If you are interested in this: Flux reference implementation is very minimalistic: https://github.com/black-forest-labs/flux/tree/main/src/flux

The minRF project is very easy to start with training small diffusion models with rectified flow: https://github.com/cloneofsimo/minRF

Also, the reference implementation of SD 3.5 is actually minimalistic too: https://github.com/Stability-AI/sd3-ref
by PollardsRho | 2025-06-14 15:33:41+00:00
Advantage, sure. I just don't think that advantage is particularly meaningful in situations a human has virtually no chance of escaping. Humans also have a lot of their own advantages. How is a chatbot supposed to cross an air gap unless you assume it has what I consider unrealistic levels of persuasion?

I think you also have to consider that AI with superpowers is not going to materialize overnight. If superintelligent AI is on the horizon, the first such AI will be comparable to very capable humans (who do not have the ability to talk their way into nuclear launch codes or out of decades-long prison sentences at will). Energy costs will still be tremendous, and just keeping the system going will require enormous levels of human cooperation. The world will change a lot in that kind of scenario, and I don't know how reasonable it is to claim anything more than the observation of potential risks in a world so different from the one we know.

Is it possible that search ends up doing as much for persuasion as it does for chess, superintelligent AI happens relatively soon, and it doesn't have prohibitive energy costs such that escape is a realistic scenario? I suppose? Is any of that obvious or even likely? I wouldn't say so.
by bertails | 2025-06-14 15:34:35+00:00
> How does this relate to domain-driven design?

The "Domain" in `upper:DomainModel` is the same D as in DDD (Domain-Driven Design) as the D in DGS (Domain Graph Service).

> in DDD it's kind of expected that the same concept will be represented in a different way by each system

In UDA, those concepts would explicitly co-exist in different domains. "Being the same" becomes a subjective thing.
by anonymid | 2025-06-14 15:35:17+00:00
I recently finished some updates to my neovim ai plugin: - context tracking - multiple threads - compaction - sub-agents

I decided to record a video of myself using the plugin to implement another feature. Aside from a demo of the plugin itself, I think it's a good view into what a typical workflow of using AI for development might look like, and I think is a good illustration of what these agents can and cannot currently do.

Find out more here: https://github.com/dlants/magenta.nvim
by cush | 2025-06-14 15:35:39+00:00
>at the end of the day, Netflix is encoding and serving several thousand videos via a CDN. It can't be this hard

Yeah maybe 10 years ago, but today Netflix is one of the top production companies on the planet. In the article, they even point to how this addresses their issues in content engineering

https://netflixtechblog.com/netflix-studio-engineering-overv...

https://netflixtechblog.com/globalizing-productions-with-net...