MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bobthepanda | 2025-06-20 21:17:40+00:00
They're good at the performance niche, but how many people need performance? The mac is good at coding and media editing (not gaming) and that's not an everyday person market; I think the market will continue to shrink.

I'd also say a mini PC is still a "performant desktop" in a smaller form factor, which is probably a reaction to gaming desktops becoming unnecessarily large and unwieldy. Similar to how importing Japanese kei trucks has become popular now that American pickups are sized for vanity and not work practicality.
by rob_c | 2025-06-20 21:18:23+00:00
> Is there some reason why solid state batteries seem to be being deployed in cars sooner than in phones?

Not quite energy density, but the energy density, cost, complexity when combined with the discharge profile generates a very "interesting" phase space.

There's a few promising technologies which have very, very good efficiencies but only like very slow predictable discharge cycles. These are excellent for say building giant GW batteries in the desert, but not so great for even car batteries.

Phones and tech have bursty power needs based on use, the cost of taking other tech down to the size of a phone is extremely high (especially if you're first to market unless you know you will sell millions of units). Not to mention the reliability of batteries typically decreasing as the size drops.

Cars tend to be in the middle with their discharge profiles being relatively smooth compared to say a laptop, but yes you still have economies of scale, complexity, reliability and supply chain and patents to contend with ;)
by conradev | 2025-06-20 21:19:18+00:00
Oh yes! I was thinking about the V8 isolate flavor of stateless functions (Cloudflare, Fastly, etc). I had forgotten about the containerized Linux microVM stateless functions (Lambda, Cloud Run, etc). They have everything, and my favorite use is https://github.com/stanfordsnr/gg

Funnily, enough, the V8 isolates support stdio via WASM now
by lechatonnoir | 2025-06-20 21:19:41+00:00
I suppose you're right about that, so I can't make the argument go through by saying "mathematics" vs "philosophy". Maybe what I should say instead is that as some dialectics advance/technologies develop, subfields of both such things sprout up and have a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick, and in these cases, the new work will be descended from but not too-essentially informed by the prior work.

Like mathematical logic (in the intersection of math and philosophy) didn't have that many true predecessors and was developed very far by maybe only 5-10 individuals cumulatively, or information theory was basically established by Claude Shannon and maybe two other guys, or various aspects of convex optimization or Fourier analysis were only developed in the 80s or so, it stands to reason that the AI-related applications of various aspects of philosophy are ripe to be developed now. (By contrast, we don't see, as much, people on LW trying to redo linear algebra from the ground up, nor more "mature" aspects of philosophy.)

(If anything, I think it's more feasible than ever before, also, for a bunch of relative amateurs to non-professionally make real intellectual contributions, like noticeably moreso than 100 or even 20 years ago. That's what increasing the baseline levels of education/wealth/exposure to information was intended to achieve, on some level, isn't it?)
by jerlam | 2025-06-20 21:19:46+00:00
Not just young people, I see a lot of elderly adults using tablets and phones as their primary computing device. They're cheaper and more user-friendly if you don't care about performance or multitasking. At the same price, a tablet is a far better choice than a laptop.

If you are afraid of technology, Android or iPadOS is lightyears ahead of Windows or MacOS.
by passivedonut | 2025-06-20 21:20:22+00:00
Congestion pricing is a regressive tax. It doesn’t actually ‘work.’

As the population or inflation increases the fee will have to increase to keep enough people off the road. It doesn’t actually address the public’s transportation needs, it’s just some rich assholes way of using wealth to cut in line at the expense of the general public.

Most of these policies that seek to inflict harm on the public to effect social change never actually produce a positive and productive end result.

Small businesses which is the U.S. economy will be heavily impacted resulting in local cities moving revenue generation from commerce to residential property, increasing cost of living.

If gentrification is your wheelhouse then yah Congestion Pricing sounds wonderful.
by Bondi_Blue | 2025-06-20 21:20:26+00:00
If you want to play locally on macOS, here is a build. If it fails to run, it is likely the error "The requested video mode is not available" and can be run if connected to an external monitor (then you can disable fullscreen and launch without an external monitor).

https://drodin.com/extremetuxracer/ https://github.com/drodin/extremetuxracer
by kleiba | 2025-06-20 21:20:33+00:00
But as far as I understand, Schmidhuber's claim is more severe: namely that Bengio, Hinton and LeCun intentionally failed to cite prior work by others (including himself) but instead only cited each other in order to boost their respective scientific reputation.

I personally think that he's not doing himself or his argument of favor by presenting it the way he does. While he basically argues that science should be totally objective and neutral, there's no denying that if you put yourself in a less likeable light, you're not going to make any friends.

On the other hand, he's gone at length with compiling detailed references to support his points. I can appreciate that because it makes his argument a lot less hand-wavey: you can go to his blog and compare the cited references yourself. Except that I couldn't because I'm not an ML expert.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-06-20 21:20:38+00:00
I suspect the incentive is less here as headway plays have margins of their own and planned obsolesce cycles to ensure continued revenue streams. Don’t forget Facebook resisted advertising for a long time and Zuck was ideologically opposed to it until they needed it to survive at all because they found no other monetization. I have a theory meta is enthralled with the idea of hardwareand its ecosystem precisely because it gives them an out from being dependent on ad tech. Even the oculus line is more about App Store, subscription revenue, and hardware margin and afaik has no ad surfaces.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-20 21:20:46+00:00
> and battery life, especially in winter, can be a life-or-death issue

How so? A full battery can run your seat heaters for about a month. That's a lot better than the hours of heat you'd get out of a full tank of gasoline.

Not to mention that you'll never get carbon monoxide poisoning from a gasoline engine with a tailpipe blocked with snow.
by lurk2 | 2025-06-20 21:21:01+00:00
> It was a visceral emotional response to the most powerful man on earth being a black man.

This is exactly the sort of mentality that led to Democrats thinking Hillary Clinton was a viable candidate.

Leftists all over the world spent the 2010s creating a coalition of the fringes, for whatever reason assuming that young majorities would not take notice. This was a very uncomfortable time to be a young man, even after Trump was elected. Young guys these days don’t have any expectation of being allowed to sit at the table, which is why they are so open about wanting to burn it all down now; a lot of them felt this way when Obama was president, too, but the risk of getting cancelled on Twitter still seemed like a serious threat back then.
by cjcenizal | 2025-06-20 21:22:10+00:00
What a great story. Going from "it's a vagina with teeth, that's bad" to "it's a penis with teeth, that's good" made me chuckle... just sounds so typical of creatives.

Some might point and say sexism, but I think it's consistent with established tropes. There are piles of analogies between sex and aggression (the Latin word for “sheath” is vagina). An image of a penis-like shark attacking a nude woman is another to throw on the pile.
by Retric | 2025-06-20 21:23:47+00:00
> Not certain that philosophy is not bound by our universe - is that something you could elaborate (or lend a link) on?

I simply mean it’s happy to assume perfect information, perfect clones, etc. The trolly problem generally ignores the possibility that choosing a different track could with some probability result in derailment because the inherent question is simplified by design. We don’t need for the possibility of perfect cloning to exist to consider the ramifications of such etc.
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-20 21:24:28+00:00
There are two groups of homeless: the financially homeless, which can be helped by providing housing, and the unstable homeless (addicts or mentally ill) for whom housing will do nothing.

The majority of homeless are the former; temporarily homeless due to inability to afford housing due to loss of income or increase in rent. But they're not the ones that make the evening news.

The unstable homeless are the loud/visible part of the problem. Giving an unstable homeless person housing is just a waste of money because homelessness is just a symptom of their real issues, and it's only a matter of time before they deliberately or accidentally destroy their housing. (This has caused the bankruptcies of two separate major housing providers in L.A.'s Skid Row. LAT has a series of articles on this, subscription required. In a nutshell: for the cost of maintaining and repairing one housing unit for a single unstable homeless person in a year, you could build and maintain 4-5 housing units for the financially homeless, and the metrics get even more skewed over longer time frames.)
by wat10000 | 2025-06-20 21:25:35+00:00
I don’t care what they pay to create content. I care about how much stuff they have that I want to watch. YouTube knocks this out of the park. Netflix fails. I actually have Netflix for free (with some ads) through my cell phone plan and I haven’t used it in a year. I use YouTube daily and the subscription fee is well worth it to remove the ads.
by hayst4ck | 2025-06-20 21:26:04+00:00
A lot of people talk about how the rich should not be taxed because the government isn't efficient at spending money, that it's a path to socialism/communism, or that the money will be given to people who haven't earned it.

Tax policy should not be argued about in terms of how the money gets spent, but the importance of individual people not having so many resources that they can buy news organizations, social media platforms, private intelligence, or to put them beyond the reach of law.

It's not important to redistribute other people's wealth. It's important to prevent people from getting so wealthy that they can individually challenge the power of the government itself.

Musk's net worth is greater than than Russia's yearly military, or the combined military budget of both India and Germany.

Elon Musk's net worth is about the same as Ukraine's GDP.

The US intelligence community budget, which is responsible for toppling governments, has a budget of ~66 billion. Elon musk could fund 3 entire American intelligence apparati for a year on his own.
by dismalaf | 2025-06-20 21:26:58+00:00
Such a weird comment. Tailpipe blocked with snow? I've lived in (the cold part of) Canada nearly my whole life, never happened. Snow doesn't fall sideways and upwards to block a tailpipe lol. And range is the relevant part of a vehicle, given Canada is so large and sparsely populated, not how long seat heaters heat.
by rob_c | 2025-06-20 21:27:03+00:00
It's a next generation Lithium battery, I've seen lithium chemistry power storage quoted as high as 600 in some prototypes so I'm guessing they cracked something in the lithium chemistry.

Given it's still lithium based I'd still think twice before chucking a bucket of water on one that's fizzing :p

As for how this battery is better I'm not an expert, but good to read if true.
by dang | 2025-06-20 21:27:24+00:00
Thanks! Macroexpanded:

I'm the CTO of Palantir. Today I Join the Army - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270660 - June 2025 (68 comments)

The Army’s Newest Recruits: Tech Execs From Meta, OpenAI and More - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44268547 - June 2025 (191 comments)
by thewebguyd | 2025-06-20 21:27:41+00:00
Hear, Hear. We are seriously missing out over here in the US and continuing to be protectionist over the big 3 automakers is not going to improve our climate situation.

I consistently hear 2 main arguments against electric vehicles in the US. Range, and cost.

BYD & China is solving both. Range is important because we lack charging infrastructure still, and anyone who rents at an apartment complex, you are screwed and have to rely on public charging stations. Big batteries are important for these folks. People also still have range anxiety, so when a fuel efficient gas car will get ~400+ miles per full tank, only having more expensive cars with a ~250 mile range is a non starter for a lot of people in the US.

Cost is self explanatory. One of the better electric cars sold in the US, the Ioniq 6 STARTS at $38k, which is already more than a significant chunk of the population can afford - you're looking at close to an $800/month payment at current rates for entry level. BYD could sell in the US at around $20,000.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-20 21:27:45+00:00
The US has no ability to stop China from becoming wealthy, they already have the will and political leadership to build high tech for a global market. At this point, it's just angry old people sticking brooms in their own bike wheels at speed.

How we made it: will China be the first electrostate? - https://www.ft.com/content/e1a232c7-52a0-44dd-a13b-c4af54e74... | https://archive.today/OSFYo
by lossolo | 2025-06-20 21:27:56+00:00
We serve a high volume of requests per second on certain OVH servers for a specific service, with continuous monitoring enabled. While their network didn’t maintain flawless uptime every second of the year, it achieved approximately 99.999% availability based on our observations, which is enough for us. However, we don't rely on their fully managed cloud services (databases, data platform, their containers etc), but we use their LBs, network services etc and as to servers we prefer solutions that are closer to bare metal. So we can’t speak for all of their services, only the ones we’ve used and have experience with.
by lechatonnoir | 2025-06-20 21:28:47+00:00
I am really not sure where you get any of these ideas. For each of your critiques, there are not only discussions, but taxonomies of compendiums of discussions about the topics at hand on LessWrong, which can easily be found by Googling any keyword or phrase in your comment.

On "considering what should be the baseline assumption":

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/epistemology

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/priors, particularly https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hNqte2p48nqKux3wS/trapped-pr...

On the idea that "rationalists think that they can just apply rationality infinitely to everything":

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/bounded-rationality

On the critique that rationalists are blind to the fact that "reason isn't the only thing that's important", generously reworded as "reason has to be grounded in a set of human values", some of the most philosophically coherent stuff I see on the internet is from LW:

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/metaethics-sequence

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/human-values

On "systematically plan to validate":

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/rationality-verification

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/making-beliefs-pay-rent

On "what could hold true for one moment could easily shift":

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/black-swans

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/distributional-shifts

https://www.lesswrong.com/w/forecasting-and-prediction
by golergka | 2025-06-20 21:28:52+00:00
> Every VC backed company sucks even worse, they work you to death, promise you “equity” that will statistically be worthless and they pay less.

That has been exactly the opposite of my experience with VC-backed companies. Great culture and support. Companies that stand by their employees and their words when it counts.

I worked at a company which ran out of runway once. Not the first, not the last time I was in this situation. But before it actually did, CEO decided to close doors sooner so he could give everybody effectively a three-month severance. We were all contractors, not employees. He didn't have to do it at all, and I think that if he wished to, he would have found a dozen ways to safely pocket this VC money himself. But he made a choice to do a solid for his employees instead.

This was just the most striking example, but overall it is pretty typical of my experience with VC-backed startups. I'm a cynical, pessimistic person from Russia and Israel, so every time I encounter another super-positive American, my first thought is that they're just phony. But in this particular industry, it just so happens that a lot of them are actually genuinely like that.
by andy99 | 2025-06-20 21:29:05+00:00
It's very common in science for people to have had results they didn't understand the significance of that later were popularized by someone else.

There is the whole thing with Damadian claiming to have invented MRI (he didn't) when the Nobel prize went to Mansfield and Lauterbur (see the Nobel prize part of the article). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Lauterbur

And I've seen other less prominent examples.

It's a lot like the difference between ideas and execution and people claiming someone "stole" their idea because they made a successful business from it.
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-20 21:29:48+00:00
Alphabet is the fifth largest company in the world, has earnings higher than most countries' GDP, and is established to have engaged in illegal behavior as a monopolist. It's fair to say they're closer to "the system" than "a player".

Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
by Bondi_Blue | 2025-06-20 21:30:03+00:00
If you want to play locally on macOS, here is a build. If it fails to run, it is likely the error "The requested video mode is not available" and can be run if connected to an external monitor (then you can disable fullscreen and launch without an external monitor).

https://drodin.com/extremetuxracer/ https://github.com/drodin/extremetuxracer
by johnea | 2025-06-20 21:31:16+00:00
The resistance to electrification in the US is one of the country's biggest self inflicted wounds.

In the long run, I really don't think we can tariff our way around technical innovation.

900 miles of range in 12 mins of charging... Charge for 20 mins and have enough range for 2 full days of travel driving!

And this is only when driving long distances. Anyone with a driveway can eassily charge overnight for typical daily driving.

The whole package: many types of energy source providing electricity, never having to go to a gas station for typical daily driving, path to complete elimination of petro combustion byproducts, massive simplification of the overall vehicle mechanism, significant performance enhancements, etc.

All technical evaluation come out in favor of EVs...
by lechatonnoir | 2025-06-20 21:31:20+00:00
Here's a collection of debates about that topic:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/85mfawamKdxzzaPeK/any-good-c...

I personally don't have that much of an interest in this topic, so I can't critique them for quality myself, but they may at least be of relevance to you.
by Lerc | 2025-06-20 21:32:27+00:00
I can see how someone could feel like that if they looked at the world in a particular way.

I have had plenty of ideas in the last few years that I have played with that I have seen published in papers in the following months. Rather than feeling like "I did it first" I feel gratified that not only was I on the right track, but someone else has done the hard slog.

Most papers are not published by people who had the idea the day before. Their work goes back further than that. Refining the idea, testing it and then presenting the results takes time, sometimes years, occasionally decades.

If this happens to you, don't think "Hey! That idea belongs to me!". Thank them for proving you right.

Now if they patent it, that's a different story. I don't think the ideas that sometimes float through my brain belong to me, but I'm not keen on them belonging to someone else either.
by hinkley | 2025-06-20 21:32:33+00:00
> The design of the job system decides how we are able to utilize it, and the old design (in use since Arma 2) worked, but it was quite primitive. It only allowed submitting jobs as one block, and there could only be one block active at a time. This means all jobs had to be submitted at once, after which we needed to wait for the jobs to be finished, before we could continue doing other things.

> This is also called "Fork-Join".

I removed one of these from a batch processing system and got about 3x the throughput in the process.

As it was written, the system was trying not to be a noisy neighbor for online (consumer-facing) traffic and was not succeeding. It could still cause brownouts if too many other things were running at the same time. So the authors thought to have the users run Splunk queries, looking for traffic from these other jobs, to see if it was safe to run the CI/CD pipeline. That's ridiculous. It's the sort of thing someone Ops-facing forgets that nobody else on the team gives a shit about most days.

If we wanted people to be able to run it without consequence, it needed to go quite a bit slower, but it was already more than half of the wall clock time being spent in a runbook as it was. So I replaced it with a queue instead, that would have n tasks running all the time, instead of up to n and as few as 1. I ended up being able to tune it to about 75-80% of the original number with little problem. Well, one problem. There was one group of customers whose assets generated about 10x the load of any other customer, and the way we queued the work clustered by group. Once I sorted by customer instead of group we stopped getting a clustering of excess workload, and it also made it a hell of a lot easier to eyeball the status messages and estimate how far along you were.

Spiky processes cause problems for both load-shedding and autoscaling schemes. And starting too many tasks at once causes memory pressure on your end, since most data processing tasks take more memory in the middle than at the beginning or the end. You are better off self-throttling your traffic so you make the memory load more sequential and you allow compensatory systems the time they need to adapt appropriately to your sudden peak of traffic.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-20 21:32:47+00:00
> I’ve tried the glasses myself, and I’m convinced that wearable eyewear like this will eventually replace the mobile phone.

I sure as f* hope not. I already struggle with my cellphone addiction and all of its constant distractions and assaults on my attention span, the last thing I want is something from one of the largest advertising companies on the planet glued to my face.