MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-22 20:02:19+00:00
> In the US, students are the paying customers.

Only on paper. In many cases - I'd risk betting in vast majority of cases - the actual paying customers are parents.

> The consequence for not learning everything is lowered skills available for the job market (engineering) or life (philosophy?).

The ability to perceive and comprehend this kind of consequences is something that develops early in adulthood; some people get it in school, but others (again, I'd bet majority) only half-way through university or even later.

On paper, you have students who're paying for education. In reality, their parents are paying an expected fee for an expected stage of life of their kids.
by ICBTheory | 2025-06-22 20:02:25+00:00
Correct: Shannon entropy originally measures statistical uncertainty over a fixed symbol space. When the system is fed additional information/data, then entropy goes down, uncertainty falls. This is always true in situations where the possible outcomes are a) sufficiently limited and b)unequally distributed. In such cases, with enough input, the system can collapse the uncertainty function within a finite number of steps.

But the paper doesn’t just restate Shannon.

It extends this very formalism to semantic spaces where the symbol set itself becomes unstable. These situations arise when (a) entropy is calculated across interpretive layers (as in LLMs), and (b) the probability distribution follows a heavy-tailed regime (α ≤ 1). Under these conditions, entropy divergence becomes mathematically provable.

This is far from being metaphorical: it’s backed by formal Coq-style proofs (see Appendix C in he paper).

AND: it is exactly the mechanism that can explain the Apple-Papers' results
by ggreer | 2025-06-22 20:02:34+00:00
All of the videos so far show no human in the driver's seat. There is a person in the front passenger seat who can tap three buttons on the touch screen: "Pull over", "Stop in lane", and "Support".[1]

It'll be a while before we know how good the self-driving is, but it seems like they're more confident than when Waymo started, as those used safety drivers for the first nine months (from May 2022 to December 2023), and didn't open up to the general public until June of 2024.[2] That said, downtown Austin is an easier environment to drive in than San Francisco.

1. https://x.com/DirtyTesLa/status/1936867325799739810

2. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/06/waymo-one-is-now-open-to-ever...
by darkwater | 2025-06-22 20:02:35+00:00
Being about businesses only and no individuals makes all the difference in the world. Otherwise it should be seen as dystopian also the fact that you can call the police on your neighborhood because "you heard noises".

I bet that the friction in the submission process was deliberately added to avoid abuses, but maybe it's just incompetence. Depending on the reason, this app can be either good or against the spirit of the rule.
by duxup | 2025-06-22 20:02:40+00:00
One of my first real jobs I worked for a company who had big banks, finance, lots of old school companies as clients. I worked tech support. The east cost folks could be direct, but they were professional.

Then one day we picked up Walmart as a "customer"... I say customer because Walmart IT convinced some sales guys to convince some executives to ship them some equipment for free and provide support. Walmart IT then proceeded to spend months shoving 20 pounds of data in a 10 pound hat, and when they got more equipment they'd do it again and throw a fit and demand someone make it right. Every contact with them was like they were trying to manufacture blame. Meanwhile Walmart IT dangled some absurd idea of them actually paying for something one day so the cycle would not end.

Every Monday on schedule I'd get the same call at 6:00 am, Walmart's sync / backup solution was behind and failed. The person on the line would lie to me about what they were doing, and then swear at me ... they were the only customer we had who would do that. Eventually their account manager mentioned one day "don't take it personally, they do this at that company to each other every day, it happens on every call I'm on". It was horrifying to think about that kind of place.

Finally our CEO stopped imagining making money that would never come, and told them to go find someone else.

Everyone who worked support refused to shop there, it was one of those experiences where you just didn't want anything to do with them.

I wonder if their old vibe they're trying to shake has to do with that kind of thing, word gets around.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-22 20:03:02+00:00
>That's not really true. You have a theory, and let's presume so far it's consistent with observations. But it doesn't mean it's 100% correct, and doesn't mean at some point in the future you won't observe something that invalidates the theory. In short, you don't know whether the theory is absolutely true and you can never know.

Let me repharse it. As far as we know all of reality is governed by the principles of logic and therefore math. This is the most likely possibility and we have based all of our technology and culture and science around this. It is the fundamental assumption humanity has made on reality. We cannot consistently demonstrate disproof against this assumption.

>Not the GP but I think humility is kinda relevant here.

How so? If I assume all of reality is governed by math, but you don't. How does that make me not humble but you humble? Seems personal.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-06-22 20:03:18+00:00
>Those countries were destined towards collapse with or without nuclear weapons. Iraq, Libya, Syria—those are three countries that fell into catastrophic civil wars, along internal conflict lines,

For Libya and Syria, sure, but what are you talking about for Iraq? Saddam was unambiguously ousted from an internally secure position of power by a foreign invasion that followed in the wake of over a decade of heavy sanctions and no-fly zone imposure. By many accounts, Saddam had a strong base of support within his population and his rule was stable (backed by a blend of patronage and severe terror obviously) right up until the day he was ousted by vastly superior military might from outside.

While it's extremely hard to know what would have happened to his regime had he still been in power by the time of the Arab Spring and the events that caused the ouster of Gaddafi and eventually Assad, Saddam would surely have been able to stay in power at least up to then. I certainly don't imagine him having more difficulty handling an internal strife of the kind that ruined Assad's dictatorship. Except for his catastrophic miscalculation of making a long-term enemy of the US during the first, utterly pointless Gulf War, he at least showed himself to be the far more experienced and careful dictator during his rule.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-22 20:04:03+00:00
I called them f-in, because they got really boring at that point. For me, every time high school curriculum touched on probability theory or statistics, it'd be urn o'clock. But then, come statistics at my university applied CS studies, there they were again. More advanced materials, but same mental model, as if it was something natural, or interesting, to people.

Also, calling them "urns". There are exactly two common usages of the word "urn" in Polish - the box you put your votes into during elections, and the vase for storing ashes of cremated people.
by systemf_omega | 2025-06-22 20:04:22+00:00
You don't have to be a star programmer, fame isn't the only form of leverage.

If you're in demand, and you're good at what you do, the road is paved for you. Top companies have already set the bar.

Them: we offer 250k-350k

Me: I don't consider anything below 500

The answers I get vary. Some tell me to politely fvck off. Some tell me they need to discuss with leadership. Some just go for it because they know how hard it is to fill that role.

The justification is simple: why would I take a job with you if I can land an HFT gig at twice the pay?
by dmurray | 2025-06-22 20:04:36+00:00
> It has been suggested that these chromium alloys could be used for stainless cutlery, but the high prices of cobalt and nickel have prevented the use of such alloys

Nickel and cobalt don't seem prohibitively expensive for cutlery, around $15,000 [0] per ton and $33,000 [1] per ton respectively. By comparison, chromium is around $10,000 and iron is essentially free.

Even if the optimal ratio is 100% cobalt, that might add $1.50 to the price of a dinner fork or $50 to a cutlery set that will last a lifetime.

Walmart might not stock it, but that seems completely within the range of what you could charge for a premium product, if the nickel-cobalt-chromium alloys really do make for superior cutlery. Maybe it's less suitable for other reasons than cost.

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/nickel

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/cobalt
by UltraSane | 2025-06-22 20:05:56+00:00
"Just living in peace while stealing the homes and land of the locals."

No. Jews migrated to Ottoman controlled land legally and paid for it. Palestinians were offered their own country but rejected that offer in favor of trying to expel the Jews and taking their land. Then they spend the next 70 years trying and failing to destroy Israel and rejecting every offer of their own country.
by braden-lk | 2025-06-22 20:06:19+00:00
Totally; and big respect to the people who put in hundreds of hours of prep. I did leetcode, practice interviews, 4.0 gpa, all that. I think the big hang up for me was, no matter how many practice interviews I did, there were only 4 real ones, with long waiting periods between attempts. And honestly... 3/4 my FAANG interviewers were really rude/late/apathetic. I actually did make it to second round at Google on the third try, but at that point I was so exhausted with the process, I took an offer from a company that at least pretended to give a shit whether I joined them or not. Had a wonderful 3 years there building green-field B2C products.

Getting some work experience and then starting my own thing was a better fit for me.
by latchkey | 2025-06-22 20:06:38+00:00
They all bin their chips after testing. 355x is 35% faster than 300x and uses almost 2x more power.

But 355 has fp4/6 added in, which until udma comes out, likely won’t get emulated.

It is fine if you dont need the features of newer hardware, but if you do… then desktop won’t help you.
Ask HN: Hydrogen plasma to deoxidize Aluminum for sustainable green hydrogen?
by westurner | 2025-06-22 20:08:09+00:00
Aluminum is plentiful.

Aluminum hydrolyzes water into Hydrogen and Oxygen; but an oxide layer forms and that limits the yield.

Hydrogen plasma removes oxygen from Aluminum ( titanium, maybe graphene oxide wafers, and from).

Hydrogen plasma underwater creates various reactive Hydrogen molecules that further purify water.

Aluminum treated with hydrogen plasma quickly reoxidizes if not immersed in water.

Is hydrogen plasma + aluminum a good solution for green hydrogen?
by int_19h | 2025-06-22 20:08:12+00:00
I want software to displace me when it comes to my day-to-day grind job, so that I can spend this time on something more interesting.

But I want that to happen in a way that results in a Star Trek communist utopia, not a hellscape where 90% of humanity is "redundant" to the very few people who own all that automation and its outputs.
by linker3000 | 2025-06-22 20:08:37+00:00
Context: We're from the UK.

My wife and I left a meeting in a business park in Phoenix and decided to walk the 5 mins to the local shopping mall, have a look around and then get a taxi back to the apartment in which we were staying (We'd taken a taxi to the meeting).

We were about 2 minutes into our walk when a car pulled up and it was one of the people from the meeting. People in the office had spotted us walking and assumed there was some kind of emergency or our car had broken down.

We had to be very politely insistent that we didn't need a lift to the mall and were perfectly fine.
by kragen | 2025-06-22 20:09:20+00:00
Is it possible that the companies that sold you these "polyethylene" storage containers actually made them out of PVC and didn't tell you? Are these those big plastic tubs? I've also noticed those getting brittle over time, although I haven't experienced the unpleasant syneresis you describe. So far my polypropylene 20-liter buckets aren't doing anything similar, but I've only had them for a few years.
by nneonneo | 2025-06-22 20:09:24+00:00
Cool! I used a similar trick in my 2048 AI: https://github.com/nneonneo/2048-ai. In my case I allow the tiles to go all the way up to 32768, so I just have one tile per nybble.

Using this representation is great: it lets me pack a whole gameboard into a single machine register, which makes it super efficient. In this case I see that you’re able to pack in a seed value to enable replayability - neat!
by gnabgib | 2025-06-22 20:09:49+00:00
(2008)

The post popular answer includes: History of the browser user-agent string related discussions:

2022 (87 points, 20 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31246438

2019 (62 points, 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21085388

2018 (558 points, 168 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16525559

2013 (100 points, 32 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6674812
by deadbabe | 2025-06-22 20:10:32+00:00
The proliferation of AI and LLMs has completely obliterated leverage.

Don’t want the job for the salary offered? Too bad. Hire a cheaper person armed to the teeth with the best LLM coding tools and move on.

Unless you’re coming in with significant clout that will move revenue and relations to bridge partnerships across other companies, you will not be worth the extra $250k on skills alone.
by CharlesW | 2025-06-22 20:10:33+00:00
Assuming that your ability to remember the content isn't a result of differences in the substance of the content, in my experience the stylistic issue can be addressed with thoughtful training/prompting and lots of Do/Don't examples.

It helps if your technical writers already adhere to a voice/tone guide, which can be pretty easily adapted/extended for automated documentation generation. If one doesn't exist, you'll definitely want to create that first. Some good examples:

Google: https://developers.google.com/style

IBM: https://ptgmedia.pearsoncmg.com/images/9780132101301/samplep...

Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/style-guide/welcome/

Red Hat: https://stylepedia.net/style/
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-06-22 20:11:00+00:00
>But my senses tell me that there is a privileged part of the wave function, namely, the branch that I'm in.

You could also sense that your location is privileged, because the observable universe is neatly centered at it, but science will prioritize Copernican principle over your senses.

>But you can't do both at the same time.

This doesn't match what you do. Tracing extracts mortal's-eye view from God's-eye view, so in God's-eye view you have both.

>depend on my suspension of disbelief and acting as if my branch of the multiverse is privileged

If your branch exists, it's sufficient for your day to day life, there's not much else to disbelieve. There's no need for it to be privileged. Do you worry that Earth isn't more privileged than Mars?

>But no one has done it, and I'm pretty sure it can't be done.

But quantum physics doesn't allow it. It's quantitative science where all observed phenomena are computable. If they aren't computable, then quantum physics doesn't predict them and thus diverges from observation. And Schrödinger equation is how predictions are made, collapse and measurement only act on what already exists before them and don't create anything new. So if Born rule is an observed phenomenon, it must be computable from Schrödinger equation. Also if Born rule holds with certainty, then it's a pure state, and observation won't do anything to it, so Born rule can't be created by observation.

>There's probably a Nobel prize waiting for the person who turns that intuition into a theorem.

This was argued by Max Tegmark https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9702052 I thought it's a famous diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spacetime_dimensionality....
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-22 20:11:39+00:00
I had, and still have. The problem is, most people are exposed to this stuff way before they have even a single application domain they're even remotely interested in.

It's really the same problem as with math in school in general ("whatever is this even useful for?") - most people don't like doing abstract, self-contained puzzles with no apparent utility, but being high-stakes (you're being graded on it).
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-22 20:11:46+00:00
George Hinton the person largely responsible about the AI revolution has this to say:

https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1lbbg0x/geoffr...

https://youtu.be/qrvK_KuIeJk?t=284

In that video above George Hinton, directly says we don't understand how it works.

So I don't speak just for myself. I speak for the person who ushered in the AI revolution, I speak for Experts in the field who know what they're talking aboutt. I don't speak for people who don't know what they're talking about.

Even though we know it's a feedforward network and we know how the queries are tokenized you cannot tell me what an LLM would say nor tell me why an LLM said something for a given prompt showing that we can't fully control an LLM because we don't fully understand it.

Don't try to just argue with me. Argue with the experts. Argue with the people who know more than you, Hinton.
by bpodgursky | 2025-06-22 20:12:53+00:00
Russia came in unprepared for this war, and is not prepared for a traditional peer conflict, but is building out a LOT of drone production capacity which will now be decisive in regional wars.

It's not going to save Iran from US stratospheric bombers, but yes the capability to throw 200 de-facto cruise missiles and 4,000 FPV drones a day at the front lines is a huge threat to anyone unfortunate enough to share a border with Russia.
by eurleif | 2025-06-22 20:12:54+00:00
To me, the impressive part is implementing it in under 200 lines of bash script, not implementing it with only 64 bits of state. Nothing clever is required for 64 bits of state: a cell has 12 possible states (2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, and empty), which can be expressed in 4 bits, and 4*4*4 = 64.
by tolerance | 2025-06-22 20:13:06+00:00
In my original comment, I said that I believe that our brains are rewired but our spirits still crave the same things as before.

Tech changes the actions and reasonings behind how our nature is exercised, at the material level.

Now, if you don't believe in the material/immaterial dichotomy that typifies man then what I'm saying may not register.

I'm not sure if this applies to you, but either way I'm curious what made you make the claim that took us in this direction because it's apparent that you've noticed a logical step that I was only aware of subconsciously.

Thanks.
by antihysteresis | 2025-06-22 20:14:19+00:00
Maybe I'm just naive, but... who needs group policy when you have other tools that can accomplish the same goals?

With Linux, it's possible to do periodic image-based deployment (ie roll out preconfigured, immutable core OS images to all managed machines) and then set up the FS to "overlay" any per-machine customisations on top of the base image. User files / home directories can be kept in their own partition, entirely separate from the OS image.

If desired, one could even set up a system for overlaying generated customization images (based on a template) on user partitions - allowing IT to systematically override particular files in user trees with immutable versions, if they so choose.

As for managing subgroups of machines which need different software/settings, or dealing with revisions? Use git to manage everything that goes into the deployed OS images. If a subgroup of machines just needs a few different configs, that can be a patchset. If the changes are more significant, it might make more sense to implement a branch.

Then IT gets to control, at a fine-grained level, the update status and configuration of every machine they manage - and easily make organisation-wide changes by pushing new images, while also having the ability to cleanly roll back to an older revision of the image if showstopper regressions are found.

Most likely you'd push image deltas (no sense wasting bandwidth routinely sending whole images if it can be avoided) once per diem, in the middle of the night.

Once the tooling is in place, I'd imagine a system like that ought to be far slicker / more convenient, not to mention more powerful and (albeit dependent on implementation) secure than Windows' Group Policy could ever hope to be.
by wrsh07 | 2025-06-22 20:14:24+00:00
I actually strongly disagree with this take and

1) after reading the original post immediately linked it to a friend who had an outstanding offer. She got a significant raise from fairly light negotiating

2) personally, I don't think of myself as a particularly aggressive negotiator. However, I have been able to truthfully discuss compensation using the tactics described with recruiters to get leveling and comp where I've wanted it to be for my last couple of jobs. Yes, I always had multiple offers. That's part of negotiating.

More generally, though, I think spending 30+ minutes (reading the piece and more) thinking about negotiating has helped me build a better mental model for what to bring to the table.
by gametorch | 2025-06-22 20:14:39+00:00
That's a fair point. It's hard to assess whether I'm being honest with myself about that.

But I know this app is truly evil in my system of morality.

AI art can be very soulless. Very dehumanizing. In certain sense.

But those two qualities are undeniably attached to surveillance states. In all senses. There is no argument against that.
by johnisgood | 2025-06-22 20:15:07+00:00
Remember, you cannot criticize (even though it was not it) unless you have something to show up! Next time someone provides a critique to an article, we have to make sure to let them know it is wrong to criticize unless they have written an article themselves on the same topic.

FWIW it really was just about his comment, and I made two statements: Perl is faster than Python, and that Perl is especially good for string manipulation. I do not mind that he chose Python, good for him.
by perihelions | 2025-06-22 20:16:53+00:00
Everything is silly, and consensus reality on these kind of things is just a glorified Reddit thread IRL. There's at least four plausible metrics. Everest is tallest from the local mean sea level (the smoothed gravitational equipotential—what a stationary water surface hugs); McKinley-Denali from its local terrain base; Mauna Kea from the local terrain base inclusive of underwater terrain; and Chimborazo, in equatorial Ecuador (it's Ecuador because it's equatorial), as measured from this planet's center-of-mass (the planet bulges out approaching the equator because of its spinning—"oblateness").

Like a Reddit thread, it's best not to argue too much with what the hive-mind decides. People literally died climbing what they believed to be the correct answer. Let them have their thing. :)
by 8note | 2025-06-22 20:17:17+00:00
egypt at least, is bribed by the US on that.

if you include the oslo accords, the narrative that palestinians are the one and only problem breaks down. the only time there was agreeable terms being set, and israelis assasinated their leader for proposing them.

i wouldnt expect america to ever be favourable to carving out a new independent state of Venesuela from colorado because theres a lot of non-citizen refugees. you can see americans today pushing back against having more immigrants, too and removing the people that are here