MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sneak | 2025-06-13 18:15:29+00:00
> A decade ago, it would’ve been unthinkable for so many tech heavyweights to openly align with the U.S. military.

It still is. Don’t be fooled by propaganda pieces like this.

It is followed up by two blatant falsehoods:

> But a sea change has taken place in both places because of the urgency and seriousness of the moment.

> Wars in Europe and the Middle East and, above all, the threat of a war in the Pacific have focused the national mind and initiated a scramble for mobilization.

None of this is true in the sense he means it. Businesses have scrambled to have alternatives to China, yes, but that’s nothing to do with the military.

> The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps, under the direction of the Army’s chief of staff, General Randy George, is part of a larger effort by our military to transform the way it prepares for and fights wars in the 21st century.

Expanding the military-industrial complex is of no benefit to anyone other than those in the military-industrial complex (such as the author of this article).

Such transparent self-serving.
by TrackerFF | 2025-06-13 18:15:37+00:00
Not trying to diminish his academic accomplishments, but it isn't that uncommon for experienced freshman students to just jump straight into advanced topics. If you're the type that has been coding since you were 10, been active in Olympic teams, or whatever, you can probably do just fine in such courses.

If anything, you'd be bored with some undergrad courses.
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-13 18:16:03+00:00
I think you need to re-read the paper.

The LLMs don't "reason" by any definition of the term. If they did, then the Tower of Hanoi and the river problem would have been trivial for them to handle at any level because ultimately the solutions are just highly recursive.

What the LLMs do is attempt to pattern match to existing solved problems in their training set and just copy those solutions. But this results in overthinking for very simple problems (because they're copying too much of the solutions from their training set), works well for the somewhat complex problems like a basic Tower of Hanoi, and not at all for the problems that would require actual reasoning because...they're just copying solutions.

The point of the paper is that what LLMs do is not reasoning, however much the AI industry may want to redefine the word to suit their commercial interests.
by rodonn | 2025-06-13 18:16:27+00:00
It might reduce scrutiny, but not completely prevent it. Clayton act says "No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock or other share capital and no person subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission shall acquire the whole or any part of the assets of another person engaged also in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce, where in any line of commerce or in any activity affecting commerce in any section of the country, the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly."
by mbesto | 2025-06-13 18:16:49+00:00
> When the means of production are easier, that changes the supply and demand curves. There's more supply and lower cost, but that opens the gates to larger and new work that hasn't been possible before.

Your correct, but you're conflating the "source and generation of music" with the digitization of distribution specifically to the RIAA's role. From your original point:

> > Where do you think these models will get the source data for these amazing generations? Doesn't matter one bit, just like mp3 and torrents didn't stop digital music.

I'm saying the two (production and distribution) aren't equivalent for the parties involved. The RIAA faced an existential criss with digitization because their purpose (license and distribute music) would cease to exist under mp3/torrents. The RIAA does NOT represent the artist and the threat here is about the artist. In fact, the RIAA would LOVE to do away with artists and find a cheaper means of production if the could...it means higher profit margin for them.

The OP's point was that the new wave of art has to originate from somewhere. The distribution partners don't care how it gets produced, they just want to own the distribution. The artists are now in a existential crisis, not the RIAA. The RIAA at least had a migration story; e.g. from physically printing vinyl, providing capital for music studios, etc. to becoming glorified lawyers and promoters in the supply chain. The artists do not. Hence, the parallel is inappropriate and doesn't capture the essence of the predicament, which is artists are in existential crisis with no clear migration path.
by drillsteps5 | 2025-06-13 18:17:17+00:00
Have a good friend, a 68yo guy, with grown-up kids (as in having their own families, houses, careers, etc), just happily hacking away in SQL, Python, building dashboards in PowerBI, learning AWS and bunch of other stuff, as a consultant. He says he'd be bored out of his mind just sitting at home.

Who says you can't have role models in your 50s? :)
by bgwalter | 2025-06-13 18:17:59+00:00
It is part time, they get a high rank immediately and will facilitate purchases from Palantir:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/army-reserve-tech-executives-meta-p...

This is just another part of the revolving door that also enables ex generals to get board positions at Lockheed. This time it is the reverse way.

Given that McKinsey ruined the German army, let us see whether this will even improve anything.
by rodonn | 2025-06-13 18:19:24+00:00
The Clayton act explicitly includes partial acquisition as still being covered. "No person engaged in commerce or in any activity affecting commerce shall acquire, directly or indirectly, the whole or any part of the stock... [where] the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition, or to tend to create a monopoly."

There may be some other regulations that are avoided by a partial acquisition, but it doesn't bring it wholly outside of the relevant antitrust laws.
by gamblor956 | 2025-06-13 18:19:44+00:00
Of course the entire city of Los Angeles isn't walkable. It's 500 square miles, or over 10x the size of Paris (40 square miles).

But LA has a great many neighborhoods that are very walkable, and it has public transportation connecting all those walkable neighborhoods.

And in response to your spurious claims about Santa Monica: the entirety of the city of Santa Monica is just as walkable as the cities of London and Paris, and definitely more walkable than the outlying neighborhoods like Versailles.

Downtown Los Angeles is also very walkable, and there are tourists who make that walk every day.
by lancekrogers | 2025-06-13 18:19:46+00:00
The problem is it will take years for the jobs to come back and a lot of people don't have years of liquidity.

If every developer is now 10x more productive, most businesses will be able to downsize until they start to be outcompeted by competitors who decided to build 10x better products rather than downsizing. The current norm is to keep the same productivity and shrink the workforce outside of small startups.
by permo-w | 2025-06-13 18:19:56+00:00
never mind the fact that half these captchas are just excuses for orgs to sneakily extract some reinforcement learning data from you. last time I tried to sign into my microsoft account it made me do 6 captchas. SIX. not six like I failed 1 captcha six times, six like each captcha was iteratively marked i/6
by stuff4ben | 2025-06-13 18:20:17+00:00
If 1.2 billion dollars in valuation was destroyed in 49 days because the CTO wasn't there, there's something to be said about the CTO's inability to delegate and ensure they have a team that supports their decisions and vision and can carry on without them. "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
by EthanHeilman | 2025-06-13 18:20:21+00:00
Codex32 allows you perform Shamir secret sharing operations and error correcting code without using a computer. Instead, you can perform the operations by hand using cardboard code wheels called volvelles.

It is a really fun idea and does not require deep technical knowledge to operate. The intent is for Bitcoin secret keys, but it can be used for any secrets.

https://secretcodex32.com/
by fragmede | 2025-06-13 18:20:22+00:00
have you seen how hard influencers work? we're talking 100 hour weeks with no weekends. yeah there's no traditional boss and no office to report to, instead there's a influencer house that they go live in, have a bunch of drama at. yeah it's a lot of time spent sitting on the couch poking at a phone. yeah, that's not physically lifting anything but how many jobs do, after sending all the manufacturing jobs to China? One of the most demanding jobs in the world, the President, doesn't lift any rocks or break any backs. It's a job that is just talking with people. That's a job? Just yap and sign papers? I could do that way faster and cheaper.

There's a different question to be made as to whether or not influencer is a good direction for society to strive for as a career, but that's a whole other matter.
by imiric | 2025-06-13 18:20:32+00:00
> What is the VR adding? Nothing but extra hoops to just through to get things done.

It gives you maximum immersion into a digital world. Rather than view it through a rectangular 2D window, it can encompass 360 degrees of your vision in full 3D. If you don't see how this would be appealing for consuming content, work, entertainment, etc., then I can't convince you otherwise.

VR adoption has always been held back by what is technically possible and how expensive it is. Nobody other than tech enthusiasts wants to wear a bulky headset for extended periods of time. Once we're able to produce that perfect headset that you mention, so that it's portable and comfortable like a pair of sunglasses, at an affordable price, the floodgates will open, and demand will skyrocket.

The same already happened with mobile phones, several times. The cellular phone was invented in the early 1980s. It was heavy, bulky, and expensive, and only business people and enthusiasts used them. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 90s that they got cheap and comfortable for the general public. Then the modern smartphone had several precursors that were also clunky and expensive. It wasn't until the iPhone and Android devices that the technology became useful and accessible to everyone. There's no reason to think that the current iteration is the ultimate design of a personal computer.

The same story is repeated for any new technology. VR itself has seen multiple resurgences in the last few decades. We're only now reaching a state where the vision is technically possible. There are several products on the market that come close. VR headsets are getting smaller, cheaper, and more comfortable, and AR glasses are getting cheaper and more powerful. I reckon we're a few generations away from someone launching a truly groundbreaking product. Thinking that all this momentum is just a risky bet on a niche platform would be a mistake.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-13 18:20:41+00:00
Paper:

Energy, Health, and Climate Costs of Carbon-Capture and Direct-Air-Capture versus 100%-Wind-Water-Solar Climate Policies in 149 Countries - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c10686 | https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.4c10686
by sneak | 2025-06-13 18:21:12+00:00
> The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.

Oh, great, vertical integration between the violence organizations and the three worst and most amoral companies in tech. I’m sure nothing bad will come out of this.

Where’s Luckey and Anduril? Did he not pass the drug test?
by yencabulator | 2025-06-13 18:22:16+00:00
> As far as I know, this is still what push notifications are built upon for an idle/sleeping device.

I thought so too, but can't find any evidence for it anymore, all I can find is mentions of the phone keeping a TCP connection alive and then some device driver level tweaks to make that power efficient. I think the older GSM-specific wakeup mechanism might have died when iPhones stopped being carrier-specific.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-13 18:23:02+00:00
They coulda said "Respect DNT or go to jail" but instead they broke the ultimate window.

For years I advocated, mostly successfully, to keep pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-ins and other abuse like that out of sites I worked on. Then the EU pulls this magic trick that transforms them into something required, and then "wholesome" so after that the dam breaks and it is common for a blog today to pop up three banners that want your email address, for pop-up ads to cover other pop-up ads, etc.

When your government is unresponsive like that the only choice is exit, no wonder the EU is overrun by populists that want out. If they don't want Frexit and Sprexit and Grexit they'd better think twice when they make another thoughtless law with terrible consequences.
by paxys | 2025-06-13 18:23:04+00:00
The new CEO was brought in to chart the path forward not dwell on the past, and clearly in his eyes the Palm acquisition was a sunk cost. The Touchpad disaster, combined with the CTO completely shirking responsibility for it (as you can tell from this article), probably showed him the writing on the wall.

WebOS was neat for sure but HP was never in a position to compete with Apple. More mobile device launches would simply have meant more money down the drain.
by kennywinker | 2025-06-13 18:23:18+00:00
> 5 minutes in, “Look how far away the breakout was from the lab!”

> Really?

https://maps.app.goo.gl/t6RUAjksL7caBQvZA?g_st=ic

A 30min drive. So, a relevant point, especially since that’s basically the key piece of “evidence” for the lab leak.

> 6 minutes in “look at the viruses they were working on…”

> Can’t, it’s been scrubbed

They published papers about what they were working on. That has not been scrubbed.

> 7 minutes in: “never been a confirmed case of a lab worker getting covid”

> The documented black market of animals out of biolabs in China and the fact that it’s an aerosol virus might be important here…

Sure. That might be relevant. But it’s not evidence, it’s just an idea of how it might have happened. A wuhan lab worker getting covid early on would be evidence.

Nobody can say definitively it wasn’t a lab leak, but what we can say is that we don’t have credible evidence that suggests it was - just a couple coincidences that aren’t actually super coincidental when you look closer. Like, say, a lab and a market 19km away in a city of 11 million people. For comparison - that’s a city with more people than NYC, and the lab is in Manhattan while the market is in Coney Island.
by lesuorac | 2025-06-13 18:23:19+00:00
> But here's the final piece of the story: Leo Apotheker was fired on September 22, 2011—just 35 days after shutting down WebOS and eleven months after taking over as CEO. The board finally recognized the systematic thinking errors that had destroyed billions in value, but it was too late for WebOS.

Is this actually the case?

I guess optically it might look bad to undo the WebOS but maybe just announce development of a NetOS which is the same except in name? Definitely people will be upset about the cancelation but retailers still have what 225k units they'd want to move so they can't be that upset about it uncanceled?
by yencabulator | 2025-06-13 18:25:05+00:00
It wasn't really SMS, it was another message type riding on top of the same lower-level protocol called SS7. But it seems that's no longer in use and it's all just TCP/IP now.

(Said differently, the radio firmware got good enough that it doesn't need a special "wake up" packet anymore, it can recognize a packet to itself in a low power state.)
by jerf | 2025-06-13 18:26:27+00:00
Your question is unclear but I assume you are thinking that iOS has always supported "multitasking". This is not the case. iOS4 introduced it on the iPhone side, and this is how AnandTech [1] describes it:

"To switch between apps on the iOS3 you hit the home button, which takes you home, and then select your next app. Your previous app, assuming it isn’t one of a very limited list of apps that have services that can run in the background (e.g. iPod, checking email), quits completely. Switching back to the previous app relaunches it."

"In iOS 4 Apple promises app level multitasking without sacrificing performance or battery life. A single push of the home button still takes you home, but a double tap will bring up a list of recently used apps along the bottom of the screen. Scroll to find the one you want to switch to, select it and you’ve just “multitasked” in iOS 4."

Even on the Palm Pilot, you could switch reasonably quickly between, say, the Memo Pad and the Calendar, and not lose context in either app because they restarted. The OS was structured around giving apps the ability to freeze their state easily and rapidly thaw it later. I believe Android had some stuff for that, but it wasn't as comprehensive as what Palm had, and I can't speak to iOS APIs at all.

(In 2025, the "solution" to this is largely to just leave the apps running in the background like a desktop, now that cell phones are substantially more powerful today than the desktops of the WebOS era. Whether WebOS could have made a superior phone back in the day, we'd still be where we are today either way.)

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/3779/apples-ios-4-explored/2
by ted_dunning | 2025-06-13 18:26:35+00:00
MAPE can be a problem also if you have a problem where rare excursions are what you want to predict and the cost of missing an event is much higher than predicting a non-event. A model that just predicts no change would have very low MAPE because most of the time nothing happens. When the event happens, however, the error of predicting status quo ante is much worse than small baseline errors.
by autobodie | 2025-06-13 18:26:45+00:00
Nonsense. There is a big difference between the implications of the following claims:

1. The specific people that are currently rich will become richer.

2. The people that are rich at any given instant in the future will be richer than the people that are rich at the current instant.

"The rich are getting richer" almost always means #2, but it depends on the context. #1 may be more interesting to individuals competing for wealth, or for an assessment of individual mobility, but #2 is much more relevant when describing the aggregate conditions of a society. For example, the Gini Coefficient depends on #2, not #1.

I don't think it's a stretch to say it's dishonest to presume the first meaning.
by yencabulator | 2025-06-13 18:26:49+00:00
Both Apple and Google mobile notifications are long-lived TCP/IP sockets where the server writes bytes to the stream when it wants to wake up the phone.

The TCP/IP and protocol-specific handshake is started by the phone, but then the phone just waits to receive data. That counts as fundamentally push, all the way down to the transport layer.
by RajT88 | 2025-06-13 18:27:02+00:00
WebOS is not PalmOS based. Your experience is not applicable.

I actually own a discount touchpad. It was snappy as hell, promised to at some point have the Android app store, and could easily be jail broken by design. The software ecosystem was not even bad - my basic needs were all met.

The UI was slick feeling, like an Apple product, but the exterior finish was plasticy and more like an Android device. Battery life was incredible compared to Android devices of the time.

All in all, I really liked it. What might have been!
by fredoralive | 2025-06-13 18:27:03+00:00
Are you perhaps thinking of the classic Palm OS on a PalmPilot or whatever, which was limited because it was designed in the '90s for '90s hardware? That was dead by the time HP bought Palm, they were onto Palm WebOS, a modern (for the day) Linux / web app based OS on the Palm Pré and Pixi devices.
by bigbuppo | 2025-06-13 18:27:44+00:00
Hey buddy, would you like to try Google Gemini AI? You can easily find it using the same button on your android phone you used to use for quick access to emergency services.

We have AI. WE HAVE AI. Why aren't you using our AI?

What if we replaced our stagnating search with AI? Would you use it then? Please? It's AI, which is the future! We're so focused on AI we fired everybody that wasn't working on AI.

AI.
by gigaflop | 2025-06-13 18:28:25+00:00
This feels disingenuous to the max. I have a younger brother who went through USAF Basic, and these tech bros just get bestowed a high rank? It smells of stolen valor.

I mean nothing ill towards the 'mud hut', but seriously? All these listed names seem like people who've never had to roll in the mud with the rest of the grunts.
by potatolicious | 2025-06-13 18:28:26+00:00
This is true - and WebOS was legitimately innovative here. At the time neither iOS nor Android could run more than one app at the same time. This was both an architectural matter and a UX matter.

On iOS and Android at the time, all apps were full-screen. When you switched to another app, the previous app suspended execution entirely. The OS would keep the memory footprint of the app warm in RAM if possible, but back then RAM was in short enough supply that more often than not the memory state of the process was dumped to disk instead.

There were lots of clever UX hacks to make this feel seamless - when an app was suspended it was also screenshotted, and the screenshot would be displayed to the user upon switching back, until the actual app could be restored and resume running.

But the app executable was totally suspended during this time.

Whereas on WebOS the UX was oriented around showing multiple "Cards"[1] at the same time, but each one represented a live running process that was able to interact to the user and render new UI.

This was a pretty big deal at the time.

Since then both iOS and Android gained a lot more capability and nuance around multitasking.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/4508/hp-touchpad-review/2
by Zigurd | 2025-06-13 18:28:46+00:00
This is not to take away from the corporate Vogon tragedy described in the blog post. WebOS could've been a credible competitor to iOS and Android. But the weak spot is right in the name: It's a web UI platform. Look at Google's attempts to make ChromeOS into a tablet OS.

While it's less clear cut now, back when HP acquired WebOS, they would've had to put in a lot of work to make WebOS competitive, and enable WebOS apps to work as well as iOS or Android apps. HP had the resources.

We don't have a third or fourth mobile platform mainly because of tragically poor leadership at HP and Nokia. Both were almost killed by CEOs who thought they were the corporate savior.
by ShakataGaNai | 2025-06-13 18:28:52+00:00
Makes sense. The thing people forget about SOC2 is that it's very not-technical and very much so written by CPA's. No two SOC2's are identical. Hell the same companies SOC2 done by different auditors will be different.

Saying "The United States of America National Institute of Standards and Technology says X on page 423 of Special Publication 800-53 revision 5" is a really awesome "We're doing things the RIGHT way".
by drillsteps5 | 2025-06-13 18:28:54+00:00
These recruiters do exist. They are difficult to find, they are rare, and there seems to be fewer of them but they do exist.

I wouldn't say you don't have to lift a finger and they do all the work for you, but some of them do seem to have backdoor entry to the companies and their applicants will be preferred. Not to mention that some companies only hire this way (through vendors, not sifting through thousands of applications on the LinkedIn or Indeed).