MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by volkk | 2025-06-20 20:39:53+00:00
learned this the hard way. got stuck with people in a big company that i thought were "cool" but literally hated tech (this included engineers in the group) and the company which they worked for. Constant complaints, everything bad, etc. I joined a much better company after and made friends with really curious/smart people--my own level of care, curiosity and side projects catapulted. I am a completely different person. Complaining is fun, and super fucking easy. Actually doing something about it is a different beast and I want to be friends with the people that understand the world isn't perfect and want to actively make it better by doing rather than incessantly whining and throwing their hands up in the air.
by physhster | 2025-06-20 20:39:54+00:00
I don't think OVH is anywhere near the level of AWS/GCP/Azure in terms of the quality of the infrastructure and networking. They seem to cut all the corners they can cut in pursuit of lower prices. They built a data center out of wood, with no fire suppression, and it burned down, taking businesses with it: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/opinions/ovhclouds-dat...
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-06-20 20:40:09+00:00
> Then we are lucky that EA promotes giving more to charity as the primary function of accumulation of wealth.

no, we are not lucky. EA-good-because-charity-good is a brain-pretzel way of lobbying against equitable taxation.

> Is a guy getting a well-paid job at Microsoft and donating half of his salary to African charities really your best example of antisocial behavior?

you're inventing a competitive debate regarding a hypothetical "best example of antisocial behavior". i didn't target anyone specifically with any part of my post.
by const_cast | 2025-06-20 20:40:18+00:00
It's kind of a meme at this point that any kind of economic control for laborers = communism. That's not just a jump you're allowed to make, sorry. There are a plethora of nations outside the US which have stronger protections for labor, and they're doing quite well. It's not 1965 anymore, we have to start making real big boy arguments.
by secstate | 2025-06-20 20:40:58+00:00
I have a relative who works in healthcare. The introduction of AI for medical notes has led her level+1 manager to ask folks to increase their patient numbers in response to the extra time saved not having to manually code charts.

The initial response was some grumbling about unionization of the doctor-class. But now they're just kinda going along with it while also complaining loudly. Profit Über alles.
by mtalantikite | 2025-06-20 20:41:20+00:00
I'm not saying it's not a fair price -- I think largely it's a positive to discourage people from deciding to commute into Manhattan by car. I'm in my 40s and only recently got my license, so I'm certainly on team public transit.

But I am saying that not everyone that lives in the congestion zone are well off office workers, particularly those born and raised in lower Manhattan that have housing arrangements that go back a few decades. An extra $2-300 month in tolls is not nothing for many people. You can't easily bring hundreds of pounds of art and building supplies to your art warehouse in Newark every day on the path train.
by dvt | 2025-06-20 20:42:14+00:00
Suffers from the same problem as all other AI "workflows"--no one wants to fucking chat with a computer (Brave sort-of does this, and it's god-awful). A chat interface should only be used as a fallback if the agent is too dumb to figure out what I want.

A chat interface works for ChatGPT because most folks use it as a pseudo-search, but productivity tools are (broadly speaking) not generative, therefore shouldn't be using freeform inputs. I have many thoughts on fixing this, and it's a very hard problem, but simply slapping an LLM onto Chrome is just lazy. I don't mean to be overly negative, but it's kind of wild to see YC funding slop like this.

And that's exactly what this is: slop. There's no technical creativity here, this isn't a new product segment, it barely deserves the "hey bro, this might be a feature, not a product" startup 101 criticism. It's what ChatGPT would spit out if you asked it what a good startup idea would be in 2025. All we need to do, even if we were being as charitable as possible, is ask who's doing the heavy lifting here (hint: it's not in the Github repo).
by bobxmax | 2025-06-20 20:42:47+00:00
That is not a full-time job. If Oog decides he's going to spend 10 hours a day doing nothing but make stone axes for the 15 other men in the tribe, Oog is going to have a bad time.

In a hunter-gatherer context, the men are hunting, fishing and fighting, while the women forage and manage the children.
by TulliusCicero | 2025-06-20 20:43:22+00:00
Yeah, this is what I'm talking about: https://sfstandard.com/2024/06/21/valencia-street-bike-lane-...

> Valencia Street’s controversial center-running bike lane did not harm businesses, as merchants claimed, a new report finds.

> “While businesses along Valencia Street have clearly suffered more than in other parts of the city since the pandemic, the challenges facing the corridor pre-date the construction of the bike improvements, and there is no statistical basis for linking the two,” a City Controller’s Office report published Wednesday found. The report used the city’s taxable sales database to analyze the effect of the bike lane on businesses.

> Merchants along the corridor have waged a war against the city’s transit agency over the bike lane for almost a year. The owner of Amado’s bar, David Quinby, even blamed the lane for closing his business, despite suffering a devastating basement flood some months prior.

> “This finding does not mean that no business was adversely affected by the bike improvements,” the city report added. “It simply means that any negative impacts on individual businesses were offset by positive impacts on others, and there is no net effect on the corridor as a whole.”
by ellisd | 2025-06-20 20:43:35+00:00
Thank you for the clarification!

While reviewing the prompt's capabilities, I had an idea: implementing a Greasemonkey/Userscript-style system, where users could inject custom JavaScript or prompts based on URLs, could be a powerful way to enhance website interactions.

For instance, consider a banking website with a cumbersome data export process that requires extra steps to make the data usable. Imagine being able to add a custom button to their UI (or define a custom MCP function) specifically for that URL, which could automatically pull and format the data into a more convenient format for plain text accounting.
by eikenberry | 2025-06-20 20:43:44+00:00
I don't believe he wanted or intended a moat. The drivers need to be in the kernel to have a working kernel, that is a kernel that actually runs on the hardware. Move the drivers out of the kernel and Linux would have died long ago as there would have been a proliferation of proprietary drivers that stopped being maintained once the hardware was no longer on sale. And poor driver support is why no other kernel has taken root.
by t-3 | 2025-06-20 20:44:14+00:00
It's not about saving keystrokes, it's saving brainpower and effort when reading, writing, and modifying code. Instead of thinking about control flow and nested loops when doing multiple complex operations on an array, you're thinking only about the array operations. Abstracting away the loops and control flow frees the programmer from the most tedious and error-prone parts of programming.
by Aloisius | 2025-06-20 20:44:25+00:00
If you look at "the people" elsewhere in the Constitution, it refers to "the people of the United States" which would not include aliens abroad.

The Supreme Court hasn't said much, but in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez plurality opinion by Rehnquist held that the rights of "the people" protected by the Fourth Amendment (written similarly) does not extend outside the United States to aliens abroad as they are not a "class of persons who are part of a national community or ... have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community."
by bobxmax | 2025-06-20 20:45:11+00:00
American & Western European chattel slavery (or perhaps more accurately, western christianity-driven chattel slavery) is uniquely barbaric historically.

The wide-scale dehumanization on a racial basis has no precedent historically.

Imperialist Christianity, of which the modern US continues to suffer from (even if it's a secular version), is uniquely brutal and violent.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-06-20 20:45:22+00:00
>It's dangerous because it gives individuals the power to provide answers when people ask questions out of curiosity they don't know the answer to, which is when they are most able to be influenced.

Can you point to a time in history of written information this wasn't true though?

- Was the Library of Alexandria open to everyone? My quick check says it was not.

- The access to written information already precluded an education of some form.

- Do you think Google has an internal search engine that is better than the one you see? I suspect the have an ad-less version that is better.

- AI models are an easy one obviously. Big Players and others surely have hot versions of their models that would be considered too spicy for consumer access. One of the most memorable parts of ai 2027 for me was the idea that you might want to go high in government to get access to the super intelligence models, and use them to maintain your position.

The point is, that last one isn't the first one.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-20 20:46:22+00:00
My Google account is indeed protected with Yubikeys and so on. Years after I bought my first Security Key, I can name all the places I use it, whereas if I type 'pass' the list goes on for several screens.

But while it's true that OPAQUE is what you might choose today, SRP is much older. We didn't have AES in 1995, we certainly didn't have a workable AEAD but instead of waiting for 21st century technology Netscape shipped SSL - very flawed but points in the correct direction.

The web actually went backwards in a sense. HTTP is designed with an authentication layer, but it's not up to the task for modern systems so nobody uses it in user facing software, only some APIs.

This feels like a theme - we can have better things, improvement is possible. "Oh well, it's never getting any better than this" isn't quite as stupid as "Nothing could be worse" (followed often very shortly by the discovery that you've underestimated how bad it could get e.g. electing the "outsider" and then electing him against now he's a felon) but it's still a mistake.

As you may know I have a habit of re-reading old stuff I wrote, one of the classics is from when Let's Encrypt launched and I'm explaining to Peter Gutmann about ACME. Peter's take is that we shouldn't make these protocols at all, they're a waste of time, and if we want one SCEP already exists. As you know, ACME has been an enormous success, but at the time this was not obvious. Peter was assuming that it's never getting any better, but it actually got almost unrecognisably better and quite quickly.
by gambiting | 2025-06-20 20:47:05+00:00
>>Once you make it no longer viable, people have no options left.

Which implies that the people who continue driving are indeed those who have no other option, and those who do have taken it instead of paying the $9. Would you disagree?

And no, of course I don't imply it's a lifestyle choice - merely that some people(not all!) were driving in NYC even though they indeed had other options available, because there was no extra cost associated with it - now that there is, those people use those other options where possible.

Again, it's really fun to speculate why who and where is doing what, but if you have more specific data then please share.
by ben_w | 2025-06-20 20:47:16+00:00
> I said that a hypothetical system that used gen AI to interact with the world (get text, images, etc.) and then a system like Lean to synthesize judgments about those things could potentially resemble "intelligence" like humans possess.

What logically follows from this, given that LLMs demonstrate having internalised a system *like* Lean as part of their training?

That said, even in logic and maths, you have to pick the axioms. Thanks to Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, we're still stuck with the Münchhausen trilemma even in this case.

> Most of the "solutions" to Gettier problems that I find compelling rely on expanding the "justified" aspect of it, and that wouldn't really work with gen AI, as it's not really possible to make logical statements about its justification, only probabilistic ones.

Even with humans, the only meaning I can attach to the word "justified" in this sense, is directly equivalent to a probability update — e.g. "You say you saw a sheep. How do you justify that?" "It looked like a sheep" "But it could have been a model" "It was moving, and I heard a baaing" "The animatronics in Disney also move and play sounds" "This was in Wales. I have no reason to expect a random field in Wales to contain animatronics, and I do expect them to contain sheep." etc.

The only room for manoeuvre seems to be if the probability updates are Bayesian or not. This is why I reject the concept of "absolute knowledge" in favour of "the word 'knowledge' is just shorthand for having a very strong belief, and belief can never be 100%".

Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was his attempt at reduction to that which can be verified even if all else that you think you know is the result of delusion or illusion. And then we also get A. J. Ayer saying nope, you can't even manage that much, all you can say is "there is a thought now", which is also a problem for physicists viz. Boltzmann brains, but also relevant to LLMs: if, hypothetically, LLMs were to have any kind of conscious experiences while running, it would be of exactly that kind — "there is a thought now", not a continuous experience in which it is possible to be bored due to input not arriving.

(If only I'd been able to write like this during my philosophy A-level exams, I wouldn't have a grade D in that subject :P)
by whynotmaybe | 2025-06-20 20:47:40+00:00
You're right, it's not anywhere where the major US cloud vendors are.

Microsoft isn't much better : https://www.geekwire.com/2018/microsoft-releases-details-las...

I remember losing access to azure devops, even though it was hosted in Canada, because Microsoft didn't have a backup domain controller elsewhere than in their datacenter in Texas.

I'm sure OVH learned from this event and will use EU's investment to improve everything.
by nancyminusone | 2025-06-20 20:48:05+00:00
Don't mean to be rude, but your deep dives could be deeper. I clicked on 'How GPS works' expecting to see a certain Scott Manley video [0] there. Instead, it's 10 shorts I'd put firmly at the 'like n subscribe' end of the scale. Think I'll stick to my own curated list of creators for now.

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=qJ7ZAUjsycY
by const_cast | 2025-06-20 20:48:09+00:00
When people discovered that telling people what they want to hear makes them money.

My favorite example of this is the entire sphere of anti-science "health" stuff on TikTok. Seeds oils bad, steak good, raw milk good, chemo bad. I noticed something. Every single time, without fail, this person is trying to sell me something. Sometimes it's outright linked in the TikTok, sometimes it's in their bio. But they're always salespeople.

Salespeople lie guys. They want you to buy their stuff, of course they're going to tell you their stuff works.
by anonym29 | 2025-06-20 20:48:52+00:00
>It's old, it's outdated, yes that's your problem!

No, it's stable, it's reliable, it's the solution to all of the problems I had on Arch, Fedora, and other rolling releases.

And again, Nvidia drivers work perfectly right out of the box on X11.

Wayland? That's a new problem.
by AndroTux | 2025-06-20 20:49:27+00:00
Personally, I've used two services hosted by OVH. Both of them regularly (about once a month) posted on social media that they're sorry their service is temporarily unavailable, because OVH has a cooling issue/had a faulty hard/OVH S3 storage was down/etc.

Might just have been bad luck, but personally, I can't recommend OVH. I'd go with Hetzner any day of the week.
by lechatonnoir | 2025-06-20 20:49:39+00:00
Well, on a meta level, I think their community has decided that in general it's better to post (and subsequently be able to discuss) ideas that one is not yet very confident about, and ideally that's what the "epistemic status" markers are supposed to indicate to the reader.

They can't really be blamed for the fact that others go on to take the ideas more seriously than they intended.

(If anything, I think that at least in person, most rationalists are far less confident and far less persuasive than the typical person in proportion to the amount of knowledge/expertise/effort they have on a given topic, particularly in a professional setting, and they would all be well-served to do at least a normal human amount of "write and explain persuasively rather than as a mechanical report of the facts as you see them".)

(Also, with all communities there will be the more serious and dedicated core of the people, and then those who sort of cargo-cult or who defer much, or at least some, of their thinking to members with more status. This is sort of unavoidable on multiple levels-- for one, it's quite a reasonable thing to do with the amount of information out there, and for another, communities are always comprised of people with varying levels of seriousness, sincere people and grifters, careful thinkers and less careful thinkers, etc. (see mobs-geeks-sociopaths))

(Obviously even with these caveats there are exceptions to this statement, because society is complex and something about propaganda and consequentialism.)

Alternately, I wonder if you think there might be a better way of "writing unconfidently", like, other than not writing at all.
by adamcharnock | 2025-06-20 20:50:13+00:00
This is something we're [1] seeing a lot of interest in. I wouldn't say it is the driving factor, but it is a driving factor that's giving quite a lot of companies the incentive to finally push the 'Leave AWS (et al)' button.

Even so, two of the major hurdles we see companies facing are:

1. Skills/Training/Hiring – Converting a staff of engineers familiar with AWS/Azure/etc to a new provider isn't necessarily straightforward.

2. Migration & disruption – Untangling one's integration with AWS/Azure/etc, finding and testing replacement services, planning the migration, executing on the migration. All this can cause disruption and delays in actually working on what's important.

What we do is provide multi-AZ bare-metal Kubernetes deployments onto EU providers (we default to Hetzner, but are flexible, and can do on-prem). As part of this we: a) include monthly DevOps engineering time dedicated to each client, and b) handle the migration planning and execution.

We're really trying to help companies (particularly SMEs & startups) make the jump. We try to mitigate the skills issue by providing actual engineers integrated with your team. We try to minimise the disruption by handling the migration in parallel to ongoing development cycles/sprints.

If anyone wants to know more you can reach me at adam@ domain. I hope this was interesting and not too much of a pitch.

[1]: https://lithus.eu
by yupitsme123 | 2025-06-20 20:50:14+00:00
This analogy pretty much gets at the heart of what makes these policies distasteful. Me walking or driving through my own city or neighborhood, where I live, pay taxes, and vote, is not the same as me taking a trip to Disney. I don't do it just for fun. I do it because living requires me to occasionally move from place to place.

Auctioning off to the highest bidder the right to move around is cruel because you make it so that some people simply can't afford to exist in public spaces, and because you're telling people that their own city or neighborhood doesn't even belong to them.

The correct analogy here would be access to healthcare, water, or electricity.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-06-20 20:50:26+00:00
Scott:

> This isn’t about me being an expert on these topics and getting them exactly right, it’s about me calibrating my ability to tell how much I know about things and how certain I am.

> At least $250 million in damage from BLM protests this year: 30%

Aurornis:

> I forgot about the slightly condescending, lecturing tone that comes out when you disagree with rationalist figureheads.

> Since Scott Alexander comes up a lot, a few randomly selected predictions that didn't come true:

> He predicted at least $250 million in damages from Black Lives Matter protests.

Is this a "perfectly reasonable but critical comment"?

Am I condescending if I say that predicting a 30% chance that something happens means predicting a 70% chance that it won't happen... so the fact that it didn't happen probably shouldn't be used as "gotcha!"?
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-06-20 20:51:09+00:00
Right? People say this as some defense for regulation, but it's the opposite. Everything that can, will be misused. USA has a lot of shootings - where guns are the most common on earth - big surprise? But when you get beyond the surface knee jerk, it's almost entirely gangs over drugs. Well, those things are already "regulated" so clearly there is a disconnect somewhere between freedom and being mad at the next thing in the chain - punishing everyone because someone might be bad.

The adult take is that things do not have malice, people might, so address that because the world will never be regulated into safety enough for the people that don't get human nature.
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-06-20 20:51:18+00:00
The bigger short in "Memories", "Magnetic Rose", is one of my all time favorite stories (It's Satoshi Kon, Koji Morimoto, Katsuhiro Otomo, and Yoko Kanno !!!)

https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-secrets-of-mag...
by pierrec | 2025-06-20 20:52:01+00:00
I also played it back in the day and it seems perfectly accurate to me, at least in terms of control and physics. After a few goes I'm quickly approaching my old personal best on Who Says Penguins Can't Fly. One thing I'll note is that the "best score" display seems to be only based on time, not herrings (which I actually prefer, but I know that's not how you're supposed to play it).
by const_cast | 2025-06-20 20:52:01+00:00
> Stop blaming technology for the way humans misuse it.

Exactly, that's why I propose every person has access to a nuke.

Elephant in the room here: the scale of technology matters. Being able to lie on a scale that eradicates truth as a concept matters.

We can't just naively say all tools are similar. No no, it doesn't work that way. I'm fine with people having knives. I'm fine with people having a subset of firearms. I am not fine with people having autonomous drones, or nuclear weaponry, or whatever. Everything is a function of scale. We cannot just remove scale from the equation and pretend our formulas still hold up. No, they don't. That's why the printing press created new religions.
by Alupis | 2025-06-20 20:52:17+00:00
> a nation investing in itself is definitely something we need more of

It's always made me curious why foreign governments allow their critical technical infrastructure to come from other nations - even friendly ones. It seems like something you obviously cannot allow yourself to become dependent on for a vast number of reasons.

Yes, the EU and it's member nations should invest heavily in their own domestic technical companies and capabilities.

However, I suspect part of the reason there is no present-day "FAANG" in the EU is in no small part due to their relatively anti-business/startup policies, which while well-intentioned, obviously have had a tangible impact on their tech business field.

Maybe some technical founders in the EU can chime in on some of the challenges they face when building within the EU versus the US.