MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rossdavidh | 2025-06-22 18:02:30+00:00
Nice stuff for explaining what p-hacking is, but the big difference between medical "does this drug work" tests and software "does this layout improve signups" tests, is that in the latter, the downsides are much less. Most pharmaceuticals have undesirable side-effects, and they always cost money to produce as well as develop; a layout change (unless it has some huge code complexity, which it typically won't) has very little. The cost of developing it has already been paid. If it is more likely to help than not, the right decision is to ship it. This makes the importance of not p-hacking far less for software, than in the pharmaceutical case.

You may have some kind of ongoing cost (code complexity or server load or whatever), but in the example given, I would not expect that, and it wasn't addressed in the article. The cost of a false positive is an important factor. If you get ten probably-helpful, or even ten 50%-likely-to-be-helpful changes out, instead of 2 or 3 definitely-helpful changes, this is a net benefit.
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-22 18:02:30+00:00
> And from how my comments are usually voted here, I suspect that few other HN readers want to see more of 'em.

It just feels uncouth or unseemly to reply in the original post as an edit, and it’s unfair to the person you’re replying to, as they may not know you replied, because you didn’t, technically. It feels manipulative and like you are avoiding downvotes that would otherwise arrive when you comment on how your comments are voted on. This feels like thwarting the will of users and subverting the will of the users as expressed through their responses. It’s hard to even have a conversation when you edit/reply, so it’s not really promoting conversation like the guidelines encourage us all to do.

And this is as someone who usually agrees with you and your comments!
by danjl | 2025-06-22 18:02:36+00:00
Startups also have more non-cash options. E.g. they can offer more than 4 weeks of vacation, unlike many enterprise companies. As a CEO, when I gave people 6 weeks of real vacation, they would never leave, since they cannot get that at bigger companies in the US. (We also stongly encouraged them to use their vacation, because a healthy work-life balance is better for the company.) Startups also have more flexibility on WFH, travel options, and other non-cash benefits like providing more authority over your schedule and tasks. They are typically strapped for cash, unless they are not actually startups anymore because they raised $100M, and just like the moniker.
by the_af | 2025-06-22 18:02:55+00:00
Others have explained why MAD has nothing to do with "tolerating" the use of nukes, and is instead more about game theory.

But let me put it in familiar worlds from pop culture:

"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

(Because Iran doesn't have nukes, it's currently being forced into playing and making losing moves.)
by ngruhn | 2025-06-22 18:03:35+00:00
They just want to annihilate the non-believers. If the Jews wouldn't have priority, they would probably bully the majority Sunni Palestinians themselves.

> Just work on improving your economy, educating your kids, building up your infrastructure

Who cares about all this secular nonsense. Killing Jews, that's what god wants you to do. Doesn't matter if you sacrifice a 100x your own muslim brothers in the process. They die as martyrs. That's an express ticket to paradise.

I think this makes a theocratic regime even more dangerous than a (more or less) secular autocrat like MBS. These guys ultimately want something that's not in this world. How can make a deal with that?
by sanderjd | 2025-06-22 18:05:09+00:00
Not only will they not stop, this has massively increased their incentive to successfully create a nuclear program.

In the opposite direction but with the same outcome, the just-barely-enough aid that Ukraine has received after being invaded by Russia, has demonstrated that it's foolish for countries to give up their own nuclear weapons, on the understanding that a friendly superpower will protect them.

This has been a very bad decade of events for incentivizing nuclear non-proliferation. I hate it!
by udev4096 | 2025-06-22 18:06:01+00:00
Don't use it. Stop shitting on everything you disagree on. Besides, privacy is not black and white. No one is implying such a ridiculous claim. Just because you grew up in a disgusting for-profit driven web, doesn't mean that everyone is trying to get you. Believe it or not, there are people who actually value privacy and actively voluntarily support decentralized and non-invasive parts of the web without hoping for any incentive. Besides, majority of private frontends are extremely fast and loads in an instant, which saves a lot of time
by YZF | 2025-06-22 18:06:11+00:00
This is true but that happened mostly after Hamas already took Gaza. Israel would have greatly preferred for the PA to control Gaza. The regime change in this case was done by the Palestinians themselves. The Israeli right wing did to some extent strengthen the division once it was in place. The Wikipedia article reads like a propaganda piece and I would not trust it at all. I've lived in Israel through this period so I have a pretty good first hand knowledge/experience of the events.

The PA didn't really come close to negotiating peace and given Hamas were not able to. See Hamas' suicide bombing campaign during the Oslo peace process. The PA, somewhat as a response to Israeli policy, decided to pursue trying to force Israel to yield via a combination of armed and political struggle and not negotiate with it. Strangely enough security cooperation did continue throughout (and the PA is basically supported by the IDF otherwise it would likely have been toppled). This all happened after the Oslo peace process collpased due to Hamas.
by voidhorse | 2025-06-22 18:06:15+00:00
I vaguely recall some sociology and media theory strands that make arguments similar to the quoted post—that we are entering or have already entered an era of post-literacy. Our new language is a language of images, (tiktok, instagram), immediacy, and literalness (does anyone even understand allegory anymore? Does the average piece of media ever express a metaphor?). I don't have numbers on it, but my teacher friends tell me that the typical student's reading comprehension skills have tanked in the past few years.
by rabidonrails | 2025-06-22 18:06:17+00:00
Iran has killed, threatened, or killed-through-proxy many Americans in the last 50 years. They have created and sown instability throughout the region threatening Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia just to name a few. Notice that none of their regional neighbors have come to their defense.

They have consistently and openly threatened US leaders.

There was no diplomacy here.
by whycome | 2025-06-22 18:06:37+00:00
That’s the problem. Major polluters have convinced people it’s the small scale production to attack rather than the giant industrial polluters. We also allow incredibly inefficient engines that produce lots of pollution.

How about a pollution credit trading program then? If my efficient car produces way less pollution than your gas-guzzling truck, I should get the room to idle until I reach our agreed max.

A technological snitch program is a weird and messed up outcome when we ignore the base problems.

But, cool technical achievement. I’m scared that a similar parking snitch program is all too easy as well. Car parked 3.5 hours in a 3hr max neighbourhood? Get them fined and get a sweet bounty! Thanks I hate it.
by mellosouls | 2025-06-22 18:07:18+00:00
tbf i only started using it the other day after i googled it myself (though I dimly remembered it from the past).

I've normally used OP (as in Original Post) but that can get confused with Original Poster (and the initial comment rather than the featured article).

TFA is more specific and now that I've learned it I think its valid to use on a board where it is likely to be a regular useful shortcut.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-22 18:07:32+00:00
By high end I assume that you mean something like some of the AMD Versal series, which are made on a TSMC 7 nm process, like the AMD Zen 2 CPUs from 6 years ago.

While TSMC 7 nm is much better than what most FPGAs use, it is still ancient in comparison with what the current CPUs and GPUs use.

Moreover, I have never seen such FPGAs sold for less than thousands of $, i.e. they are much more expensive than GPUs of similar throughput.

Perhaps they are heavily discounted for big companies, but those are also the companies which could afford to design an ASIC with better energy efficiency.

I always prefer to implement an FPGA solution over any alternatives, but unfortunately much too often the FPGAs with high enough performance have also high enough prices to make them unaffordable.

The FPGAs with the highest performance that are still reasonably priced are the AMD UltraScale+ families, made with a TSMC 14 nm process, which is still good in comparison with most FPGAs, but nevertheless it is a decade old manufacturing process.
by vineyardmike | 2025-06-22 18:07:41+00:00
Within the last year or so, I discovered my city’s 311 app, which I’ve become addicted to. I don’t drive, so I’m always walking around the neighborhood, and got in the habit of always reporting graffiti, dumping, illegally parked cars, etc.

This had inspired me to try and make a few apps for civic use, but I discovered that many of the accessible web tools for my city have rules against bots. For example, the city maintains a list of locations and dates where parking is temporarily restricted for short term things like construction, but I can’t scrape it.

I really wish that the government (at any level) made more serviced and data available as APIs or digital formats. The government is usually bad at building/buying websites and services, and I’d have done it for free (or for $0.99 on the App Store).
by mcnamaratw | 2025-06-22 18:07:50+00:00
Great example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly noise music doesn’t support a lot of full-time jobs compared to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what Stephen Foster did.

We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.
by boston_clone | 2025-06-22 18:10:36+00:00
> Can I say again how deeply silly this munition is?

Honestly, I'd rather you not. For those who are more personally familiar with warfare and combat operations, consistently describing any sort of bomb as "silly" is childish and inaccurate to the point of making me wonder if there's an ulterior motive with your description.

This is not "Looney Tunes".
by tempestn | 2025-06-22 18:10:40+00:00
Ok, I see the logic, but nuclear weapon use is the brightest red line in the world. If there's anything a government wouldn't be forgiven for, it's that. I can't imagine how the calculus for the US would work out in favor given the risk. (Of course that assumes rationality, which one could certainly argue is lacking, but even still.)

Also 1000ft is an upper estimate, right? It's certainly possible the MOPs were sufficient.
by xdennis | 2025-06-22 18:11:27+00:00
This is the pattern of constantly moving the goalposts:

- There's no evidence Iran is enriching uranium past nuclear-reactor grade. What's that? They're enriching past 5%?

- There's no evidence Iran is enriching uranium past medical purposes grade. What's that? They're enriching past 20%?

- There's no evidence Iran has enough to build bombs. What's that? They have enough to build 10 bomb?

- There's no evidence they have a way to deliver bombs <-- you are here

If Israel doesn't continuously try to stop Iran, they might even have a 10 Megaton ICBM and you'll be saying "there's no evidence Iran has ever said it want's to destroy Israel".
by whstl | 2025-06-22 18:11:32+00:00
This remind me of something. In music criticism there are two terms, Rockism and Popism.

I feel like the intial drive against "Rockism" was to embrace different subcultures, like punk and post-punk, but later the result was "Popism", which became its own kind of orthodoxy, pushing critics into treating label-engineered chart pop as deep just because it’s popular or polished.

Back when I was a journalism student wanting to work in music in the early 2000s I used to frequent early internet hangouts for critics and it was interesting to see the change happening progressively, with critics increasively and progressively adopting a certain air of superiority over anyone who couldn't conflate popularity with genius.

For me the big chasm was over brazilian funk music. Sure I could see it a few times as somewhat interesting, and I could understand the appeal as dance music, but the old guard was trying to use old arguments to push it as "descendants of Kraftwerk" while the new guard was using socio-anthropological arguments to defend it. The music rarely stood for itself, and when it did was often on the back of previous music. I'm not saying it's automatically "bad" but its positive qualities were blown out of proportion by critics for me that it become grating.

Today the internet made it all even worse, lots of "pop culture centric" communities are 5% about music and 95% about the personal life of artists, the TMZ-level gossip, the memes, the constant fighting virtual wars with other pop-music fandoms, the metacircular discussion around the fandom itself...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockism_and_poptimism
by oldgradstudent | 2025-06-22 18:11:33+00:00
>There are multiple charges of corruption against him, which he is probably guilty of.

For anyone who is not following the trial, as soon as the prosecution's case-in-chief was over, the judges publicly notified the prosecution that they should drop the bribery charges as they are unlikely to be able to prove them.

The prosecution case for briberty was built on a hypothesized meeting in which Netanyahu supposedely instructed the director general of the ministry of communications to serve the interests of Elovitch.

During cross examination, the defense managed to prove conclusively that such a meeting, as described, could not have occurred. They also showed that the presocution had the evidence to show it could not have occurred.

Don't assume guilt or innocence based on heavily politisized reporting.

https://www.kan.org.il/content/kan-news/local/409910/ (use Google Translate)
by simpaticoder | 2025-06-22 18:11:38+00:00
Or rather, a prime example of education != wisdom != experience. Who has experience operating at the geopolitical scale? Very, very few. And this is by nature of the problem: coherent choices are only made at the individual level, by political leaders. The real cohort that should be considered expert are therefore political leaders, past and present. Unfortunately, they all have deeply ingrained bias for their own nation's geopolitical goals, and so cannot be objective. To make matters worse, the context of every crisis point is so unique as to be almost worthless in meeting the demands of the next one, so even experience is not necessarily enough for expertise.

I would argue that the best voices to listen to about such matters are the academic historians that focus on the region involved, and who've studied in great detail the evolution of the region over time, how crises were resolved in the past, and who therefore have an informed intuition for the current state of the region. Furthermore, because they are academics they are practiced in objectivity -- the ability to look at horrifying situations with fascination rather than disgust.

But such experts tend to be ignored for two reasons: they generally aren't charismatic enough to get attention, and "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it; those who do know history are doomed to watch others repeat it". This might seem rather gloomy. It is precisely the same level of gloom with which we would watch any slow-moving natural phenomena threaten life on Earth, for example. Like seeing a nearby supernova explode, knowing that one of it's nuetrino jets will eventually rotate and hit us within 100 years. The mass and momentum of geopolitics is enormous and almost impossible to change, with or without understanding.

So, we chat with each other, armchair quarterbacking this game in which no-one really has control.
by roughly | 2025-06-22 18:12:01+00:00
> But I guess you have your own version of that...

Indeed we do :-)

> That is why the Palestinian authority never joined Hamas's war against Israel.

The PA's reward for this is the settlers.

I think a basic problem for Israel here is that some relatively small percent of the population wants genocide, and they're the ones who've been driving the cart for the last decade or so.

What, to you, is the realistic road to a two-state solution?

With regards to the hostages - to an outside eye, Israel's bombing campaign doesn't really seem to indicate they're overly worried about the health and safety of those 53 remaining hostages.
by YZF | 2025-06-22 18:12:43+00:00
Israel reportedly took out >50% of the launchers. With complete control of the air space a launcher becomes a single use rather than its intended multiple use. The USA can defend its positions with Aegis/THAAD and its detection capabilities give early warning.

Israel has taken a lot of damage but relatively little loss of life.

Iran would be foolish to expand the war and they know it. They're not going to attack the UAE or Saudi. Iran's bluff has been called.
by perihelions | 2025-06-22 18:13:47+00:00
> "there was credible OSINT[0] warning"

That one was counterintelligence deliberately placed in OSINT to confuse Iran. The B-2's that flew west over CONUS in daylight, in plain view, were decoys on a wrong timing.

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/the-u-s-strik... ("U.S. Strike on Iran Began With a Ruse")
by anonymousiam | 2025-06-22 18:13:50+00:00
You've hit on part of what I think the reason may be. The C in SCI is "compartmentalized" (or "compartmented" depending upon what era you're from). Keeping information separated reduces the damage from compromise, but also prevents cleared people from seeing the big picture, which might confront the viewer with some ideological conflicts, and make them more likely to leak.

Both Boyce and Snowden leaked because of their ideological opposition to what they saw.

The truth is that "we" (the "good" guys) are doing the same rotten things that the "bad" guys are doing, and being part of that world can make you feel soiled. If "we" chose the high road and didn't stoop the level of the "bad" guys, it would put "us" at a competitive disadvantage.

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...

To survive, you need to rationalize what you see against your own values, and have a mix of patriotism and respect for the rules.

There's an ever-present danger of becoming corrupt within this culture. I've never been an "ends justify the means" sort of person, but most CIA/NSA people I've met are.
by bluescrn | 2025-06-22 18:14:02+00:00
Milking motorists is very profitable. Stopping more problematic crime, not so much.

So we end up with anarcho-tyranny, where 'real' crime is policed poorly, if at all - but loads of resources and tech are deployed aggressively policing+punishing mostly-law-abiding people for the most minor of infractions.
by daxfohl | 2025-06-22 18:14:27+00:00
I have to imagine google considered this and decided against it. I assume it's that all the high-perf matmul stuff needs to be ASIC'd out to get max performance, quality heat dissipation, etc. And for anything reconfigurable, a CPU-based controller or logic chip is sufficient and easier to maintain.

FPGA's kind of sit in this very niche middle ground. Yes you can optimize your logic so that the FPGA does exactly the thing that your use case needs, so your hardware maps more precisely to your use case than a generic TPU or GPU would. But what you gain in logic efficiency, you'll lose several times over in raw throughput to a generic TPU or GPU, at least for AI stuff which is almost all matrix math.

Plus, getting that efficiency isn't easy; FPGAs have a higher learning curve and a way slower dev cycle than writing TPu or GPU apps, and take much longer to compile and test than CUDA code, especially when they get dense and you have to start working around gate timing constraints and such. It's easy to get to a point where even a tiny change can exceed some timing constraint and you've got to rewrite a whole subsystem to get it to synthesize again.
by lisper | 2025-06-22 18:14:42+00:00
> The math tells that there are no privileged parts of wave function.

That's true. But my senses tell me that there is a privileged part of the wave function, namely, the branch that I'm in.

The way I think about it nowadays is that QM is like a Necker cube. You can look at it in two different ways. You can take the God's-eye view and look at the entire wave function, or you can take the mortal's eye view and look at only a proper subset of the wave function (which is necessary in order to recover classical reality). But you can't do both at the same time. For my day-to-day life, I have no choice but to take the mortal's-eye view because I am a mortal. All of the things that matter to me depend on classical reality, and so depend on my suspension of disbelief and acting as if my branch of the multiverse is privileged, even if I can intellectually jump out of the system momentarily and recognize that the mortal's eye view is necessarily incomplete.

> Didn't you admit yourself that if MWI works it's a big deal and will kick the chair from under other interpretations?

That depends on what you mean by "works". If someone can derive the Born rule from the Schrodinger equation that will be a big deal, a slam-dunk Nobel prize. But no one has done it, and I'm pretty sure it can't be done. I'm pretty sure that the Born rule is an emergent property of our branch of the multiverse. I believe the same is true of the Second Law and even three-dimensional space. You can slice-and-dice the wave function to give you physical spaces with any number of dimensions, but three is the magic number that gives you atoms and stars and planets with stable orbits [1] and so on. So I'm pretty sure the Born rule can only be explained by the anthropic principle. There's probably a Nobel prize waiting for the person who turns that intuition into a theorem.

---

[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/50142/gravity-in...
by oersted | 2025-06-22 18:14:53+00:00
This is indeed the previous generation, but it's not even that old. When I was coming out of undergrad word2vec was the brand-new thing that was eating-up the whole field.

Indeed, before that there was a lot of work on applying classical ML classifiers (Naive Bayes, Decision Trees, SVM, Logistic Regression...) and clustering algorithms (fancily referred to as unsupervised ML) to bag-of-words vectors. This was a big field, with some overlap with Information Retrieval, lending to fancier weightings and normalizations of bag-of-words vectors (TF-IDF, BM25). There was also the whole field of Topic Modeling.

Before that there was a ton of statistical NLP modeling (Markov chains and such), primarily focused around machine translation before neural-networks got good enough (like the early version of Google Translate).

And before that there were a few decades of research on grammars (starting with Chomsky), with a lot of overlap with compilers, theoretical CS (state-machines and such) and symbolic AI (lisps, logic programming, expert systems...).

I myself don't have a very clear picture of all of this. I learned some in undergrad and read a few ancient NLP books (60s - 90s) out of curiosity. I started around the time where NLP, and AI in general, had been rather stagnant for a decade or two, it was rather boring and niche, believe it or not, but was starting to be revitalized by the new wave of ML and then word2vec with DNNs.