MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by woke_ai_god | 2025-06-08 00:01:22+00:00
The GDP rise your talking about is to some extent an exchange rate phenonomena. Russia's currency collapsed in the early 90s, by the 00's it was able to strengthen and stabilize. Quality of life went down, but it was not proportionate to the collapse in GDP. Thinking about similar phenomenon occurring in the United States is kind of pointless, that would require a collapse in the dollars reserve currency status which would have dramatic ramifications world wide. The Dollar is the yardstick, if another currency became stronger, it would be the yardstick, and that's an entire regime change kind of for everybody. While Russia's currency can collapse in strength vis a vis the dollar, and then increase a great deal, but it was weaker than the dollar at every point. The collapse in its strength meant that it was difficult for the country to trade in that period. But Russia still had its domestic industry through the entire period, which wasn't affected to the degree that the collapse in trade and currency value would suggest,

Also the volatility of economic growth of smaller countries tends to be much higher than anything experienced by developed countries. When you start from a small scale, GDP jumps of 10x are hardly unheard of. While increases of such magnitude in an already developed country would be unprecedented.

Also, the Russian economy is just a series of frauds run by lawless oligarchs stacked on top of each other. The only limiting factor on them is when Putin randomly decides to throw one of them out of a window. It's a pure patrimonialist system, which is a system sustained by lawlessness, manipulation, and fraud. This is of course the truth of the fascist system itself, its simply an attempt to wrap the whole of society in one big patrimonialist network. There's a reason they had to invade Ukraine - the bills were coming due, and they knew the only way they could make good on promises they otherwise couldn't keep was a sustained program of national subjugation and exploitation. This was inevitable from the moment the system was set up. This system is inherently unstable.

The words of the participants in the system while it is ongoing are meaningless. They are wrapped in some kind of patrimonial network or another, supporting some kind of overhyped fraud or another that represents all their dreams and aspirations. They are censored, subject to constant manipulation, and deliberately manipulated with false flags and psy ops. Their whole society is designed as a giant cartwheel to shove people into various frauds. I can be sad for victims of fraud, yes, but that doesn't make them any easier to deal with before they give up on their expectations and stop believing the lies of the one who is defrauding them, who frequently sicks them on anyone who attempts to combat the fraud, telling them that "Actually that person is the one who's keeping you from getting your money!" Hitler arrayed millions of German youth upon fields of slaughter with such tactics once before, why would we expect any different outcome now? We should've known better.
by n2d4 | 2025-06-08 00:02:05+00:00
> So, "if people kiss your ass enough, they get contract" does not seem to be a long-term viable strategy. (Exhibit A: Musk.)

But Musk initiated it, by going against Trump's bill. The new conclusion is "to get contract, you must kiss ass so much and you can't say anything bad, ever"
by specialist | 2025-06-08 00:02:19+00:00
> the vast majority of people do not have the cognitive ability

Fascinating. I'd love to know more.

Assuming your statement is true: If most people lack executive function, then people presenting ADHD symptoms are the norm, not the exception.

Accepting that hard truth would change society, right?

--

Not to get too into the weeds about UBI...

> Ideally 100% of humanity would be on disability

Do you mean 100% eligibility, regardless?

> someone just needs to rebrand it as "UBI."

Or maybe you mean the original "negative income tax" proposal? (What the kids today call "UBI".) So that everyone's guaranteed a bare minimum income.

In either case: I agree.

We'd be able to greatly simplify our patchwork safety network. No need for special consideration for pregnancy, family leave, eldercare, recovering from surgeries, etc.
by Johnny555 | 2025-06-08 00:03:48+00:00
Single passenger cars still have a problem with density even if there's no need for a driver. Combining multiple people into one trip can help, but also lessons the utility of Waymo if riders have to go out of their way to pick up additional passengers.

Getting 1000 people downtown could be up to 2,000 Waymo trips (one trip to drop off the worker, another trip for the car to go back out to pick up another passenger). While one of these 56 passenger very light rail cars can do it in 18 trips. A light rail vehicle like the Siemens trains used in San Francisco can carry up to 200 people at crush loads, so that's 5 trips.
by pyman | 2025-06-08 00:05:21+00:00
Why would you come to that conclusion? Its really not that hard to understand.

They already had a library of templates, modules, components, and existing code, which they were likely reusing.

According to their website, their virtual assistant interacts with customers to understand requirements, recommends suitable templates, and assembles a basic version of the app automatically. Then assigns developers to that project, as shown on their site. In one of their blog posts, they mentioned using machine learning to generate dependency graphs, which was used to map out what needed to be built and estimate timelines.

Since 2019, they've expanded their AI and ML team and hired the former Director of AI from Amazon.

The issue here is that you're quoting articles published before GenAI or ChatGPT even existed. Back then, AI mostly referred to machine learning, it was a different landscape entirely.

I'm only interested in understanding why they lied about their finances. Because the tech they had was actually quite impressive.

We'll never know if they were reusing 40, 60, or 80 percent of the code. What we do know is that developers were spending 7 months (based on a screenshot from their website) writing code. So GenAI clearly wasn't used to generate the code. But to be fair, they never claimed it was.
by layoric | 2025-06-08 00:05:28+00:00
Again, it's a value judgement, so the answer is largely personal. For me, yes. The social license we give these larger companies after all the violated trust doesn't make sense. If your local shop owner/operator that you talked to everyday had the same attitude towards your when you went shopping and exchanged pleasantries with most weeks, people would confront them about their actions, and that shop wouldn't last long. We have created the disconnect for convenience, and tried to ignore the level of control these companies have on our day to day lives if they are so inclined or instructed to change their systems.

Cloud is just someone else's computer. These systems aren't special. Yes they are impressively engineered to deal with the scale they deal with, but when systems are smaller, they can get a lot simpler. I think as an industry we have conflated distributed systems with really hard engineering problems, when it really matter at what level of abstraction the distribution happens when it comes to down stream complexity.
by Centigonal | 2025-06-08 00:08:10+00:00
If you pad your output with something that doesn't represent silence, then any outputs that happen to have a non-standard length (i.e. nearly all outputs) will end with whatever sound your padding bits represent in the model's embedding space. if "0000" represents "Whoosh," then most of your outputs will end in "whoosh."

Here's a non-AI example: If all HN comments had to be some multiple of 50 characters long and comments were padded with the letter "A," then most HN comments would look like the user was screaming at the end. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
by digitalPhonix | 2025-06-08 00:08:59+00:00
Source?

They were targeting $7.5k for their in house honeycomb lidars and they have 12 of them - that’s 90k already.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/27/22644370/waymo-lidar-stop...

They also aren’t close to the $7.5k target (there isn’t any public source for that so you’ll have to take my word for it).

Also $30k wouldn’t even cover the base vehicle.
by baby_souffle | 2025-06-08 00:09:03+00:00
> Nukes already exist, and one country that gave them up saw that to be a huge mistake.

"nukes" here meaning "de-anonymizing" the internet. I don't think "but at least one country already has them so of course the DPRK should be allowed to have them!" is a good attitude to have towards nuclear proliferation.

I have no problem with a site/platform having a "you need to prove to us that you're an adult" policy. I am terrified that other government(s) will use "because of the children" to force these policies onto the internet at large.
by Retric | 2025-06-08 00:09:04+00:00
“social status and ability to direct human labor” doesn’t require ownership just control.

In the US congress controls in the funding, but in a dictatorship the guy at the top can unilaterally allocate billions and then manage how it’s spent. It’s not total control of all government assets but it is control of a significant fraction of a modern economy.

Just as a thought experiment, suppose he wanted to fund Doctors Without Borders or some other international charity. Do you really think he’d have trouble sending the equivalent of 1 billion USD in Chinese government funds to that org? How about 2 billion? Obviously at some point it wouldn’t work but where exactly that line is says a lot about the power he has.
by teitoklien | 2025-06-08 00:09:16+00:00
Idk why but judges typically care more about flexing their powers instead of having decent idea as to how their actions end up setting future precedent or harm to the nation. (Just like how they made donating infinite money to political parties by one individual a fundamental right to free “speech” thereby breaking all existing donation limits and completely breaking apart our electoral process)

The way this judge is pretending like there arent a gazillion ai models that can do this now

One can simply download a app like msty.app combine it with openrouter or ollama based local model and crawl and do all of this from their computer.

This order was absolute insanity and is going to make most corporate users be extremely skeptical with providing their data to american llm providers. This judge single-handedly put 100s of millions of chatgpt users privacy potentially breached and american businesses losing trust as reliable LLM providers not because of their own faults but because of judges like Ms. Wang

This is why America needs a Right to Privacy as a constitutional amendment for american citizens just like how some european and asian countries have.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-06-08 00:09:37+00:00
I like the question. Not sure how id do it. As a one off of the table is not too big id get all the IDs then write a program to pick 1000 at random. I assume randomness is more important than expense but that can be a clarifying question to the interviewer.

If this query had to be done regularly for A B testing or whatever I might suggest a salted hash. Given an id you hash and do a Bitcoin style "is it lower than X". Figure out X based on total user count and desired sample. This way you can tell if a user is in the set without looking at other records. You can also handle the user count growing or shrinking. But the trade off is rough numbers over exact numbers.
by kentonv | 2025-06-08 00:10:24+00:00
Did you actually read the commit history?

My prompts specify very precisely what should be implemented. I specified the public API and high-level design upfront. I let the AI come up with its own storage schema initially but then I prompted it very specifically through several improvements (e.g. "denormalize this table into this other table to eliminate a lookup"). I designed the end-to-end encryption scheme and told it in detail how to implement it. I pointed out bugs and explained how to fix them. And so on.

All the thinking happened in those prompts. With the details I provided, combined with the OAuth spec, there was really very little room left for any creativity in the code. It was basically connect-the-dots at that point.
by woke_ai_god | 2025-06-08 00:12:45+00:00
Nah Japan rejects a lot of people even for work visas, also the requirements for maintaining the work visa can be extremely burdensome. You are underplaying the amount of bureaucratic hurdles that the average person will in fact face.

This nation has always taken in at least some percentage of less well off immigrants. It's against tradition to do otherwise. I don't see why we should render the second category non-existent, or why that is some inherent good that everyone should agree to be the case? Am I allowed to believe otherwise?
by cycomanic | 2025-06-08 00:13:38+00:00
You mean it's very difficult to compete with a company that is massively subsidised by public infrastructure? That's what really killed freight rail in most of Europe, make the train companies pay for track maintance (often the rail companies even want this because it keeps competition out as well), while trucks atpapy very little of the cost they impose on the public (i.e. much higher road usage, causing most of the traffic issues).
by habosa | 2025-06-08 00:14:12+00:00
Comments so far are not discussing what makes this light rail “very” light, so here’s an excerpt. The project claims to cost half of “normal” light rail.

> The vehicle is battery-powered, eliminating the need for overhead wires. It features an innovative turning system, enabling it to handle 15m radius curves. This allows for installation in tight corners within the existing highway. The Council intends for it to operate at a high frequency, providing a turn-up-and-go service. The vehicle has a capacity of 56, is comfortable and has low floors to enable passengers to embark and disembark easily. The vehicle has been developed to allow autonomous operation in future.

> The new track is laid just 30cm within the road’s surface, minimising the need to relocate pipes and cables, which is time-consuming and expensive. It achieves this by leveraging cutting-edge materials science, while still utilising standard rail parts to ensure ease of manufacture.
by jjmarr | 2025-06-08 00:14:21+00:00
Let's say I'm in a large company. Someone on some other team decided to rely on my implementation internals for a key revenue driver, and snuck it through code review.

I can't break their app without them complaining to my boss's boss's boss who will take their side because their app creates money for the company.

Having actual private fields doesn't 100% prevent this scenario, but it makes it less likely to sneak through code review before it becomes business-critical.
by layoric | 2025-06-08 00:15:02+00:00
Claude and others are still in the adoption phase so the services are good, and not user hostile as they will be in the extraction phase. Hopefully by then some agreement on how to setup RAG systems for actual human constructed documentation for these systems will be way more accessible, and have good results with much smaller self hosted models. IMO, this is where I think/hope the LLMs value to the average person will land long term. Search, but better at understanding the query. Sadly, they will also been used for a lot of user hostile nonsense as well.
by AstroBen | 2025-06-08 00:15:41+00:00
I've taken this as far as I can. I love being disconnected from the internet for extended periods - they're my most productive times

I have a bash alias to use wget to recursively save full websites

yt-dlp will download videos you want to watch

Kiwix will give you a full offline copy of Wikipedia

My email is saved locally. I can queue up drafts offline

SingleFile extension will allow you to save single pages really effectively

Zeal is a great open source documentation browser
by wefinh | 2025-06-08 00:15:42+00:00
Trump is very interesting critter to observe.

>>>What is true is that accusing the president of the US of being linked to a pedophile ring is not the same as accusing some random scuba diver of being a pedophile.

I think you might have bigger issues here. Trump has links to mafia - and that is a fact. I'm more interested on what he was doing in regards to Ukraine, as post Soviet mafia(Georgian-Soviet Jewish mix in NY) via NY US Italian? mafia helped him a lot and gave him loans for his projects. Over the time Kremlins took over Soviet mafia and incorporated it - it might sound like a joke, but it is the truth - all the countries have mafia, but in Russia mafia is running country.

So, from the actions of Trump on how he is dealing with Ukraine, Trump is no better than Biden and Democrats that were frozen by fear because of the threats that Putin said. Which is good... if you want to see fireworks of nuclear weapons in action, because US actions(and inactions) are enabling that. Putin will use nukes on US - for many reasons - mainly because Putin is not at fault here and is misunderstanding American mindset, which is not completely decommissioned by Democrats.

From what I understand Musk simply has no leverage what Kremlin mafia has over Trump, also Musk is autistic who has no training on how to influence other people the way how Putin(could be slightly autistic, as he is mirroring what Russians want - just like Hitler did) does as he is blunt and uses brutal force, which people as social beings does not appreciate.

There is also significant difference between Trump and Musk - Trump can say things bluntly, but he also can operate on personal level and have different attitude to very important people - also he likes flattery. Musk has only one of those qualities - he can say things bluntly(but without confidence and aura of power), but as autistic he is completely unaware of when he should really shut up when he is not in control of situation.

PS Trump, Musk, even the opposition to me are insects and entomology of humans is just a hobby to me. Unlike most of people from US(and apparently people that can't understand that they are not part of US) I have my own thoughts, that I don't have a need to resonate and change in frequency according to some general line of one side or other.
by stevenwoo | 2025-06-08 00:16:01+00:00
I got a look at an early version of StarCraft source code as a reference for the sound library for Diablo 2 and curiosity made me do a quick analysis of the other stuff - they used a very naive approach to C++ and object inheritance to which first time C++ programmers often fall victim. It might have been their first C++ project so they probably needed to start over again anyways. We had an edict on Diablo 2 to make the C++ look like recognizable C for Dave Brevik's benefit which turned out pretty well I think (it was a year late but we shipped).
by cardanome | 2025-06-08 00:18:52+00:00
I used to think that being diagnosed would not change much but for me it did. A lot. Just having more knowledge about myself has been extremely empowering. Even just knowing myself that I have it helps me be kinder to myself.

Also there is ADHD coaching. Having someone who had ADHD themselves coach me through my problems was an absolute game changer.

Maybe that could be an option for you as well. Worked much better that traditional therapy for me personally.

As for medication, well for most people with ADHD it works really well and is worth the relative mild side effect. But that is most, for some it does not work unfortunately. I think it is always worth trying but yeah it is no silver bullet that works for everyone.
by alan-crowe | 2025-06-08 00:18:53+00:00
LLMs have taught us that there is more than one kind of intelligence. They are definitely intelligent, but not the specific kind of intelligence we were hoping for. We get to be wise after the event and move the goal-posts. It is not so much that they have the wrong kind of intelligence, as that we never suspected the variety of possible forms of intelligence. We are clearly making progress towards ASI, but we don't know how distant the goal really is, because we don't know what the goal actually is.

Fusion is much better understood. We are not going to create "the wrong kind of fusion" and have to come up with a new plan.
by zaptrem | 2025-06-08 00:19:53+00:00
In addition to what Centigonal said, even if the autoencoder was trained on only speech data, an all zero vector is probably just out of distribution (decoder has never seen it before) and causes weird sounds. However, given the hallucinations we're seeing, the AE has (maybe unintentionally) likely seen a bunch of non-speech data like music and sound effects too.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-06-08 00:21:33+00:00
Each downtime is an opportunity to learn the weaknesses of your own system.

There are certain scenarios you have no control over (upstream problems), but others have contingencies. I enjoy working out these contingencies and determining whether the costs are worth the likelihoods - and even if they're not, that doesn't necessarily mean I won't cater for it.
by baby_souffle | 2025-06-08 00:23:56+00:00
> Normalize age verification for adult-only services.

Lets not, please.

Normalization like this could absolutely invite overreach / abuse. The immediately/obvious one is now sites have a "this is/is-not a minor" data point to correlate with the user activity that they'll sell off to some advertiser/broker.

I don't recall where I heard it, but the quote was essentially "the perception of surveillance is itself restrictive."
by password4321 | 2025-06-08 00:24:14+00:00
I use Chrome for Google workspace, Firefox for ongoing personal logins, and Brave incognito for other browsing (restarting completely for a new session when changing gears).

Last week's discussion on a profile management tool offered several insights into how others a bit further down this path use their browsers of choice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44132752
by keepamovin | 2025-06-08 00:24:26+00:00
Being an asshole is a right ordinarily reserved exclusively for managers and is somewhat correlated with their insecurity/incompetence.

So the corporate principle is often not against assholery per se, it's against who's permitted by the hierarchy to do it.

I've seen this a few times. There's more assholes among those who have a "manager"-type title. But by no means are all managers assholes. I think it oftens comes down to: 1) emotional immaturity, where people don't know how to execute the duties of the office (getting others to do something) without some kind of abusive coercion / intimidation; 2) also likely comes down to people reflecting the authority style they were raised with - so those who were traumatized by abusive asshole parents are probably going to have that as a model of authority and reflect that when they have authority; 3) finally, I often observed it correlated with obvious insecurity, in that it seems to be a defensive mechanism where people who fear themselves to be incompetent/unworthy will compensate by trying to shore up their position with abuse of their colleagues.

Ideally, promotion should prevent/remediate such behavior, but I guess that the selfish-streak often displayed by assholes is mildly adaptive for the power dynamics involved in getting promoted. As a last point, often I think there's something else, that people tend to trust that "abusive/coercive" assholes will be able to "get shit done" (by, roughly, intimidating their team) - which there is probably some "truth" to, unless a team wholesale revolts against such behavior. Overall this last points reflects some room for improvement in human organizational dynamics in general.

As a counterpoint to the prevailing "assholery" discussion in this thread, it would be really cool I think to see counterexamples in detail of managers who greatly succeeded by being stellar people and really good managers. I think ideally the "asshole manager" trope will become a true relic of history, something antiquated like the tolerated alcoholic hothead, or whatever.