MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2025-07-15 19:33:17+00:00
Disruption is disruptive and can suck. But it's also not new. Some companies and people will do short-sighted things in response and pay the price. Other job types and roles will simply be disintermediated and those individuals will need to learn new skills and find different kinds of jobs in the evolving landscape - same as always.

I just wrote a longer reply to a sibling comment addressing exactly this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44574895.
by shric | 2025-07-15 19:33:25+00:00
> Isn’t the second defined as a specific number of cesium transitions?

Yes

> How can anything …

So your cesium counting device will fauthfully provide such a count and depending on their altitude it will be at different rates.

Both clocks are each experiencing time at the usual one second per second but gravity dilates spacetime.

Locally, a second is always a second, but from everywhere there is no such asbsolute, just as there is no universal "now".
by Spivak | 2025-07-15 19:33:50+00:00
It doesn't have to, it just has to outperform humans on some tasks. Often really simple tedious tasks. Take this whole discussion out of the context of AI and instead look at it as just a machine. Machines outperform humans at all sorts of things, that's why we built them. Your dishwasher outperforms a human because it can wash your dishes on demand for pennies while a human taking that task from you would demand $15/hr. My car vastly outperforms my legs at getting me places. Email outperforms the USPS for correspondence. I don't know if there's a limit to the side of HN comments but I could hit it if I continued. These LLMs are a new tool that can perform tasks autonomously that couldn't be done before, and that's super cool. For some reason people get swept up in the mystique of it all and expect them to replace a human, body and soul, at every task which is kinda silly when discussing an advanced washing machine.
by tptacek | 2025-07-15 19:34:22+00:00
I said this elsewhere on the thread and so apologize for repeating, but: I know mid-career people working at this firm who have been through these conditions, and they were energized by the experience. They're shipping huge stuff that tens of millions of people will use almost immediately.

The cadence we're talking about isn't sustainable --- has never been sustained anywhere --- but if insane sprints like this (1) produce intrinsically rewarding outcomes and (2) punctuate otherwise-sane work conditions, they can work out fine for the people involved.

It's completely legit to say you'd never take a job where this could be an expectation.
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-15 19:35:06+00:00
The point of the nanny state is to stop aggressive actors causing widespread harm.

not allowing companies to poison people for profit, ensuring people are qualified to do safety critical jobs. Making sure that companies can't cut OSHA for profit, ensuring that buildings are built to withstand the weather properly, even though it costs more.

A lot of the "nanny state" shit is there because people died. Now, of course some of it is because conservatives/liberals/that class you don't like got their knickers in a twist as well. But that tends to disappear pretty quick.

But that means that big money can use that as a spring board to remove expensive regulation.

You want clean air? but thats expensive! nevermind, soot spewing engines is manly, everything else is what those people you don't like do.

You want social media to stop sending porn to tweens? freedom of speech my friend! thats what makes america better than communism. You want your child to read the great american novels? oh did we say freedom of speech? no we meant don't do our country down.

All of that is theatre, what matters is the food and drugs you eat are safe, effective and well controlled so that the most amount of good is allowed with the least amount of harm
by aDfbrtVt | 2025-07-15 19:35:10+00:00
To get a ballpark power usage, we can look at comparable (for some definition thereof) commercial offerings. Take a public datasheet from Arista[1], they quote 16W typical for a 400Gbps module for 120km of reach. You would need 2500 modems at 16W (38kW) jointly decoding (i.e. very close together) to process this data rate. GPU compute has really pushed the boundaries on thermal management, but this would be far more thermally dense.

[1] https://www.arista.com/assets/data/pdf/Datasheets/400ZR_DCI_...
by slg | 2025-07-15 19:35:22+00:00
The Matrix is an earlier and I think more impactful example of this. That is a movie made by two trans filmmakers and with hindsight it is clearly an exploration of their own identities. Yet somehow it has been co-opted by people with diametrically opposed political and gender ideologies[1]. That has to be incredibly frustrating as an artist and I bet many people have seen that sort of reaction and go out of their way to make it more difficult for people to be that wrong about their art.

[1] - https://static1.cbrimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2...
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-07-15 19:35:55+00:00
This is a baffling response. The politics are completely irrelevant to this topic. Pretty much every American is distrustful of big tech and is completely unaware of what the current administration has conceded to AI companies, with larger scandals taking the spotlight, so there hasn't been a chance for one party or the other to rally around a talking point with AI.

People don't like AI because its impact on the internet is filling it with garbage, not because of tribalism.
by tptacek | 2025-07-15 19:36:19+00:00
Yes, and the reason for that is that employees at OpenAI believed (reasonably) that they were cruising for Google-scale windfall payouts from their equity over a relatively short time horizon, and that Altman and Brockman leaving OpenAI and landing at a well-funded competitor, coupled with OpenAI corporate management that publicly opposed commercialization of their technology, would torpedo those payouts.

I'd have sounded cult-like too under those conditions (but I also don't believe AGI is a thing, so would not have a countervailing cult belief system to weigh against that behavior).
by zahlman | 2025-07-15 19:36:22+00:00
> There have been some reddit communities over the years doing this, but IME they frequently devolve into echo chambers. It almost always comes down to bad moderators.

In my experience:

Most of them are basically designed to be echo chambers from the start — opposition is only admitted in to the extent that it allows easy targets to knock down. Most people just aren't that good at explaining why they believe what they believe, let along making a convincing argument for it; so all you need to do is set up an environment where one side's position is the default.

There have been a few attempts at explicitly avoiding that problem. They do eventually collapse. But I don't think it's due to bad moderation. It's more that certain factions simply refuse to engage civilly and unemotionally with each other. They will see statements as inherently provocative that the other side genuinely consider matter-of-fact.

I was a moderator for a place like that once. It was remarkable to me how, on the "hot topics" that were polarizing and led to a lot of bans and suspensions, on one side people who were suspended would argue and whine and complain basically as long as we'd listen to them, maybe even the entire duration of the suspension, and they would never get it into their head what our standards were for respectful discourse; and they would even suggest that having such standards was inherently oppressive; and when they got back they would immediately go back to their old ways. And on the other side, people would basically say "LOL, see you on <suspension end date>" and disappear, and come back as promised, and behave themselves for a while.

And while there were a very few people who simply couldn't kick the habit of using slurs or other disparaging terms to refer to identifiable groups of people, there were far more — almost all on the opposite side — who simply couldn't kick the habit of openly insulting the people they were directly responding to. Or at insinuating negative character traits and hidden motivations not in evidence, or other such "dark hinting" as we call it. Or even just of using obnoxious, brutal sarcasm all the time when we expected people to speak plainly.
by teamonkey | 2025-07-15 19:36:37+00:00
True, but MPs receiving a few mails that say “this law has affected me in this way” is IMO far more likely to be effective than a petition with 100k signatures that says “I don’t like this law which you recently approved”.

MPs have been known to respond to letters. I have had responses to various issues. It obviously depends on the MP. Many MPs were very much opposed to this issue.
by Edman274 | 2025-07-15 19:36:57+00:00
okay, well that guy won an election so clearly it's possible even without sortition. If people are picked at random then the likelihood of getting some wacko is lower rather than higher, because wackos are more highly motivated to try to act on their wackadoo policies and because of the way voting is implemented, that wouldn't really be a problem for them because it no longer appears to be disqualification for a politician to be crazy, and the crazy ones are the ones who run. On the flip side, the actual rate of totally crazy people across the entire population is likely to be smaller than you expect and random selection would represent the underlying rate of wackos in the public. If it turns out that the rate of wackos is so high that like, 51 percent of your legislature is hearing voices in their head and living like Diogenes, then representative democracy isn't going to help you either.
by theletterf | 2025-07-15 19:37:11+00:00
For a company that has grown so much in such a short time, I continue to be surprised by its lack of technical writers. Saying docs could be better is an euphemism, but I still can't find fellow tech writers working there. Compare this with Anthropic and its documentation.

I don't know what's the rationale for not hiring tech writers other than nobody suggesting it yet, which is sad. Great dev tools require great docs, and great docs require teams that own them and grow them as a product.
by gretch | 2025-07-15 19:37:13+00:00
> For us at the time, it was magnificent.

At the time, did you think the quality of that DVD was about the same as the experience you got in the theater?

The parent post is arguing that the gap in experience between home theaters and theater theaters has shrunk immensely. Right now I have a 85" wide OLED in my living room - That's not a thing that existed in 2002
by PKop | 2025-07-15 19:37:16+00:00
"Summary: Garnet consistently achieved the highest throughput across all concurrency levels and under both workloads, maintaining large performance margins over Redis. Valkey underperformed compared to Redis at low to moderate concurrency, especially in the read-heavy workload, but surpassed it at high concurrency levels, indicating better scalability. KeyDB followed a similar trend to Redis but generally underperformed across both workloads and did not demonstrate any meaningful advantage."
by inglor_cz | 2025-07-15 19:38:28+00:00
>> The political parties generally support the process because it keeps socially divisive topics out of the main political sphere.

> Contemptible. If politicians don’t want to deal with socially divisive topics they should be doing something else with their lives.

That is debatable. Too much concentration on divisive topics can distract from actual governance. We are now so deeply immersed in the social media world that we tend to consider "constantly raging culture war" to be the norm and the expected pivotal point of all politics, but it is more of a disease of the system.

There is no hard principle that politics should be exclusively performed by elected politicians. Even in the US, plenty of states have ballot initiatives, thus outsourcing decisions about some problems to the citizens themselves.

If the Irish system works similarly and reduces the systemic "inflammation", so to say, by outsourcing it to sortition-based bodies, then I would argue that it might be more efficient at governance than the "rip their throats out over scissor statements" standard that now rules the US and many other places in the world.
by gpm | 2025-07-15 19:38:34+00:00
> > Blocking is the wrong terminology here.

> This is geo-blocking, by definition.

Do you also refer to steam games that only sell in some regions as "geo-blocking"? I don't. Steam doesn't (they call them region restrictions). There's no blocking going on, merely declining to offer something in the first place. Cloudflare is the host here, they aren't blocking anything, they just aren't providing the pirate site in the first place.

> when they don't have legal obligation to.

While I know relatively little about UK law I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that cloudflare does not have a legal obligation to not knowingly host websites committing copyright infringement.
by convolvatron | 2025-07-15 19:38:46+00:00
I had a Panasonic writer at work for doing vis. there was (I think) an rs232 interface, I wrapped it up in library an made a network api, so I don't remember. the cool thing was from a vis perspective that you could record a single frame at a time. we had everything hooked up to a rs232 controller analog matrix switch that did rs-170. so with that an an rs-170 -> svideo encoder you could put a record-frame call in your animation loop.

the lab I was working at had an internal cable-tv network (which also ran ethernet on some of the channels), so we got a channel and hooked that to the output of the switch.

so you could get live visualization outputs from your office, or route them to the recorder to store your frames, and play them back at a smooth 30fps interleaved whenever you wanted.
by vunderba | 2025-07-15 19:39:20+00:00
Basically markov chains trained on Gibsons books. Programming something like that is starting to feel like the "hello world" of information theory.

Looks like somebody even made a cyberpunk style markov generator:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/6g4weu/i_made_a_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain
by leakycap | 2025-07-15 19:39:27+00:00
The developer -sorry, studio- is the one claiming this is art. I was curious, looked, and saw nothing remotely resembling art.

I encourage you to review the App Store listing since that is what is being removed. The description on this free app still shows "80% off limited time sale!" on this art (which is now free, so the description makes no sense).

I think this is much ado about nothing. If you cared about the app, make it something people want. Nobody wants a game from 2015 with bad graphics and lackluster storyline.
by zahlman | 2025-07-15 19:40:02+00:00
I'm seeing quite a few plugs for lobste.rs ITT. My recollection of my impression from many years ago is that they had different politics from HN (I did read it every now and then, even if I only actually joined months ago) of the time, but that many posters were still very much engaged in ideological battle, and furthermore flagging and downvoting was used more to suppress one side of the argument than it was to keep the site tech-focused.
by waterhouse | 2025-07-15 19:40:12+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512145

"We've had a huge spike in traffic lately, from roughly 24k daily uniques to 33k. This is a result of being mentioned on more mainstream sites [...] You can help the spike subside by making HN look extra boring. For the next couple days it would be better to have posts about the innards of Erlang [...]"

"Ok, ok, enough Erlang submissions. You guys are like the crowdsourced version of one of those troublesome overliteral genies. I meant more that it would be better not to submit and upvote the fluffier type of link. Without those we'll be fine."

Also some fun comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=512178
by riku_iki | 2025-07-15 19:40:47+00:00
> but presumably the VCs have some idea of what Thinking Machines is building

you imply that VCs are rational because bet their own money, which in current complicated world probably is not true. VC funds get money from complicated funnel likely including my/your retirement account and country public debt, VC managers likely receive bonuses for closed deals and not long term gains which may materialize in 10 years. So, investing 2B into non-existing product with unclear market fit/team/tech moat smells very strongly.
by tesseract | 2025-07-15 19:40:59+00:00
> My family had a small B&W CRT that fascinated me with its image quality, in that it always reminded me more of a b&w photo than color CRTs reminded me of color photos.

The problem of a finite dot pitch interfering with image quality, especially on small displays where the dots were necessarily larger relative to the image size, is what motivated Tektronix to develop field-sequential color CRTs which they used in their digital oscilloscopes in the 80s and 90s. JVC also used the technology in some professional broadcast video monitors. Basically it was a B&W CRT with a changeable (liquid crystal) color filter in front of it. The R, G, and B channels would be shown one after another with the corresponding filter activated, in a similar manner to a color wheel DLP projector.
by busterarm | 2025-07-15 19:41:12+00:00
I put almost $20k into a home theater setup. And with what I bought and how I set it up it punches way above its weight. I only have to wait 3 weeks to 3 months to be able to watch a movie at home now. Why would I go to a theater!?

I used to make exceptions for independent films when I lived near an IFC theater, but streaming/vod services now have me covered there too and I don't live near one anymore.
by grafmax | 2025-07-15 19:41:30+00:00
I guess with the impending climate crisis quality of life will very likely go way down.

Climate catastrophe is expected to destabilize societies. A natural outcome from that could plausibly be the rise of extreme ideologies that advocate for nuclear conflict for example. It’s plausible human beings face an existential threat in the coming decades.

I think human progress is a chaotic process dependent on human choices, not a determined one. For example some hunter gatherer societies have lived lives of leisure working as little as 15-20 hours per week - quite a lot of ease compared to the modern work week most of us see. Human history is much more heterogenous and chaotic than what one might conclude from a perspective limited to today, medieval peasants, and ancient Egypt.

Luxuries I think should be viewed critically also. The effect of luxuries is unfortunately likely canceled by the hedonic treadmill. In our current society roughly 30% of people are suffering from mental illness like anxiety or depression. This is despite having iPhones instead of landlines.

You are right that longevity has increased over the long term. I think this is a stronger area of your argument. But is longevity alone a good measure for quality of life? I think we should include other factors, like happiness. Unfortunately we just don’t have those statistics over any meaningful horizon.

Overall I think measuring quality of life over the long history of our species isn’t quite as straightforward as you make it out to be. We must be wary of adopting just so stories. Quite a lot of heterogeneous human experience falls under this generalization, and most of it, at the very least, we just don’t have good data for.

In my view, progress that human beings experience is contingent, the result of our choices. Sadly I don’t think there is an arrow of history that guarantees a better future for our species. The risks we face in the upcoming years are immense. If there is a better future waiting for us, I believe it’s one we will have to fashion ourselves. Relying on an abstract concept like the arrow of progress can even be dangerous if it misleads us into forsaking our agency in fashioning our collective future.
by egeres | 2025-07-15 19:41:47+00:00
> Assuming genAI won't deliver and make that world disappear entirely, ofc.

Even if genAI were to kill the cinema/animation back-end industry, I still think 3D software would be needed to continue videogame development, and godot is far behind in modelling/animation capabilities compared to blender. Hopefully they can latch on this in the long term if it happens that AI keeps eating artists lunch.
by mindslight | 2025-07-15 19:41:55+00:00
It's not even just the "incentives", but rather the main issue that people have a legitimate problem with - depression of the labor market. Regardless of the viciousness signalling, Trump always backs down when posturing meets reality - he was certainly bound to do so on an issue directly affecting his business empire! His only real skill is being a really good con artist. He is not even good at running businesses, hence the simplistic fascism of just ordering people around.

And so, if you actually care about addressing illegal immigration, or any other issue that requires a competent government, then Trump has been a step backwards for you regardless of how you may feel. Your first step is now admitting your mistake and working to get rid of Trump, alongside every other American.
by marshray | 2025-07-15 19:42:04+00:00
This was so great.

I can imagine that people who grew up around graphical computer user interfaces (mouse, touch) would feel that they were sort of pre-ordained, just waiting for the chips to enable them.

But it was broadly-literate, deeply introspective, people who understood that computers could be an extension of the human mind and not just business and science tools. And this would require human-centric design.

"So when John McCarthy saw a [networked] air defense graphics terminal in the 50's [1], which was designed for tracking Russian bombers, his first thought was 'every home will have one'."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/FSQ-7_Combat_Direction_Cent...
by mlyle | 2025-07-15 19:42:13+00:00
> Again you are wrong. Why do you make stuff up when you are in over your head?

If your next comment includes something like this again, I will not respond. You can "win" the last word by including insulting language like this.

https://www.lazard.com/media/uounhon4/lazards-lcoeplus-june-...

"Reflects the average of the high and low LCOE marginal cost of operating fully depreciated gas peaking, gas combined cycle, coal and nuclear facilities, inclusive of decommissioning costs for nuclear facilities. Analysis assumes that the salvage value for a decommissioned gas or coal asset is equivalent to its decommissioning and site restoration costs. Inputs are derived from a benchmark of operating gas, coal and nuclear assets across the U.S. Capacity factors, fuel, variable and fixed operating expenses are based on upper- and lower-quartile estimates derived from Lazard’s research"

Reactors in the US are required to prefund decommissioning and to pay into a government-run waste disposal program. They also pay for the first $450M of accident insurance and pay into a secondary $12B liability pool.

No US accident has ever tapped the secondary liability pool.

These are all ordinary operating costs.

> I love how you resorted to inventing new costs for storage when even you realized you couldn't dodge reality anymore.

Again loaded language. No, I'm saying using the amortized as-built capital costs-- like Lazard does-- to figure LCOE is reasonable. There's reasons it's pessimistic (we may have some useful life left in batteries; we may be able to keep using components and infrastructure even if we replace batteries). There's reasons it's optimistic (e.g. battery recycling and disposal costs; possible obsolescence or changes in patterns of need; etc). In the end, until we have experience we have to use something in the ballpark, and as-built costs amortized over design life is reasonable.