MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by greatgib | 2025-07-19 19:38:42+00:00
Woah, based on the title I didn't expect to read one of the most elaborate corporate bullshit I have seen coming from HP.

Basically, they just want to add constant and invasive useless telemetry, in the crappiest way possible to ensure easy access for them, unexpected hardware bugs and security breach as much as possible. Green washing again pretending that it has any impact on the environment.

For no added value for the user. That sucks highly.

What would be good for the user and ecologically is too ensure that every part is easily replaceable and user serviceable. Also reduce the useless crapware in the background consuming energy and reducing performance. But I guess it does not give you $$ worth of user telemetry data.

For reselling, everything has already enough info at sale time, as is, without keeping a daily log: - age of the computer - SSD health data - battery health data - model of all components that would give you info about their quality on the long run - you can easily check the state of the casing, screen, keyboard, connectors. - if it was easy to open, you can see the inside state, fan state.

For the rest, anyway there is no telemetry that will tell you if anything will fail based on its past. It just suddenly fail at random time by surprise, like the screen connector being torn. And anyway, again, normally if a component has a problem, like ram, you should be able to easily swap it.
by blibble | 2025-07-19 19:39:04+00:00
what power imbalance?

obviously if you give them cash deposit there's not much you can do, but with a credit card you can easily dispute the transaction

I always pay my bills in full and on time, but if a merchant tries giving me the run around I will simply dispute the transaction and then the pain moves entirely to them

with a credit card the power imbalance is entirely in the consumer's favour
by phatskat | 2025-07-19 19:39:11+00:00
I’ve been daily driving Arc for a while now and I’m very sold on the tabs on the left. I think it’s the mix of smart folders, pinned pages, and knowing that stale tabs will be automatically closed so it doesn’t ever feel too cluttered. Also the quick show/hide with Cmd+s is perfect, especially since it’s been quite a while since I’ve wanted to Save a webpage.

Side note: it infuriates me that Microsoft’s web-Office will “helpfully” remind me that it auto saves when I do Cmd+s but also captures the event so that Arc can’t handle it. Which reminds me…I can probably whip up a quick Boost to get rid of that - yay rubber ducking in the comments!
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-19 19:39:18+00:00
I do understand the point, but other then allowing a process of auditing to allow a middle ground of consent implied for first-party use only and within some strictly defined boundaries, what else can you do? It's a market for lemons in terms of trustworthy data processors. 90% (bum-pull figures, but lines up with the number of websites that play silly buggers with hiding the no-consent button) of all people who want to use data will be up to no good and immediately try to bend and break every rule.

I would also be in favour of companies having to report all their negative data protection judgements against them and everyone they will share your data with in their cookie banner before giving you the choice as to whether you trust them.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-07-19 19:39:38+00:00
>Who are these people

Clowns, mostly. Yudkowski in particular, whose only job today seems to be making awful predictions and letting lesswrong eat it up when one out of a hundred ends up coming true, solidifying his position as AI-will-destroy-the-world messiah. They make money from these outlandish takes, and more money when you keep talking about them.

It's kind of like listening to the local drunkard at the bar that once in a while ends up predicting which team is going to win in football inbetween drunken and nonsensical rants, except that for some reason posting the predictions on the internet makes him a celebrity, instead of just a drunk curiosity.
by lucianbr | 2025-07-19 19:39:44+00:00
The whack-a-mole thing is a huge "this thing is not useful" indicator to me, and I am really confused how other people don't see it. Ok, there's an agent and the agent is able to figure out stuff and do stuff on its own. Great. But it's trying to cheat and instead of doing what I'm asking it just tries to go the easiest fastest way to claim "job done". How is that useful? If I had an intern do this I would seriously consider getting rid of them.

This is elementary school stuff. Do the assignment, don't cheat. Does useful software get written by people who don't understand this basic fact?
by fragmede | 2025-07-19 19:40:24+00:00
What would a great leap forwards for humanity look like? Sure, making it easier to shovel out shovelware means more shovelware, but why is that a bad thing? If customers have a very specific problem that wasn't going to get solved because it was too expensive to build a custom solution, and they now get to have bespoke software to cure their ills, other than being judgemental about this hypothetical piece of software as being shovelware, why is that a bad thing?
by keysdev | 2025-07-19 19:40:49+00:00
https://schildi.chat is better client than Elememt IMHO. That was the whole point of matrix federated. You dont hear ppl complain oh I am going to give up on SMTP cause outlook or fill in the blank sucks. Then make another client or server.

EDIT:

It really sucks that the default implementation is so bloated. But I do not equate matrix with element.
by mlyle | 2025-07-19 19:41:13+00:00
Man, we have executive imposition of regulations since the very beginning of the republic. Hamilton's treasury department and customs. The 1792 postal act.

You can't have an effective executive without some kind of rulemaking authority.

Marshall wrote in 1825--

"The line has not been exactly drawn which separates those important subjects which must be entirely regulated by the legislature itself from those of less interest in which a general provision may be made and power given to those who are to act under such general provisions to fill up the details."

(And, of course, subsequent decisions have helped to draw that line more exactly).

> adjudicate violations of the regulations

You can always go to a real Article III court, but you need to exhaust the remedies within the agency first.
by ghjnut | 2025-07-19 19:41:30+00:00
It is, which I'd argue has a time and a place. Maybe it's more specific to how I cut my teeth in the industry but as programmer whenever I had to ask a question of e.g the ops team, I'd make sure it was clear I'd made an effort to figure out my problem. Here's how I understand the issue, here's what I tried yadda yadda.

Now I'm the 40-year-old ops guy fielding those questions. I'll write up an LLM question emphasizing what they should be focused on, I'll verify the response is in sync with my thoughts, and shoot it to them.

It seems less passive aggressive than LMGTFY and sometimes I learn something from the response.
by craftkiller | 2025-07-19 19:41:37+00:00
In addition to the great answer by jeroenhd, you also might have encrypted your secure boot signing keys with your TPM. This has the advantage that your signing keys can't be stolen so you know that your bootloader was signed on your specific physical machine. But this is not necessary, you can just store your signing keys on your SSD or anywhere/anyway you want.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-19 19:42:14+00:00
I remember the days when 1ms latency in Windows considered extremely good. Then ASIO came, and slapping that Red/Green logo meant any simple sound card get a 3x multiplier on their price tag.

So, having 2 samples of latency in most cases is way better than having 1 sample latency in some cases. Esp, for non-computer people, as you say.

Back then, on Linux, JACK provided a clunky setup, but a better experience latency/flexibility-wise w.r.t. Windows. Now Pipewire is probably way better (w.r.t. JACK), but I'm not recording anymore.

Mind you, macOS is not my primary OS of choice. I only prefer it for my portables because of the hardware it implies, and the OS's BSD heritage. On the other hand, I don't believe neither in "everybody shall know computers inside out", nor I stereotype people according the OS they choose to drive daily.

Both are bullshit, like you prefer to say.
by iforgotpassword | 2025-07-19 19:42:22+00:00
To add to the pile:

- The web client doesn't load any images/media anymore for me in new sessions. I log in, I cross authenticate with another client, no images load. At work I've a very old browser session going and everything works.

- We host synapse at work to explore feasibility. Been going on for about 9 months now. Public profile lookup is disabled. This breaks inviting anyone from our company from another server, when the inviting user is using element. Because element tries to query the user info first, and if that fails with an unexpected error code, it will not allow you to continue sending the invitation. There's obviously an issue open for months now, where multiple people suggested they just add a warning that it couldn't check if the user exists, with a "continue anyways" button, but the devs prefer to come up with idiotic excuses why that would be a bad idea.

I did some quick research myself then, and it looks like the profile lookup is relayed through the server of the inviting user to the server of the user to be invited. The inviter's server converts any http error code from the invitee's server that is "not valid" to a generic error, that element then chokes on, here: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...

i.e. Only 404 is valid, according to code and comment there.

But IN THE SAME FUCKING SOURCE FILE, they return a 403 if profile lookup is disabled: https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/blob/1920dfff40ad10780...

Can't get any better than this I guess. Cobbled together bullshit. I hope my company will consider this experiment failed soon and switch to slack or something. Anything.
by siliconc0w | 2025-07-19 19:42:58+00:00
Always check the bill, there are a slew of bullshit dark park-patterns here like charging you for stuff in the mini-bar you didn't take or pay-per-view you didn't watch.

In a normal market system, you'd think a business that routines tries to fraudulently charge their guests would be punished but either by the government or the customer but due to consolidation or just the total acquiescence of customers to this kind of abuse it's just business as usual.
by MrGilbert | 2025-07-19 19:42:59+00:00
I never heard of Roko's Basilisk before, and now I entered a disturbing rabbit hole. Peoples' minds are... something.

I mean, it's basically cheating. I get a task, and instead of working my way through the task, which might be tedious, you take the shorter route and receive instant gratification. I can understand how that is causing some kind of rush of endorphines, much like eating a bar of chocolate will. So, yeah - I would agree, altough I do not have any studies that support the hypothesis.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-19 19:43:10+00:00
Code is either fit for a given purpose or not. Communicating with a LLM instead of directly with the desired recipient may be considered fit for purpose for the receiving party, but it’s not for the LLM user to say what the goals of the writer is, nor is it for the LLM user to say what the goals of the writer ought to be. LLMs for communication are inherently unfit for purpose for anything beyond basic yes/no and basic autocomplete. Otherwise I’m not even interacting with a human in the loop except before they hit send, which doesn’t inspire confidence.
by asdff | 2025-07-19 19:43:38+00:00
I feel like I missed a lot of the early internet while it was happening because I had dialup and it was already a DSL/cable era pretty fast by the end of the 90s. So many times you'd click an image link and go "ehh maybe I didn't care enough to see it after all" after it only loaded 10% of the pixels after way too long. I couldn't even play runescape for years; the site at the time ran a speed test and would just tell me my connection was too slow not even letting me into the world to test. Parents would set an egg timer for computer usage so every second counted which only added to the frustration and stress.
by yencabulator | 2025-07-19 19:43:50+00:00
A system's purpose is what it does. Nix the language is used to generate bash scripts that are then run in a sandbox, and based on what I'm seeing it's not a great fit/architecture.

(Nix is not a general-purpose language. The concept of store paths etc is hardcoded in it.)

I can complain about the horrible, undebuggable, error messages on the slightest typos too, if you want? Nix is way too subtle to "win the readability contest".
by mauriziocalo | 2025-07-19 19:43:57+00:00
Related — these videos give a sense of how someone might actually go about thinking through and solving these kinds of problems:

- A 3Blue1Brown video on a particularly nice and unexpectedly difficult IMO problem (2011 IMO, Q2): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M64HUIJFTZM

-- And another similar one (though technically Putnam, not IMO): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkmNXy7er84

- Timothy Gowers (Fields Medalist and IMO perfect scorer) solving this year’s IMO problems in “real time”:

-- Q1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G1nySyVs2w

-- Q4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-vp4zGzwIs
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-19 19:44:11+00:00
> Some people/organizations send signals about things that we're not ready to fully drop it on the world.

This is called marketing.

> When my wife tells me there's a pie in the oven and it's smelling particularly good, I don't demand evidence

Because you have evidence, it smells.

And if later your ask your wife "where is the pie" and she says "I sprayed pie scent in the air, I was just singling" how are you going to feel?

Open AI spent its "fool us once" card already. Doing things this way does not earn back trust, failure to deliver (and they have done that more than once) ... See staff non disparagement, see the math fiasco, see open weights.
by cjs_ac | 2025-07-19 19:44:17+00:00
Copyright originates in the Statute of Anne[0]; its creation was therefore within living memory when the United States declared their independence.

No rights have existed 'forever', and both the rights and the social problems they intend to resolve are often quite recent (assuming you're not the sort of person who's impressed by a building that's 100 years old).

George III was certainly not surprised by Jefferson's claim to rights, given that the rights he claimed were copied (largely verbatim) from the Bill of Rights 1689[1]. The poor treatment of the Thirteen Colonies was due to Lord North's poor governance, the rights and liberties that the Founding Fathers demanded were long-established in Britain, and their complaints against absolute monarchy were complaints against a system of government that had been abolished a century before.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-19 19:44:41+00:00
It's in the ballpark if you include all energy source for the family.

100 rooms times, say, 50W (5kW) is 43,000kWh. That's over 10 UK families of 4-5 (4100kWh/yr) for electricity, or 2 if you include gas usage. So for Americans, it's probably must closer to parity.

The fridge does dump heat into the room, so it has a small additional penalty for the aircon in hot countries, but a small, but inefficient compared to a heat-pump, heating offset in cold countries.
by archon1410 | 2025-07-19 19:44:44+00:00
It is not "supremacist" to believe that depriving hundreds of millions of people from higher education in their native language is deeply unjust. This reflection was prompted by a comment on why Indian languages are not represented in international competitions, which was prompted by a comment on the competition being available in many languages.

Discussions online have a tendency to go off into tangents like this. It's regrettable that this is such a contentious topic.
by Arathorn | 2025-07-19 19:45:00+00:00
The corrupt room bug which pushed the OP over the edge was due to a corrupted DB index on matrix.org which caused millions of rows to be incorrectly deleted and was an absolute nightmare to debug and mitigate. You can see some of the story at https://marc.info/?t=175161814600006&r=1&w=2.

We need to write up the incident report; it’s not clear whether the root cause was a bug in postgres (potentially years ago, and only caused problems when we started using the corrupt piece of the index by coincidence) or due to potential corruption from a HW failure years ago.

The rooms affected should now work again after reconstructing the lost data. No data should have been lost over federation though; the room history should have synced up as normal. Also, only room state (not msgs) was effected. Do you have a bug report anywhere for the missing msgs?
by skydhash | 2025-07-19 19:45:13+00:00
1) That's why some tools have a simulate option, or you can just do a kill 9 on the processes you've just launched. Just make sure you've capture their output in a file

2) Again logs, if actions needs to be taken after the command has stopped. For immediate action, you can use `tee`.

Managing context isn't hard. I see more issues with ensuring the right command.
by c1ccccc1 | 2025-07-19 19:46:18+00:00
I mean, sure people can use this to fool themselves. I think usually the cause of someone fooling themselves is "the will to be fooled", and not so much that fact that they used precise numbers in the their internal monologue as opposed to verbal buckets like "pretty likely", "very unlikely". But if you estimate 56% it sometimes actually makes a difference, then who am I to argue? Sounds super accurate to me. :)

In all seriousness, I do agree it's a bit harmful for people to use this kind of reasoning, but only practice it on things like AGI that will not be resolved for years and years (and maybe we'll all be dead when it does get resolved). Like ideally you'd be doing hand-wavy reasoning with precise probabilities about whether you should bring an umbrella on a trip, or applying for that job, etc. Then you get to practice with actual feedback and learn how not to make dumb mistakes while reasoning in that style.

> And do we also pull this one out of thin air?

That's what we do when training ML models sometimes. We'll have the model make a Gaussian distribution by supplying both a mean and a variance. (Pulled out of thin air, so to speak.) It has to give its best guess of the mean, and if the variance it reports is too small, it gets penalized accordingly. Having the model somehow supply an entire probability distribution is even more flexible (and even less communicable by mere rounding). Of course, as mentioned by commenter danlitt, this isn't relevant to binary outcomes anyways, since the whole distribution is described by a single number.
by somat | 2025-07-19 19:46:33+00:00
> "Star ratings on major platforms increasingly cluster between 4.3 and 4.9, leaving buyers little room to distinguish products."

The good ol' 7 out of 10 problem. Where the entire lower half of the rating system is unused.

The way I solve it is to have 0 be the middle, If the transaction exceeded expectations you can give it a +1 if it failed to meet them give it a -1 (thumbs up/down if you prefer) you can even throw in a +-2 if you want to allow for more subtlety of expression
by achierius | 2025-07-19 19:47:09+00:00
"Many people die from X" is different than "you will most likely die if you X".

Most people who pass out in vehicles probably survive. Say we ignore the cases where you're on a side street, stuck in traffic, going at slow speeds, etc. (and just end up idling in the road with people honking/routing around you) -- so just consider the deadliest case, going at speed on the highway. While there aren't statistics for this particular scenario, we can look at the numbers for multi-car collisions in general, as that's near to the worst thing that could happen if you did just stop managing your car while at speed (gliding into the median is much less likely to be fatal): https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/.... One line in the report suggests this should be broadly comparable to what we're thinking of: "In about 40 percent of fatal single vehicle rollovers and 57 percent of multi- vehicle rollovers, investigating officers reported that no crash avoidance maneuvers preceded the crash".

Even still: the fatality rate is <10%!

Compare to >80% if you pass out while doing underwater cave diving.
by airstrike | 2025-07-19 19:47:32+00:00
I'm far from a Rust pro, but I think the dismissal of alternatives like Polonius seems too shallow. Yes, it is still in the works, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong about the idea of a borrow checker.

This is true both in theory and in practice, as you can write any program with a borrow checker as you can without it.

TFA also dismisses all the advantages of the borrow checker and focuses on a narrow set of pain points of which every Rust developer is already aware. We still prefer those borrowing pain points over what we believe to be the much greater pain inflicted by other languages.
by froh | 2025-07-19 19:47:36+00:00
that's still secure boot, isn't it? just not uefi but homegrown?

fine with me. I read GP as rejecting the whole idea.

to point at another elephant in the room: at some point I came to realize that the ME is a x468 running some BSD. that little bitch has full access to your machine.

if trust and security is the objective, we're in for a hard ride to find trustworthy hardware.
by meroes | 2025-07-19 19:47:50+00:00
Math RLHF already has verifiable ground truth/right vs wrong, so I don't what this distinction really shows.

And AI changes so quickly that there is a breakthrough every week.

Call my cynical, but I think this is an RLHF/RLVR push in a narrow area--IMO was chosen as a target and they hired specifically to beat this "artificial" target.
by watwut | 2025-07-19 19:48:05+00:00
> As he says, a tightrope act is just as difficult at any height. The only need to make it dangerous is because the audience wants the circus.

Tho, only a few of the people who engage in these dangerous sports are famous or earn money on that. As in, if you look at those sports, there are always people who seek the danger and possible self destruction. They do it, because they want to do them. Not because of the audience.
by asdff | 2025-07-19 19:48:09+00:00
Ironically people at the time were not discounting Y2K going awry. Parents told me years later that new years was spent a bit more tense with the cellar stocked with cans and booze. We make fun of it now but people had concerns about the supply chain and what might result from that if everything borked at once. I guess the guys in Office Space managed to save the world in time (initech in that movie was patching fintech software for y2k).
by alilleybrinker | 2025-07-19 19:48:27+00:00
For the disjoint field issues raised, it’s not that the borrow checker can’t “reason across functions,” it’s that the field borrows are done through getter functions which themselves borrow the whole struct mutably. This could be avoided by making the fields public so they can be referenced directly, or if the fields needs to be passed to other functions, just pass the the field references rather than passing the whole struct.

There are open ideas for how to handle “view types” that express that you’re only borrowing specific fields of a struct, including Self, but they’re an ergonomic improvement, not a semantic power improvement.
by nitwit005 | 2025-07-19 19:49:12+00:00
I personally suspect in many industries there is a sort of informal agreement about what is reasonable spending on sales and marketing.

If any single company spends more, and succeeds in gaining advantage purely by spending more, all their competitors will generally just be forced to follow.

But, no one really wants to follow that to the logical conclusion of spending all possible dollars on marketing.