MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toast0 | 2025-07-17 03:22:20+00:00
For buy and hold investors, stock buybacks do nothing, whereas dividends create real taxable income. Either you take the income, minus taxes, and spend it, or you reinvest it into the stock, again minus taxes.

If you reinvest it into the stock, you've had to pay taxes on the dividend amount, so you've lost vs a buyback.

If you want to spend money and your stocks don't issue dividends, you just have to sell some of your shares. Selling $X of shares will almost always generate less taxable income than receiving $X of dividends as some of it will be a return of capital; so again, if you take $X out of the holdings, you've lost with a dividend vs a buyback and you sold $X.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-07-17 03:22:30+00:00
Sure, and there are systems that work to prevent or those people from practicing. Imperfect systems, to be sure, but at least I as a citizen can look up the training and practice standards for therapists in my state, and I have some recourse if I encounter a bad therapist.

What safety systems exist to catch bad AI therapists? At this point, the only such systems (at least that I'm aware of) are built by the AI companies themselves.
by sobellian | 2025-07-17 03:23:20+00:00
There is so much work for skilled tradesmen that they would rather see more automation so they can take more jobs. Even many unions, e.g. carpenters' unions, think this way.

I mean no large group is a monolith so I'm sure one can find opinions either way among tradesmen. But IMO the problem is so big that it's no longer revenue maximizing for anyone, even the workers. By some measures productivity has actually been declining for construction. If that was good for workers then we should just set them to digging a second Panama Canal with spoons.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-07-17 03:23:30+00:00
Ha ha, which schools? I can list Pawnee, Apache, Comanche, Somerset, Meadowbrook and Shawnee Mission East (although the latter ones were in Prairie Village, KS).

Yeah, we moved around the 'burbs a bit.

Also: another experimental "Free" school in the 1970's for one year was P.A.C.E.R.S. in KCMO, and then a partial year at a Catholic School in KCMO: Saint Francis Xavier, ha ha.
by cyral | 2025-07-17 03:24:34+00:00
As someone who ran an iOS app for years

- Very little users know this is in the settings app (there are thousands of other settings that are two steps away, how many can you name?). How many people have ever clicked on their name in the settings app to see what is inside, despite it being the first item? Apple gets a cut of every transaction so it's in their interest to make it hard to stumble upon the subscription list by accident.

- Very little users understand that Apple is billing them. They buy something from X Corp and expect X Corp to be able to help them, the idea that everything is really through Apple is a foreign concept.
by AngryData | 2025-07-17 03:24:39+00:00
It is if you aren't adverse to training people and living with lower productivity for a few months as they learn. The biggest obstacle to becoming a heavy equipment operator is finding someone willing to put you in heavy equipment without already being an experienced heavy equipment operator. And the machines cost enough money that someone can't afford to just go buy their own excavator and practice, even really old used equipment that leaks fluids and can't run more than 20 minutes without overheating can cost 6 figures, especially if you also need a truck and large equipment trailer to move it. And even if someone likes the job and gets past those obstacles there are other restrictions, like drug usage, that keeps many people out of the business. You went home and smoked a joint last week but this week something broke or went wrong? Well you better hope they don't fear any liability because they will drug test you, fire you, and black list you to shed all liability.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-17 03:24:53+00:00
> A human may also possess malevolent tendencies that a silicon intelligence lacks.

And an LLM may be trained on malevolent data of which a human is unaware.

> The question is not if they are equals, the question is if their differences matter to the endeavour of therapy.

I did not pose the question of equality and apologize if the following was ambiguous in any way:

... they are humans which possess intrinsic aptitudes a statistical text (token) generator simply does not have.

Let me now clarify - "silicon" does not have capabilities humans have relevant to successfully performing therapy. Specifically, LLM's are not an equal to human therapists excluding the pathological cases identified above.
by Ohkay | 2025-07-17 03:25:57+00:00
The things that just work that I look for are mouseover to get info on an identifier (local or external), right click to go to the definition, and running code in the debugger with a click. Maybe I just don’t know how to set that up in vscode; I’m a company of one and don’t have a coworker to ask how to do it. My Python work was just making requests, analyzing the data and outputting results to csv’s. This was replaced by Rust and then C. And the C is 60k loc as it does much more. In Clion when you open a cmake project it automatically understands your project structure from the cmake files and provides those need-to-have features I listed.
by MiddleEndian | 2025-07-17 03:26:42+00:00
>you have to compare the actual phone sizes, not the screen sizes. bezels have gotten smaller.

This is true, and it's hard to fully assess without a tool like you linked, which is pretty neat.

>the article's "small phone" benchmark with a 5.4" screen is almost the same size in every dimension as your benchmark of the HTC 8x

But as mentioned, I don't consider the 8X to be small. It's a standard-sized phone in my eyes.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-17 03:27:18+00:00
> European condiment sets were made with three shakers: salt, pepper, and well, no one is really sure.

Mustard seems to be the agreed answer for the third condiment, though some people hold out for sugar instead. (Sugar seems to be unlikely because it wasn't cheap enough to be commonplace until after the third shaker fell out of use).
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-17 03:27:21+00:00
Congrats to your girlfriend! Actually shipping their own app is a feat that many programmers never achieve, instead spending their entire lives working on projects for others.

I'm going to jump on this to think aloud about the unlock this ability gives the world for customized apps. My neighbor is a landscaper and he is constantly complaining to me about invoicing software. He has gone through 10+ apps trying to find one that fits his particular set of requirements. He was telling me recently that he spent several phone calls with a developer who had shipped an iOS app that was close to what he needed trying to explain what he wanted. He knows I am a programmer and is always hinting that I should develop an app that would meet his requirements.

But I know better. Invoicing/scheduling software is really difficult, especially to appeal to everyone. Each small business has so many tiny requirements that are specific to their business and their personality. You can't just have one piece of software that appeals to everyone, that meets all of the requirements, without it becoming bloated and complicated. And if I built to his particular requirements, I would have exactly 1 customer, which isn't sustainable as a business (I mean, he wants to pay ~20/month).

But now we have a world where that kind of highly customized software will be possible. As more and more LLM-ready building blocks emerge, custom software may become the norm rather than the exception.
by ulfw | 2025-07-17 03:28:12+00:00
LOL. So now it's not even their own skill but the "experience of having worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies" that would value a nothingburger 12 Billion dollars.

I am sure there must be a better argument that just that. Because I have "worked with certain people at well-funded and rapidly growing companies" a lot and I'm worth nothing whatsoever.
by jmyeet | 2025-07-17 03:28:32+00:00
Automation will break the back of capitalism. That's a good thing. But it's going to get very bad before that happens.

There are a ton of jobs that should be automated like working in an Amazon warehouse. Automation can go one of two ways: it can make all of our lives easier or it can displace the workforce and suppress the wages of those who remain so those are the very top can have $250 billion isntead of $200 billion.

Those displaced will be told to find new jobs and that will work for a time with considerable personal hardship for those affected. We've seen the impacts of this with manufacturing jobs being shipped overseas from the Rust Belt, for example. But at some point we'll start to run out of jobs for people to go. And then things will get very, very bad.

I imagine a distant future where food is grown with automation, houses will be built that way, robots will pick up the trash and so on. This will leave people to find more meaningful pursuits. But this will require the ultra-wealthy to share and history has taught us that this will get bloody.

Instead we'll face a future where companies will fail because there simply aren't customers because nobody can afford anything.

I welcome less labor intensive constructions but construction is a significant (~20%?) sector of the economy. The potential for negative impacts from such mass layoffs is enormous.

and as others have mentioned: there's a ton of cost built in that really comes down to corruption and overcoming NIMBYism.
by coliveira | 2025-07-17 03:28:55+00:00
Computer scientists are, in part, responsible for the public confusion about what LLMs are and can do. Tech investors and founders, however, are the biggest liars and BS peddlers when they go around saying irresponsible things like LLMs are on the verge of becoming "conscious" and other unfounded and impossible things (for LLMs). It's not a surprise that many people believe that you can have a personal "conversation" with a tool that generates text based on statistical analysis of previous data.
by nxobject | 2025-07-17 03:30:01+00:00
It's a very laid-back place - more of a "you're missing out on life if you're not enjoying nature every weekend" type of place. Lots of new parents in the mid-to-late 30s (I think the highest proportion of any major city, actually.)

I think what hampers Oregon is that there isn't much non-Intel investment in R&D in the Portland region as well, compared to the Bay Area – there used to be a graduate institute funded by Tek et al., but that never got sustained. [1] The local academic medical research center is well-regarded and otherwise wouldn't have trouble attracting talent if it wasn't for the salaries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Graduate_Institute
by fsckboy | 2025-07-17 03:30:28+00:00
it's not hard to read for native speakers, but you have to go slowly, where ordinary reading is very fast. reminds me of the experiment that shows you can read words with all the letters scrambled if the first and last letter are not part of the scramble https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let... I assume that works in any language? but that "reads" fairly quickly whereas this one here for me at least is a little slower
by iFire | 2025-07-17 03:30:39+00:00
In godot engine we decide to do a continuous level of detail based a pixel error metric. (simplified explanation pixel-error -> based on fov -> based on floating point error of the meshopt_simplifyWithAttributes function)

The 12 ish lods are automatically generated by https://github.com/zeux/meshoptimizer.

https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/3d/mesh_lod...

We allow a hierarchical level of detail if people want to set it up.
by TheDong | 2025-07-17 03:30:40+00:00
Instagram, Tiktok, and Google have gotten users addicted to consuming content, and larger screens help with that.

We are helplessly addicted to digital cocaine, and so we demand large phones, and so motorola will not make money selling a small phone.

It's like the parent said: our addiction is the product, and so just like a chain-smoker will say "I want to quit" as they buy 5 packs a day, a modern smartphone user will say "I want a smaller screen and to look at ads less" as they hopelessly buy a 10 inch phablet and can't go 5 minutes without pulling it from their pocket to check tiktok.

It is not that the money from advertising flows, it is that the addicted users have already been ruined, and will not buy the devices they say they want.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-07-17 03:31:09+00:00
Jujitsu threw in the towel and is shelling out to the git CLI because of minor variations in libgit vs the binary.

Failing to find a write-up, but there was this lobster thread[0] where someone from GitLab reported they had to do the same owing to some discrepancies vs the binary -where all of the real development happens.

[0] https://lobste.rs/s/vmdggh/jujutsu_v0_30_0_released
by frosted-flakes | 2025-07-17 03:31:30+00:00
At 193 cm in height, I have large hands too. I currently use a Zenfone 10 and a Galaxy S10e before that, and I can grip them both just fine in one hand, but I can't also control them with that same hand without awkward contortions and a reliance on gravity.

The only phones I've had that I could comfortably use one-handed were my old BlackBerry Q10 (2013) and BlackBerry Classic (2014). The Q10 because it's short enough to hold between my thumb and ring finger such that I could use my index and middle fingers on the touch screen (slightly unorthodox but it worked really well), and the larger Classic because it has an optical thumbpad and excellent software support for it (it was so good I rarely used the touch screen at all). And both had physical keyboards.
by iFire | 2025-07-17 03:32:11+00:00
Our budget couldn't afford Epic Games style nanite, but there are three js implementions.. so it's not impossible to recreate.

- https://github.com/AIFanatic/three-nanite

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42974461

three-nanite is based on https://github.com/zeux/meshoptimizer cutting each mesh into maybe 124 triangles per chunk.
by JimDabell | 2025-07-17 03:32:39+00:00
They have been called “dickbars” before [0].

> Kill-sticky, a bookmarklet to remove sticky elements and restore scrolling (174 comments)

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32998091

[0] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/06/27/mcdiarmid-stick...
by ta8645 | 2025-07-17 03:32:40+00:00
> Let me now clarify - "silicon" does not have capabilities humans have relevant to successfully performing therapy.

I think you're wrong, but that isn't really my point. A well-trained LLM that lacks any malevolent data, may well be better than a human psychopath who happens to have therapy credentials. And it may also be better than nothing at all for someone who is unable to reach a human therapist for one reason or another.

For today, I'll agree with you, that the best human therapists that exist today, are better than the best silicon therapists that exist today. But I don't think that situation will persist any longer than such differences persisted in chess playing capabilities. Where for years I heard many people making the same mistake you're making, of saying that silicon could never demonstrate the flair and creativity of human chess players; that turned out to be false. It's simply human hubris to believe we possess capabilities that are impossible to duplicate in silicon.
by sashank_1509 | 2025-07-17 03:35:24+00:00
Second hand knowledge, I have a cousin in Intel Oregon. Intel mass hires PhDs in Physics/ Chemistry or Biology etc, reasoning that a PhD is enough to learn whatever is needed for a process engineer. Assume 30-40 people hired every cohort and there is 12 or so cohorts a year. Another curious thing I noticed, was Intel had online multi correct tests for its engineers that they had to pass weekly, presumably to keep track whether they are actually learning on the job or not. The multi correct tests though just seem like rote memorization and easy to cheat.

Overall my 5000 ft view, was the culture was very different from FAANG or a Bay Area Tech company. If the Bay Area approach is high ownership and high accountability, Intel was much more process driven and low ownership. They even tracked hours worked for engineers in Oregon.
by apical_dendrite | 2025-07-17 03:35:25+00:00
High levels of engagement aren't necessarily a good thing.

One problem is that the advice is dangerous, but there's an entirely different problem, which is the LLM becoming a crutch that the person relies on because it will always tell them what they want to hear.

Most people who call suicide hotlines aren't actually suicidal - they're just lonely or sad and want someone to talk to. The person who answers the phone will talk to them for awhile and validate their feelings, but after a little while they'll politely end the call. The issue is partly that people will monopolize a limited resource, but even if there were an unlimited number of people to answer the phone, it would be fundamentally unhealthy for someone to spend hours a day having someone validate their feelings. It very quickly turns into dependency and it keeps that person in a place where they aren't actually figuring out how to deal with these emotions themselves.
by xeonmc | 2025-07-17 03:37:06+00:00
So this is essentially the equivalent of teaching only hiragana for years and then immediately throw you into the deep end expecting you to suddenly know all the kanjis already, without any transition of gradually accumulating the mapping of morphemes to phonemes.

It seems to me that this ITA would have been quite useful had it served an annotative role taught in tandem with canonical spellings to build the morpheme-to-phoneme mapping. Akin to kana rubytext for kanji in books targeted for younger learners that are then elided for adult readers.
by guiambros | 2025-07-17 03:37:38+00:00
I don't understand where you're coming from. From the article: "1Password draws a firm line: we will not use MCP to expose raw credentials or secrets."

That seems a pretty reasonable argument to me. MCP is a complete hack, and the risk of agents going rogue (or getting hacked, or finding some vulnerability, 0-day, etc) and exposing your entire secrets database is just too high for 1P to accept. As a customer for 15+ years, that's exactly what I'd like to hear from my password manager.

Are users soon going to demand a way to give agents access to their passwords? Yes, absolutely.

With "AI browsers" and a whole industry of startups building agents, you can count the months until users start asking their password managers for ways to grant permission.

What 1Password is saying is "fine, but we need to do better", and MCP is an insecure clusterf*.

I think that's very reasonable, although I'll reserve judgement for when they release the so-called "secure agentic access".
by appreciatorBus | 2025-07-17 03:38:32+00:00
That 7% is for the projects that actually happen. This misses all the projects that don’t when start because they don’t pencil due to the phenomenon that the original poster mentioned.

If you want to see it up close and personal, go to any Public Hearing in your city for any new construction of any kind, and watch 100 of your neighbours who have already benefitted from past construction lineup to oppose the prospect of any additional construction for anyone else. It’s not just that it adds a few percent costs, it’s that it drastically reduces the number of projects people even try to build.
by yndoendo | 2025-07-17 03:40:10+00:00
I am hesitant to post this because of JFK JR and ignoring with the politicians in power against ASD.

Gait is not constant in the stride. It all depends on the footwear. The constant for me is being silent while walking. Be the ball of your feet or the heels. Having auditory issues / sensitive to sound, I walk to be silent and unheard.

Walking and scaring wildlife and other humans was a personally taught process. I cannot stand clothing that makes noise while moving nor the sound of my own footsteps. It is also a means to allow for listening of my environment so I am not shocked or surprised.

This also why it is extremely hard to spoke me.

Silence is gold because it allows me filter in the environment. I want to hear the person walking behind me or were I cannot see. I want to walk up to a person and they don't know. This also reduces engagements.

Walking on the ball of your feet is silent up to the point of stretching and cracking your bones. Walking on the heels is also silent when reducing push down with long heel to toe arch. All of course it is defined by the footage and how they squeeze during application to the to the ground dependent on the gait.

The gait and noise it makes also highlights if an aspie has a grander stimulus to sound or not. Those that do not have auditory issues will easily pound their heels into their ground and make the floor shake.
by ta8645 | 2025-07-17 03:40:19+00:00
Heh, it's that simple for someone who thinks the training regime and AI technology will not change further. The early horseless carriages had all kinds of stupid problems, and it would be very easy to pronounce them DOA. "Nobody is going to want to ride something so prone to breaking down", "a horse only needs food from the farm, not stuff drilled from the ground", etc. People don't have much imagination in such situations, especially when they feel emotionally (or existentially) attached to the status quo.
by kcplate | 2025-07-17 03:40:42+00:00
No, cruelty is just a tactic to convey as negative a forced deportations experience as possible to an illegal immigrant. The point is actually to encourage self deportation and to discourage further illegal immigration. The folks going through this will eventually get back to their countries of origin with an ugly story to tell about their awful experiences of deportation. Some people tht hear of that experience and will opt out of taking the illegal path. News stories like this viewed and read here in the US motivate folks to take the easier self deportation path.
by somenameforme | 2025-07-17 03:43:11+00:00
That book seemingly exclusively leans on misleading arguments. For instance, literally their very first effort is to try to 'debunk' the idea of having Mars as a sort of 'backup' to Earth by claiming that even in the case of a doomsday event Earth would still be far more hospitable than Mars. That statement is completely true but also completely irrelevant.

Take a typical doomsday event, an asteroid impact or a supervolcano. Both kill you the same way. It isn't the event itself, but rather the sun ending up getting blotted out for years by mass debris/ash not only causing an extreme freeze across the planet, but also ending photosynthesis rapidly killing all plant life which starts a mass extinction on up the food chain to animals that ate those plants then animals that ate those animals and so on.

This is the sort of event that could easily completely kill off humanity, but it's not because it'd make Earth a worse place than Mars. Even at the climax of mass extinction, Earth would still be dramatically more hospitable than Mars. The reason it will be so deadly is the same reason that more people die in the desert of drowning than of thirst. It's something you simply don't prepare for. An offworld colony in this case would help ensure humanity is perpetuated, Earth is recolonized, rescue survivors, ensure global order, and so on. In fact this is the case for most of all conceivable disasters.

If there's any argument you found particularly compelling from the book, please do share. I have a copy if you simply want to reference the page number or whatever.