MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vparikh | 2025-07-13 19:54:55+00:00
I would argue that we have that today in the form of the Apple MacMini (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini) -- the Commodore 64 was priced at around $300 in 1984 or $950 in 2025 money. The basic model MacMini comes in at $600 today. For that you get a fully Unix system with a full development suite to build desktop/mobile/Unix apps out of the box. Every development platform is available (C/C++, Python, Swift, JavaScript, Java, Rust, etc.) on it. The expansion system is extremely simple also (USB C/Thunderbolt). Not to mention it is much smaller than a Commodore 64 and arguably more user friendly.
by sahaj | 2025-07-13 19:55:07+00:00
It has more to do with the workforce wage demands and their output. Imagine if we all think that AI will get rid of our job at some point. We will work harder and demand less money do that work. All large corps did huge coordinated cuts in workforce in 2022-2023, and now there's this narrative. They are simply trying to get us to do more work for less money.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-07-13 19:55:41+00:00
"If we assume about 65% of people who start GLP-1 medications quit by the end of year one, that creates a big problem. When someone stops the medication, they'll usually regain the weight they lost, and in two years, most of those key health indicators (like BMI, blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol) bounce back to their starting point. "

So in addition to the quitters returning back to normal after they got life insurance underwritten when they were healthy, we have the unknown of the longevity of people on the glp-1 drugs.
by silotis | 2025-07-13 19:55:51+00:00
> Medical insurance companies often already go out of their way to pay early to save in the long run

Literally LOLed when I read this. Health insurance companies might pay lip service to this and make some token gestures like free preventative care, but in my experience health insurance companies frequently shoot themselves in the foot by denying care that later ends up costing them even more when the patient's untreated condition worsens.
by acdha | 2025-07-13 19:56:02+00:00
The way these people are being caught are things like dodgy LinkedIn profiles or refusing in person meetings so I would think a licensing process designed around things which would be expensive to fake: in person government ID checks, periodic exams, peer evaluations, etc. The trick would be actually doing that in person, which could be a useful thing for conferences - treat an afternoon at PyCon or re:Invent as the cost of renewing your professional credentials if you don’t live near a major city or university.
by refulgentis | 2025-07-13 19:56:04+00:00
Subtly different: you read "most...return to normal...within 2 years", it says "When someone stops the medication, they'll [return to baseline]"

Then from there, I click through the 65% #, assuming they have a good study on 65% of people stop after a year. Nah, they don't. It's super complex but tl;dr: specific cohort, and somehow the # getting on it in year 2 is higher than the # of people who quit in year 1.

I have a weak to medium prior, after 10m evaluating, that the entire thing might be built on more sand than it admits.

Lot of little slants that create an absolute tone - ex. multiple payouts over the "lifetime" of a life insurance policy. (sure, it's technically possible)

Also there's no citation for the idea this mortality slippage happened because of GLP-1, and it's been out for...what...a year? Maybe two?

That's an awful lot of people who were about to die, saved in the nick of time by...losing weight? Again, possible, I'm sure it even happened in some cases.

Enough to skew mortality slippage from 5.3% to 15.3%?

I thought they were 98% accurate?

Wait...is the slippage graph net life increase slippage? Or any slippage?

Because it's very strange this explosion happened in exactly the year of a global pandemic that had sky-high mortality rates for older people.
by k9294 | 2025-07-13 19:56:07+00:00
I'm a tech co-founder at loqus.ai, me and my team thought that it’s a great idea to make a one app “to rule them all”, but it appeared to be a bad idea.

We decided to stop active development when realized that most people don't want different models, custom instructions, tools, etc..

People want their work done, and no one cares how exactly it will be done - the less they have to think about the setup, the better (and chatgpt just works in most of the cases).
by cubefox | 2025-07-13 19:56:38+00:00
In case of Stanislaw Lem I would say that when things are hard to understand, they are usually also hard to understand for the main character. Who is intelligent and tries to make sense of things in first-person narration. E.g. Ijon Tichy in Wizja Lokalna (Observation on the Spot), Kris Kelvin in Solaris, or the fictional author of the "Memoirs Found in the Bathtub".

In cyberpunk the characters themselves understand the world they are living in, and they are usually not encountering any hard to understand events. The narrator just doesn't try to simplify or explain things to the reader when they are obvious for the characters. Similar to how books set in the present don't try to be science fiction for people in the past, even though they would be, and therefore don't avoid or explain modern terminology.
by daxfohl | 2025-07-13 19:57:16+00:00
I don't really get it. If AI is a force multiplier that suddenly makes your workforce way more productive, wouldn't you actually want to increase the size of your workforce to reap the maximum benefit?

There are only two reasons I can think not to. First, if AI can fully replace a human in a role. But it seems like we're a long way away from that. Second, if the added productivity leaves you with nothing to do. But we're in tech. There's always something new to do. If you're not doing new things as a company, you're getting replaced by those who are.

So it seems like a losing strategy to make your workforce cost reduction your primary concern when we could see the greatest workforce productivity gain in modern times.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-07-13 19:57:18+00:00
Once daily pills will very likely replace injections in the near future.

Eli Lilly will soon release key data on its weight loss pill orforglipron - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465346 - March 2025

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orforglipron
by can16358p | 2025-07-13 19:57:48+00:00
Sure, I'd love to use an open source model locally that's trained on fully ethically-sourced data... once it's on par with ChatGPT or Sonnet.

For now, that "crap" big tech throws at us outperforms the "non-crap".

I'd love to see competition though, K2 is a nice step.
by slowmovintarget | 2025-07-13 19:58:21+00:00
> Van der Sloot: “We now see the political interference by Russia and by Big Tech itself in elections in Europe, the rise of AI, and the fact that Europe is totally dependent on America in this context. In my opinion, the only way to protect our European values is to ban all American technology in Europe within five years, not only for consumers but also for government authorities and companies. At the same time, we need to bridge the technological gap because we remain vulnerable as long as we are dependent on foreign technology.”

So bog standard protectionism is what he's advocating for. He should have a discussion with economists as he's making assumptions outside his expertise, I suspect.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-07-13 19:59:21+00:00
I agree but, then they can go after people producing porn, not people that watch it.

This is the same as going after the drug addicts.

This feels like going after the people on the more vulnerable side because it is easy. Which signals it is more about forcing people to not do something instead of trying to genuinely help them.

But going after people producing porn is a no no because they have money and they are organised.

Also imo the intention of people trying implement things like this is just about surveillance and has absolutely nothing to do with protecting the families, children, addicts etc. etc.
by fvdessen | 2025-07-13 20:00:01+00:00
Here's an interesting, related European history tidbit;

Most of the popular old school European Comics are from Belgium; Tintin, The Smurfs, Asterix, Lucky-Luke, etc. That doesn't mean they were all made by Belgians, there were French and Italian authors.

The reason they were based in Belgium, is because American Comic books where banned in Belgium. This is an artefact from the second world war, the American comic books were banned by the nazis. But the after-war catholic government kept the policy going for a while. In other countries, the market was flooded with American comics such as Picsou Magazine, so there were little room for other kind of comics. The Belgian market, while small, was enough to give an audience and thus work for Non-American comic authors. The ban didn't last long, but was enough to kickstart an entire industry that would eventually get good enough to compete on its own.

This fact is little documented, I learned it while studying comic book drawing in Belgium. The teacher was then complaining about the flood of Japanese Manga, which in his opinion would kill the European comic industry, as they were subsidised by a captive Japanese audience. Much of the cultural industry in France now only survives because of laws mandating that at least half the products sold must be French. And so is it with other European countries. But unfortunately those very same laws are preventing the growth of a pan European industry.
by bgnn | 2025-07-13 20:00:59+00:00
I'm not sure about this calculation though. Phosphor decays exponentially with a time constant of roughly 5ms (according to HP [1]). This means when a new frame comes at 60Hz refresh rate there is still 10-15% of the previous frame related excitation is present. This means there is considerable amount of nonlinearity, hence the performance is even worse than 10ms LCD/OLED displays.

Genuine question: why do you think CRTs are better?

[1] https://hpmemoryproject.org/an/pdf/an_115.pdf
by togetheragainor | 2025-07-13 20:01:02+00:00
The handwringing over an LLM creator shaping a narrative is somewhat absurd compared to the alternatives we had prior to Grok: LLMs that literally erased white people from history to align with their creators far-left progressive politics.

The difference here is many techies are more comfortable with LLMs censoring, or even rewriting history, as they align with their politics and prejudices.

Musk has attempted to provide a more balanced view I don’t consider just censorship. If he’s restricting the LLMs from including mainstream media viewpoints, I would consider that to be censorship, but I haven’t seen evidence of that.
by nerevarthelame | 2025-07-13 20:01:03+00:00
This is akin to saying a severely anxious person should be able to take an SSRI for a few months, learn how to change their thinking, and stay off antidepressants for the rest of their life. So simple. Must be their fault if they can't pull it off.

Perhaps that works for some people. I'm glad it seems to have worked for you. But the facts of the world we live in show that it doesn't work for most. "Learn the lesson and be disciplined!" is not effective advice.
by sssilver | 2025-07-13 20:01:38+00:00
My understanding is that every employees compensation (from the janitor to the CEO) is basically a function of “how different would the outcome for the shareholders be if this person was replaced with someone else”.

Obviously Apple wouldn’t be Apple without Jobs, Tesla without Musk, and Amazon without Bezos.

Moving on from founders, we saw the cardinal difference between Balmer and Nadella for Microsoft.

So there’s some merit to their role. One could argue that from a shareholders perspective it’s the only role that matters. Every other role is an opaque “implementation detail”.
by treetalker | 2025-07-13 20:01:38+00:00
All he says about it:

> This is not science fiction. There are very, very knowledgeable people—and I just talked to one today—who worry very much that human beings will not be able to control the technology, and that artificial intelligence will in fact dominate our society. We will not be able to control it. It may be able to control us. That’s kind of the doomsday scenario—and there is some concern about that among very knowledgeable people in the industry.
by bediger4000 | 2025-07-13 20:01:42+00:00
Ordinarily, articles in this category ("career lessons from fictional or historic figure") rub me the wrong way. Neither Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte gave two figs for multitasking, for example. The "10 life lessons" you're drawing from their lives are kremlinology or overfitting.

I've never been in the military, so I have no idea what a "squad leader" is, but it seems like Dwight Schrute's job was something like squad leader in the first place. It's no coincidence that this article's author can construct a decent case for Schrute as a squad leader.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-07-13 20:02:09+00:00
I do actually think it's that simple, yes. Term life is just not that complicated a product at heart.

Onus is on you to prove that if every single life insurance provider was suddenly Thanos snapped out of existence tomorrow, we wouldn't see a swarm of hungry financial professionals swoop right back in to recreate the service within weeks. That seems like a laughable claim to me, but maybe you know something I don't.

(Edit, for future readers: ecb_penguin seems to have missed the question earlier in the thread I was responding to:

>... and the question was about the aggregate effect. What happens if all life insurers go bankrupt?

Emphasis mine. This was to clarify that yes, the original commenter meant literally all providers.)
by aetherson | 2025-07-13 20:02:16+00:00
Nope, try again. "You can't possibly learn enough about a system to simulate it" is still a different and weaker claim than "It is mathematically impossible to compute this thing that is being computed."

But also: if general intelligence were computable, but it was not possible to learn how to make the computer that can compute it, then you've disproved evolution.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-07-13 20:02:32+00:00
There kind of is, in my view. It's easier for me to hire and relocate an engineer from Eastern Europe than from France where I'm based now.

Most baffling to me are the 25 y.o. graduates of engineering universities who can't write five lines of code in a programming language of their choice. All right you want to be a developer, where the hell have you been all these years? You can get to the senior level by that age, let alone learn one programming language.
by sethhochberg | 2025-07-13 20:03:05+00:00
With term life insurance specifically the lifetime policy premiums are typically so low relative to the value of the policy that there's a natural bias towards insuring generally healthy people. Its not uncommon to see policies that are something like $40/month for 20 years ($9600 in premiums) for a $1mm death benefit, for example.

People with more complex medical conditions often can get life insurance from smaller, specialized providers... and at much higher rates. But the big mass-market players offering inexpensive term life products are only offering them that cheaply because they really control the risk profile during underwriting.
by scott_w | 2025-07-13 20:03:26+00:00
> They might not be your field of expertise but calling (for example) Rally as “niche” is insanely off the mark.

I say this as someone who’s uncle was a rally driver: it’s niche.

> Except you didn’t give an example that had anything to do with our conversation.

Half correct: long course is, in theory, a race between people. In practice, it’s a bunch of time trials that sometimes sees a pass, but there’s not much interaction by the time you get to the run.

If we wanted to talk within a sport: cycling has time trialling and road racing. I can tell you the difference in spectator numbers is stark. Like, time trialling has 0 spectators and road racing gets plenty. I love it but it’s really not that interesting to watch compared to road racing.
by vincent-manis | 2025-07-13 20:03:41+00:00
There is one very BIG thing that Cobol pioneered: the requirement that not only the programs, but also the data, must be portable across machines. At a time when machines used different character codes, let alone different numeric formats, Cobol was designed to vastly reduce (though it did not completely eliminate) portability woes.

We take this for granted now, but at the time it was revolutionary. In part, we've done things like mandating Unicode and IEEE 754, but nowadays most of our languages also encourage portability. We think very little of moving an application from Windows on x86_64 to Linux on ARMv8 (apart from the GUI mess), but back when Cobol was being created, you normally threw your programs away (“reprogramming”) when you went to a new machine.

I haven't used Cobol in anger in 50 years (40 years since I even taught it), but for that emphasis on portability, I am very grateful.
by WASDAai | 2025-07-13 20:03:53+00:00
The article recounts how the author used xAI’s newly released Grok 4 to “launder” a disallowed request—asking ChatGPT to rate his ex-girlfriend’s attractiveness—by having Grok steadily re-phrase it as a neutral-sounding “quantitative geometric analysis.” Once stripped of overtly subjective language, the prompt slipped through ChatGPT-o3’s content filters and produced code that assigned the photo a numerical beauty score, highlighting how permissive models can act as jailbreak intermediaries for stricter ones. While the piece showcases clever prompt-engineering tactics, it glosses over the ethical and scientific problems of rating a real person’s looks without consent and underscores the fragility of keyword-based moderation.
by bootsmann | 2025-07-13 20:03:54+00:00
Europe has lots of capital but when it comes to capital “Europe” is not a singular entity. Its surprisingly difficult for a fund in country A to invest in a privately held company of country B. The whole thing about the lack of big tech in Europe is partially caused by this fragmentation. In areas where the EU broke down those barriers (such as manufacturing) Europe is significantly more competitive than the US.
by ZoomZoomZoom | 2025-07-13 20:04:07+00:00
> What I'm trying to say is the stuff is there and it's accessible, but it's only going to be a minority of people that use it

Exactly. This is why the tech has to be made resistant to surveillance and censorship by default. Until usage of alternative connectivity and circumvention methods sticks out as a sore thumb (turns out, for most tools it does), it applies a constant pressure on anyone under oppression to stop, increasing the risks for those who continue to use them.
by os2warpman | 2025-07-13 20:05:04+00:00
Tariffs are not now, have never, and will never lead to an increase in domestic production.

They only lead to higher costs and/or a festering, shambling corpse of domestic production that is a shell of its former self.

The US has done this multiple times already and the result is always the same.

Numerous countries have done this and the result is always the same.

The results, everywhere, every time, forever, are always the same.

Higher prices, stagnant markets, eroding capabilities, higher and higher tariffs and/or subsidies to keep it all propped up.
by bhattisatish | 2025-07-13 20:05:10+00:00
Taking a segue, I am a 50+ man who hasn't played any games in my working life. I did play Prince of Persia 2 but never crossed level 1. Played Doom in the network mode with classmates. Now I want to start exploring games. I am on Ubuntu with Intel graphics. I am ready to invest in a joystick or gamepad.

What games do you guys recommend to me? Also any hardware accessories, other than GPU's, that is?

I just tried Steam, and was completely overwhelmed by choice.
by jxmorris12 | 2025-07-13 20:05:40+00:00
I recently wrote a post about scaling RL that has some similar ideas:

> How to Scale RL to 10^26 FLOPs (blog.jxmo.io/p/how-to-scale-rl-to-1026-flops)

The basic premise behind both essays is that for AI to make another big jump in capabilities, we need to find new data to train on.

My proposal was reusing text from the Internet and doing RL on next-token prediction. The linked post here instead suggests doing 'replication training', which they define as "tasking AIs with duplicating existing software products, or specific features within them".
by firesteelrain | 2025-07-13 20:06:12+00:00
The analogy to your example is that someone who has to take Mounjaro for diabetes will always have to take it even after losing say 100 pounds. Or Metaformin even.

GLP-1 in those cases helps manage the problem better.

But for those who are not in those cases where Type 2 Diabetes has sunk in, then they need to use the opportunity to get better while on it and kick themselves into high gear or they will have learned nothing from the experience
by J37T3R | 2025-07-13 20:07:45+00:00
I'm actually pretty hopeful about this - I do some home computer help as a side gig and Windows recovery is usually either great or a complete roadblock. Usually if it can get to the recovery environment and people remember their passwords the existing tools are great. If not... well either wipe or good luck. Anything that helps Windows get to the RE is great.
by altairprime | 2025-07-13 20:07:56+00:00
> The issue is that for dashboard purposes we mark an email has having valid DKIM status when it has one valid DKIM signature (or multiple valid DKIM signatures), but they don’t have to be aligned with the domain of the sender. While for forward authentication purposes we were requiring one valid DKIM signature aligned with the domain of the sender.

> We have temporarily lifted the forward auth requirements, while we relax the DKIM check in order for it to be consistent with what appears in the dashboard.
by loeg | 2025-07-13 20:08:07+00:00
I think it's unlikely that the quoted 65% of GLP-1 users will go off the drug and resume their unhealthy lifestyle as the drugs go off patent and become more affordable. It's not super inconvenient to stay on, just expensive (today, using the name brand formulations). Users benefit from good health more than they benefit from deceiving life insurers.
by heelix | 2025-07-13 20:08:28+00:00
I've got games that I intend to play later, and they were cheap enough that I don't think I'll save any more by waiting. I do intend to play Mad Max at some point - $5 was too much for me to add it to my library. $2.50? Fine... pulled the trigger with 9 other items I plan to do. The thing with steam is once you have them in your library, they remain. Some items are not sold anymore, however.

Looking at my queue over 20 years... likely hording. Nuts. One of the gotchas I bumped into was I really need a larger disk for games. Some of the newer stuff takes an enormous amount of space, which means it waits and waits.
by sublinear | 2025-07-13 20:09:05+00:00
I take more issue with the media spin than the actual story. Why does the discussion even mention software jobs when that's less than 4% of Amazon's workforce?

It makes more sense that Amazon would continue to push AI where it's already being used successfully. Devs may benefit from finding solutions quicker with AI, but it's never made sense to me why that would affect productivity per head or change hiring/firing rates.

Put another way: there are never enough devs and they write a lot of shitty code. AI writes even shittier code, but in subtly different ways and can write it even faster helping the dev iterate to better code.

The result is basically no change anywhere except a modest increase in quality. This is equivalent to, but cheaper than going on an epic quest to find the good devs and overpay them. Why is this a bad thing for like 99% of people who write code? There's basically no impact on their pay or ease of finding a job.