MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-08-18 21:19:04+00:00
> Am I an exception?

Years ago I was following development of an indie game. The developers wanted to provide a DRM-free experience.

The game had some online functionality (leaderboard or something). They were surprised when the number of accounts accessing the online functionality exceeded their sales by a dramatic number. The developer updates grew more and more sad as they switched from discussing new features to pleading with people to actually buy the game instead of copying it. Eventually they called it quits and gave up because the game, while very popular, was so widely pirated that few people actually paid.

Whenever the piracy topic comes up I hear people do mental gymnastics to justify it, like claiming they spend more than average and therefore their piracy is a net win. Yet when we get small peeks into numbers and statistics like with video game piracy, it’s not hard to see that the majority of people who pirate things are just doing it because they get what they want and don’t have to pay for it.
by fencepost | 2025-08-18 21:19:25+00:00
For the comparison to phone batteries, it's worth noting that until the last few years few if any phones allowed capping charge below 100% but now iPhones (15 and higher?), many or all Samsungs and unknown others allow capping for battery health. For the Samsung devices, the ability to do this came somewhere around the time they started promising 5 years of OS and/or security updates.

I'm pretty sure Tesla early on 'sold' an optional range extension that simply allowed you to charge the batteries further for extra range, with part of that cost presumably covering an anticipated higher battery failure rate. IIRC there were also some times when there were hurricanes coming during which they OTA unlocked that for everyone in the affected regions as well to facilitate evacuations.
by fancyfredbot | 2025-08-18 21:19:49+00:00
Article doesn't understand that cutting "between five and 20 percent of support and admin processing" is really valuable, instead it seems to want to dismiss that as a dull failure.

Business process outsourcing companies are valued at $300bn according to the BPO Wikipedia page. So 5%-20% of that is 15-60bn. So even if we're valuing all the other GenAI impact at zero the impact on admin and support alone could plausibly justify this investment.
by simianwords | 2025-08-18 21:19:55+00:00
This is technically correct but missing some details.

The real GDP after accounting for cost of living has not changed much because while GDP has decreased, cost of living has also decreased (because A is now priced at 104 instead of 160).

But it’s even better because we have this extra money that we previously spent on C. In theory we will spend this extra money somewhere else and drive demand there. The workers put out of employment due to LLM will move to that sector to fulfill it.

Now the GDP not only increased but also cost of living reduced.
by Buttons840 | 2025-08-18 21:19:59+00:00
In March Canada exports to the US decreased 6.6%, and their exports to other countries increased 25%. Canada's imports from America decreased 2.9%. Canada now exports more crude oil to China than it does to the US. There is now a strong social will and political will to reduce ties to the US and increase ties with other nations. This may take time, and it may not end the US, but it doesn't help the US by any means.

And why is this happening? "America First" means helping people that live in America; what part of this helps people living in America?
by OliveMate | 2025-08-18 21:20:32+00:00
I have close friends from a TF2 community server that's been dead for over a decade now, but I can't think of anyone I've met via random matchmaking since.

Game servers are the perfect digital third space, it starts off with random players but as you log in each night, you see more and more familiar faces pop up and before you know it you're all regulars popping in to chat while playing a few rounds, learning more about your new friends and praying to god that you've got the godlike Finnish sniper player on your team.

By comparison, modern matchmaking-lead multiplayer feels gentrified and - for lack of a better term - soulless. You're blindly shuffled between random players each game, and there's no way to properly build a connection with players or a community out of it. There's a vacuous and temporary nature to it all that just feels cold.

Edit: also the fact that things like skins & sprays - player controlled ways of expressing themselves - have been neatly packaged by gamedevs and sold back to players at a premium. It feels completely antithetical to the player-led nature of what such games used to be.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-08-18 21:21:03+00:00
> I think Intel wants to stay alive so they are looking for a lifeline

I'm not sure Intel was asking for this.

It seems like a better approach would've been to broker a deal (he likes deals, right?) where companies like Apple and Nvidia (companies that are currently dependent on TSMC) would've been incentivized to make investments in Intel.
by red-iron-pine | 2025-08-18 21:21:53+00:00
that's a bullshit answer, esp. because now trends suggest that even STEM graduates are struggling to find jobs.

you're blaming the victim when chances are every adult, website, school teacher, and guidance counselor told them to go to school. you expect an 18 year old to be able to predict, perfectly, job trends over the next 20 years? hell, that underwater basket weaving degree might actually be more useful than CS after Trump collapses the US economy and everyone is back to subsistence level crafting
by WorldMaker | 2025-08-18 21:22:16+00:00
Internet Explorer in an ancient age used to have .HTA ("HTML Application") files for a double-click a self-contained HTML file that can act as a small local application. It did a lot of what PWAs are still trying to do, somewhat more effectively and simpler. (.HTA was mostly just a ZIP file! Simple to build.) It also had a lot of security holes that gave it a terrible reputation and a lot of reasons it got killed. (It was very early days for "AJAX" and modern browser security tools like CORS and whatnot, after all.)

Such things seem to be cycles.

Today a lot of browsers support .MHT which is a similar format, but also worse in many other ways. (The M stands for MIME and wrapping a website like an email seems somehow sillier and weirder to me than wrapping it in a ZIP file, though I get that MIME wrappers are ancient internet tech with an ancient track record.)

Then we see all the millions of apps in PWAs and Electron downloads.

At some point it feels like we should have better solutions and cut some of the gordian knot cycling between "local apps are too much of a security risk" and "local apps should be complicated collections of Service Workers to get offline support" and "local apps should just embed a full browser and all its security implications/risks rather than allowing browsers to directly open local apps" and back and forth. .HTA and .MHT both showcase possible directions back to "simpler" than PWAs/Electron, they just have such fascinating and weird histories.
by tonyg | 2025-08-18 21:22:32+00:00
I don't think that's right - IIRC it used to be possible to write out a file, if loaded from a file:// URL, directly from JavaScript. Then that ability got nobbled because security (justifiable) without properly thinking through a good alternative (not justifiable). I mourn the loss of the ability, TiddlyWiki was in a class of its own and there should have been many more systems inspired by its design. Alas.

ETA: Wikipedia has reminded me the feature was called UniversalXPConnect, and it was a Firefox thing and wasn't cross-browser. It still sucks that it was removed without sensible replacement.
by dylan604 | 2025-08-18 21:22:44+00:00
But the seesaw is what the future is going to look like. If some bit of mass voting breaks out for the next election and moves to the other party, there will be a swing back the other direction. Then the following election the masses will get upset about something and swing it back. The country is too polarized to expect anything other than seesaw policies. Unless we go full revolution and just deny the other party from ever taking charge.
by lucb1e | 2025-08-18 21:23:19+00:00
If you and I would support the works we think are good, why wouldn't others? I keep noticing that people constantly expect worse morals from others than how they claim they are themselves

It's easy to add a "me too" onto the existing list but that's not my point. I think we generally can expect better from the average person than we instinctively do. If 50% of people are just as honest as we are (if we're average persons which, on average, we are), that would be easily worth it if free distribution of a book gets you a 3x bigger reach as compared to when people have to pay up front. I'm not aware of research confirming or refuting this (of course I'd like to believe that information can be free), but it doesn't seem so outlandish to me that we can ignore the option altogether by doing a sniff test
by doctoboggan | 2025-08-18 21:24:13+00:00
This article definitely feels like chatgptese.

Also, I don't necessarily feel like the size of LLMs even comes close to overfitting the data. From a very unscientific standpoint it seems like the size of weights on disk would have to meet or exceed the size of the training data (modulo lossless encryption techniques) for overfitting to occur. Since the training data is multiple orders of magnitude larger than the resulting weights, isn't that proof that the weights are some sort of generalization of the input data rather than a memorization?
by mike_d | 2025-08-18 21:24:32+00:00
Hospitals are categorized as critical care facilities, regardless of how much on prem compute they have.

Under national fire and electrical codes hospitals have to have at least three completely isolated power systems (these are the different colors of electrical outlets you see).

The life safety branch is the most critical and powers things like fire alarms, exit signs, stairwell lighting - anything required to evacuate patients.

The critical branch is patient care like ICU beds, ventilators, and operating rooms.

Lastly is the equipment branch which is essential to patient care but won't kill people immediately: HVAC, kitchens, and sterilization/cleaning equipment.

There is usually a fourth system for everything else, but these are the required ones. Each has its own requirements for battery and generator backup (life safety can't take more than 10 seconds to cut over), and usually the systems are wired so that they can draw power from lower priority circuits if needed.
by tbird24 | 2025-08-18 21:25:12+00:00
Thanks! Most of the clients hiring engineers tend to be non-technical, especially those hiring Fractional CTOs of course. But sometimes we'll work with CTOs to hire a contractor for their team too.

I think the devs that have the most success have the following qualities: - They can clearly show their work history (Linkedin, Resume, Github, custom site, etc.) - They have some baseline level of knowledge/experience in relationship management, i.e. they can talk the talk. You do have to do a bit of "selling", especially when looking for contract work.
by kkfx | 2025-08-18 21:25:17+00:00
Honestly? We need not a successor of FHS but of filesystems, who are intimately tied package managers and installers. Zfs timidly start the change, with IPS (Image Package System) and BE (Boot Environments, as zfs clones), and we need to go much beyond that instead of wasting resources keeping up an '80s model like some do from btrfs to stratis.

We need:

- query-able storage, because search&narrow is the current way of accessing information and collecting/transcluding data is the way to go;

- easy storage management, the "rampant layer violation" of zfs we really need;

- integration of such storage to the software stack, from the OS to single packages, it's a nonsense having to "spread" archives in a taxonomy to deploy them or downloading archives to be unpacked as well for updates when we have send-able filesystems (zfs send of snapthots) and binary diff (from a snapshot "tagged version" of a fs-package to another, sent over internet).

Unfortunately we need operation people together with devs and nowadays operation is nearly disappeared. Devs alone can't understand what we need, they can't go beyond their desktops in a mass large enough to avoid a positive evolution.
by cvoss | 2025-08-18 21:25:34+00:00
Yes, but for an even more immediate reason. The axiom of choice itself is a non-constructive axiom. It asserts the existence of the inhabitant of a certain type, without in any way furnishing the inhabitant.

But Lean sequesters off the classical logic stuff from the default environment. You have to explicitly bring in the non-constructive tools in order to access all this. So, actually, I would disagree with GP that Lean's type system includes a choice axiom.
by kgwgk | 2025-08-18 21:26:14+00:00
> I also think things like "is this chest Xray cancer?" are going to be hugely impactful.

Yes, but https://radiologybusiness.com/topics/artificial-intelligence...

Nine years ago, scientist Geoffrey Hinton famously said, “People should stop training radiologists now,” believing it was “completely obvious” AI would outperform human rads within five years.
by godelski | 2025-08-18 21:26:14+00:00
> by the desire to

An appropriate choice of words.

I'm just wondering if/when anyone will realize that often desire gets in the way of achieving. ̶T̶h̶e̶y̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶n̶n̶y̶ ̶w̶i̶s̶e̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶y̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶o̶l̶i̶s̶h̶.̶ Chasing pennies with dollars
by bvrmn | 2025-08-18 21:26:29+00:00
Author picked up a quite convenient example to show methods/lambda superiority.

I prefer list/set/dict comprehensions any day. It's more general, doesn't require to know a myriad of different methods (which could not exists for all collections, PHP and JS are especially bad with this) and easily extendable to nested loops.

Yes it could be `[for line in text.splitlines() if line: for word in line.split(): word.upper()]`. But it is what it is. BTW I bet rust variant would be quite elaborate.
by pixl97 | 2025-08-18 21:27:53+00:00
I don't really think that is what Occam’s Razor is about. The Razor says the simplest answer is most likely the best, but we already know that intelligence is very complex so the simplest answer to intelligence is still going to be a massively complex solution.

In some ways this answer does fit Occam's Razor by saying the simplicity is simply scale, not complex algorithms.
by amatecha | 2025-08-18 21:28:06+00:00
There's a correlation between psychologically-manipulative apps and car-centrism: the endless desire for profit -- hyper-domination by capitalism. If the primary motivating factor behind society's actions were "for the greater good", such things would never have become even remotely acceptable. Instead we allow everything, everywhere, to be driven by the desire for greater wealth (usually on the part of a handful of executives, specifically). The more you question "is this motivated by profit" about anything in society or everyday life that is harmful to you, you'll start to notice that the answer is almost always "yes".
by velcrovan | 2025-08-18 21:28:26+00:00
> If I had a 10% loss in fuel economy, I’d be looking for something wrong and fixing it.

Have you never had a car start burning oil due to gasket failures and what not?

All of the cars I've owned had 80k plus miles on them when I bought them, and most recently I disposed of a 2001 Corolla with 265k miles on it. They all had various moving parts that failed at least annually and prevented me from using the vehicle *at all*. I'll take a slightly reduced range on my EV over that, any day.
by layer8 | 2025-08-18 21:28:37+00:00
Honestly, I find using intermediate variables more readable than a long chain of function invocations where you have to keep track of intermediate results in your head:

input_groups = input_list.split(None) group_sums = map(sum, input_groups) max_sum = max(group_sums)

This also gives you a slightly higher-level view on how the algorithm proceeds just by reading the variable names on the LHS.
by nuancebydefault | 2025-08-18 21:29:06+00:00
> love as emotional intimacy

Nicely framed! Something I am often in limbo about: how open/intimate can I be with this or that person. Often you only see the thin line after you stepped on it or over it. Then it leads either to shame or regret.

Indeed bravery is needed to walk close to that line.

I recently learned as well that expressing emotional intimacy can be seen as a dance. You reach out and bravely await a response that might come or not, and that might be positive, negative or indifferent. Your move, their move, and so on.
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-18 21:29:39+00:00
Sure, but if you're taking kickbacks to promote something, it's a near certainty that's not what you're doing.

Like in this thread you have people asking what about retailers that take money for product placement, or how will people find products without ads? It's apparently inconceivable that retailers spotlight actual high quality products that they believe in and they do some industry research into what they should carry and actually stand by what they're selling instead of treating their customers like suckers to be sold.
by kstrauser | 2025-08-18 21:29:45+00:00
If that were the case, then it would probably stand. The Ninth usually has the lowest, or among the lowest, reversal rate of any district: https://ballotpedia.org/SCOTUS_case_reversal_rates_(2007_-_P...

You hear a lot of lies to the contrary that it has the highest number of reversals, which is misleadingly irrelevant because the Ninth also has by far the greatest number of decisions. It's like saying that New York City has more violent crimes than El Paso, which utterly ignores the population difference between the two.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-18 21:30:04+00:00
Bingo - the solution to this is already programmed into the free market. Intel's failure can't be turned back around, especially not 10 years after the first cracks started showing.

It's not inherently wrong to want to prop up American chipmaking, but it is wrong to deny reality. No matter how much American scrip you put on the table, Intel's mistakes can't be undone faster than China can beat them.
by source99 | 2025-08-18 21:30:13+00:00
I would love to build a small physical device at my home wifi router level that detects these network patterns (certain IP addresses and data patterns). Then blocks those network streams. I think the correct fix is to intermittently block them so that the user gets a small drip and don't realize its broken so they don't try to find a workaround like turning off wifi.
by kingstnap | 2025-08-18 21:30:29+00:00
Battery degradation isn't really a function of use as much as its a function of abuse.

Phone's are designed to drive their batteries hard. If you are gentle about charging it slowly and keeping it in the 30-80% state of charge region it will last a long time.

The worst thing you can do is aggressively charge it to full and drain it till dead constantly. It will last a few hundred cycles before it gets seriously degraded.

A lot of people unfortunately (fortunate for smartphone companies) do exactly that (you know that person in your life who's phone is always dead?).
by jstummbillig | 2025-08-18 21:30:31+00:00
What arrogant and cynical way of looking at business operations. You don't know how anything interesting turns out in the future. You make educated guesses and those cost money. When you run a business, everything costs money. But that is not "lighting money on fire", that is how all learning happens.

If anyone thinks they have figured it all out, stop blabbering around. Short the market.
by hagbard_c | 2025-08-18 21:31:28+00:00
Is there any danger to WiFi, 5G and other similar technologies? I have not yet seen any definite proof or disproof of that but that does not mean these are 'conspiracy theories' nor that everyone who asks these questions are 'crackpots'.

The lab leak origin of the SARS2 unpleasantness was called a 'conspiracy theory' and those who supported it were called 'crackpots' and 'science deniers'.

Those who voiced doubt on the efficacy and safety of the mRNA therapies pushed for the same were called 'crackpots' and 'science deniers' by the same crowd.

The same was true for those who were open to other treatments for the disease, things like Ivermectin and the like.

It has taken many years and the jury is still out on the efficacy of many 'alternative therapies' but by now it is clear that the virus did escape from the very same lab pointed out by all those 'conspiracy theorists' and 'science deniers', that the mRNA therapies lacked efficacy and that the lack of a targeting mechanism for delivering mRNA to the right locations - in this case mucous membranes - while keeping it away from organs which stood to be harmed if the mRNA were to be delivered there - ovaries, testes, heart muscles and more - radically changed the risk profile for delivering these agents to younger people who were unlikely to be harmed by the virus but were (and are) at risk of harm from those same agents.

And what happened to the reputations of those who labelled these dissenters 'conspiracy theorists' and 'crackpots'? Nothing happened, they just moved to whatever cause the current desired narrative dictates - we've always been at war with Eurasia after all?

It is remarkable how risk-free it is to label people 'conspiracy theorists' or any of the other epithets bandied around by the chattering classes. Where in the pas nobody ever got fired for choosing $brand nowadays it seems to be that nobody ever gets fired for labelling those who do not follow the narrative 'conspiracy theorist' or 'crackpot' or 'racist' or '${identity_group}phobe'.
by solardev | 2025-08-18 21:32:27+00:00
It's not about whether it's full, but whether you can successfully make it to a faraway destination in a reasonable amount of time (& not adding hours & days to the trip).

It's not really a "debate", just a consideration. We recently got an EV, and generally love it, but long trips are more difficult. We ended up taking the gas car because the EV would've added 5-6 hours to the trip, due to a lack of fast chargers along the routes we needed to take and the 200-ish mile range of our car.

For around town, it's wonderful though.
by gavmor | 2025-08-18 21:32:52+00:00
> Intelligence isn't about memorising information—it's about finding elegant patterns that explain complex phenomena. Scale provides the computational space needed for this search, not storage for complicated solutions.

I think the word finding is overloaded, here. Are we "discovering," "deriving," "deducing," or simple "looking up" these patterns?

If "finding" can be implemented via a multi-page tour—ie deterministic choose-your-own-adventure—of a three-ring-binder (which is, essentially, how inference operates) then we're back at Searle's Chinese Room, and no intelligence is operative at runtime.

On the other hand, if the satisfaction of "finding" necessitates the creative synthesis of novel records pertaining to—if not outright modeling—external phenomena, ie "finding" a proof, then arguably it's not happening at training time, either.

How many novel proofs have LLMs found?
by spapas82 | 2025-08-18 21:32:59+00:00
The proper way to parse or construct nested list comprehensions as explained in pep 202 is to think like you're using normal for:

for a in b:

for c in a: use(a,b,c)

This would be

[use(a,b,c) for a in b for c in a]

Everything stays the same except the "use" part that goes in the front (the rule also includes the filters - if).
by solardev | 2025-08-18 21:33:27+00:00
Yes, I'm sure it depends on the locale. Sorry for not specifying. In the US, particularly more rural areas, it's difficult because we have such vast distances. On a long trip, there aren't enough DC fast charger OR level 2 chargers, the ones that are there are often broken and/or in use, and it is quite the adventure to plot a longer trip.