MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epistasis | 2025-08-14 16:43:37+00:00
> Free speech absolutists are mostly principled people who want to defend civil liberties

If this were true, where were they on this clear case of government censorship?

Check out this thread, and the single person admitting to be an "absolutist" seems to have no opposition to this law at all, and merely wants to defend limits to speech.

Free speech "absolutists" are the least principled defenders of free speech, but they may have extremely right-wing principles they are trying to defend. Others here have given examples of high-profile "absolutists" but I'm talking about those I encounter online mostly, such as in this thread.
by latchkey | 2025-08-14 16:43:44+00:00
Came here to say this. It is the basis for my entire business. It isn't just CUDA though, it is the hardware layer too. That is why we are exclusive to AMD AI hardware.

We have dozens of companies building foundational models and they all target a single vendor to supply all the hardware? Make it make sense! Yes, I know models run on AMD too, but the fact is, Nvidia, who's clearly doing a great job, is a literal monopoly. We need viable alternatives.

This deal was done with CirraScale, who are great people. It is important to point out that they are also one of the 13 official AMD Cloud Partners. I'm on the list too.
by biophysboy | 2025-08-14 16:43:52+00:00
Its something I keep thinking about when I see all these deep-dives by Anthropic on the "genetics" of LLMs. I see the emergent properties of LLMs as inseparable from their data environment. If the organization/prevalence of text online was different, I think Anthropic would see different "genetics". As the amt of LLM-generated text grows, I think it will become more clear that the "fundamental unit" is their relationship.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-14 16:44:21+00:00
I think this is a pretty well-reasoned piece, personally. The clearest thinking often happens when we are confronted with two already pretty solid options and asked to choose between them.

With only the information I have in front of me, I would have chosen Offer 2. More money is awesome in a very straightforward way. Staff is more fun than Senior. But mostly I think my view simply is that boring, steady businesses which can afford to pay top dollar for top talent tend to be really good places to drive capitalism forward at compared to relative moonshots like fusion tech. It seems like a much more straightforwardly good value proposition to (letting my brain fill in a random high impact detail here) bust my ass to shave a basis point off of everyone's Vanguard management costs than to work on something like fusion, where I imagine plenty of very motivated people are already exploring this from a lot of different directions.
by zahlman | 2025-08-14 16:44:26+00:00
>Why make a green bikeshed when there's already a red bikeshed?

Because then you have two bikesheds. An important aspect of the fact that the bikeshed exists, as a separate entity not integrated with the house, is that you can choose a different one. Specifically, the one that's already painted the way you want.

Maybe you don't think this is a feature in your current circumstance. Others do, which is why it persists.
by nonethewiser | 2025-08-14 16:44:35+00:00
>Software engineers are able to step back, think about the whole thing, and determine the root cause of a problem.

Agree strongly, and I think this is basically what the article is saying as well about keeping a mental model of requirements/code behavior. We kind of already knew this was the hard part. How many times have you heard that once you get past junior level, the hard part is not writing the code? And that It's knowing what code to write? This realization is practically a right of passage.

Which kind of begs the question for what the software engineering job looks like in the future. It definitely depends on how good the AI is. In the most simplistic case, AI can do all the coding right now and all you need is a task issue. And frankly probably a user written (or at least reviewed, but probably written) test. You could make the issue and test upfront and farm out the PR to an agent and manually approve when you see it passed the test case you wrote.

In that case you are basically PM and QA. You are not even forming the prompt, just detailing the requirements.

But as the tech improves can all tasks fit into that model? Not design/architecture tasks - or at least without a new task completion model than described above. The window will probably grow, but its hard to imagine that it will handle all pure coding tasks. Even for large tasks that theorhetically can fit into that model, you are going to have to do a lot of thinking and testing and prototyping to figure out the requirements and test cases. In theory you could apply the same task/test process but that seems like it would be too much structure and indirection to actually be helpful compared to knowing how to code.
by throwway120385 | 2025-08-14 16:44:44+00:00
In this case Kodak has a plan for avoiding the situation, but it almost entirely depends on market conditions and the current holder of the pension obligations. They have the cash, but it's tied up contractually and they're working to release the contract so they can use the cash to pay down some debt.

Incidentally pharmaceutical manufacturing and some of the other industries they're in are still very good industries to be in. So they could still pull through.
by _swfb | 2025-08-14 16:45:00+00:00
> Beyond this, comes the counter-intuitive position of being far more skilled than an interviewer. This can definitely work against you at times as well for a number of reasons. Just because you are the most technically adept for a position, doesn't mean you get the position. The technical aspects of most jobs are more about a minimum of, can they do the job. Not, are they the best fit.

This has been happening to me a bit, at an increasing frequency lately

I don't want to come off as cocky, but I think I have a decent understanding of concurrency and distributed systems, and I think a lot of interviewers simply do not. Sometimes I'm "corrected" on my whiteboard examples, and I have to push back because I'm not actually wrong about something.

And that kind of makes me seem like a douchebag, but at the same time I'm not going to pretend that I'm wrong on something if I don't genuinely think I might be wrong.
by eniveld | 2025-08-14 16:45:31+00:00
Location Station — AI audio local + global news (equity-only, pre-funding) Building a hyper-local, AI-personalized audio news app. Daily spoken briefing with detailed follow-ups + convai; publishers paid by attention minutes (incl. conversational minutes via explicit citations). Potential patent around multilevel provenance chains. Think Spotify AI DJ meets Apple News.

Looking for:

Technical cofounder (LLM/audio + mobile): prod LLM/audio, streaming, evals, retrieval, latency/cost tuning. Stack: Node/TS, AWS, DynamoDB, OpenAI Assistants, ElevenLabs; mobile: Kotlin/Android, iOS (Swift/SwiftUI), React (web); ffmpeg multitrack mixing; HLS/WebRTC.

Non-technical cofounder (content/revenue): newsroom/media operator; publisher sourcing, licensing, payouts, GTM for SF + North Bay. Status: prototype components running; 10-min demo slice; early publisher outreach. Terms: pre-funding, significant equity-only; remote-friendly (PT), Bay Area plus. Email: david at locationstation dot net.
by Sunspark | 2025-08-14 16:45:58+00:00
In an era of offshoring, outsourcing, automation and now uncontrolled mass migration from incompatible cultures into the west, it is undeniable there are problems.

Arch-capitalists push for these things in order to reduce cost as much as they can without consideration for society's future or well-being. E.g. laying off American workers in order to hire H-1B workers from corrupt countries where many lie about their experience and/or forge credentials. We have all seen how everything is getting worse in multiple countries now because of corporate control of society.

I do not for a second believe that they actually will implement UBI. There will be conditions attached to it. I don't know what the conditions are imagined to be, but it won't be as simple as these breathless articles about UBI make it sound.

Meanwhile, all these arch-capitalists are building their private doomsday bunkers underground.

Why are they building bunkers underground if everything is fine?
by ryandrake | 2025-08-14 16:46:22+00:00
Had to scroll too far down the page for this response. I wouldn't try to guess the reason why any particular company rejected you. 1. They usually aren't going to tell you why. 2. If they do, it's not necessarily going to be the real reason. There are so many internal reasons for not choosing to move forward with a candidate that have nothing to do with the candidate or their interview performance. The company's internal priorities and projects might have suddenly shifted. The headcount may no longer exist anymore. The hiring manager may have decided they really don't need another person after all. The job might not have existed in the first place and they're just fishing. The job might exist but they already know who they want and are doing throwaway interviews as a formality or for legal compliance reasons. Or they're just randomly rejecting candidates because they don't want to hire someone who is unlucky. No way to know for sure.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-14 16:46:25+00:00
> Similar to fiat, most of the value in gold is in people believing it has value.

Much moreso, really, because the value of money is kinda sticky; it's really difficult for it to change _quickly_ because a lot of stuff is essentially priced months or years in advance. Even the pretty dramatic inflation in developed world countries in '21-'23 would not be particularly exciting price action for gold, which really can swing quite dramatically in a short period of time.
by ARandumGuy | 2025-08-14 16:46:56+00:00
> People using the Nokia 3210 were very much not anticipating when their phones would get good, they were already a killer app. That they improved was icing on the cake.

It always bugs me whenever I hear someone defend some new tech (blockchain, LLMs, NFTs) by comparing it with phones or the internet or whatever. People did not need to be convinced to use cell phones or the internet. While there were absolutely some naysayers, the utility and usefulness of these technologies was very obvious by the time they became available to consumers.

But also, there's survivorship bias at play here. There are countless promising technologies that never saw widespread adoption. And any given new technology is far more likely to end up as a failure then it is to become "the next iPhone" or "the new internet."

In short, you should sell your technology based on what it can do right now, instead of what it might do in the future. If your tech doesn't provide utility right now, then it should be developed for longer before you start charging money for it. And while there's certainly some use for LLMs, a lot of the current use cases being pushed (google "AI overviews", shitty AI art, AIs writing out emails) aren't particularly useful.
by jl6 | 2025-08-14 16:47:11+00:00
Feels like there should be value in building smaller, more specialized models - maybe even doing so on-demand. I don’t always want a model that knows Polish and astrophysics and Shakespeare, I want one that runs really fast and is laser-focused on the domain that I’m working on.

I want to be able to say to a large general purpose LLM: “write a script that trains a model that is optimized for <useful task>” and then run that model.

Edit: well gosh darn. Within the edit window for this comment, Google goes and launches Gemma 3 270M.
by vel0city | 2025-08-14 16:47:15+00:00
> 7 trillion in military spending is unaccounted for

If someone gave me $100, and I handled it without keeping track, that's $100 not accounted for. But we do know that I was given $100, and the money went somewhere we just don't know where. But it doesn't necessarily mean that this was shadow money outside of the larger picture budgets, people still know I was given $100. Its not like now there's somehow $200 spent because I was given $100 and I failed to account for $100.

So thinking about the $800B defense budget, if they fail to properly track $150B of that budget, that's another $150B added to that pile of unaccounted for money. But its not an extra $150B that got spent, its still a part of that $800B.
by ranger207 | 2025-08-14 16:47:31+00:00
Yeah, both parties are becoming more authoritarian. IMO the solution is a different voting system than first-past-the-post that allows multiple parties to exist to force different political factions to interact with each other and compromise. But until then though I'm going to vote for the lesser of two evils, since under FPTP not voting at all would not be acting against the greater of two evils.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-14 16:47:38+00:00
>Comparing this to our lack of understanding of the human brain and discussing how these things might be "conscious" is silly.

Don't call my claim silly. I'm sick of your attitude. Why can't you have a civil discussion?

Literally we don't know. You can't make a claim that it's silly when you can't even define what consciousness is. You don't know how human brains work, you don't know how consciousness forms, you don't know how emergence in LLMs work. So your claim here is logically just made up out of thin air.

Sure we "understand" LLMs from the curve fitting perspective. But the entirety of why we use LLMs and what we use it for arises from the emergence which is what we don't understand. Curve fitting is like 1% of the LLM, it is the emergent properties we completely don't get (99%) and take advantage of on a daily basis. Curve fitting is just a high level concept that allows us to construct the algorithm which is the actual thing that does the hard work of wiring up the atomic units of the network.

>Yes there are emergent properties we don't understand but the same is true of a spam filter.

Yeah and so? Your statement proves nothing. It just illustrates a contrast in sentiment. The spam filter is a trivial thing, the human brain is not.

We don't understand the spam filter. And this is the most interesting part of it all is that the SAME scaling problem that prevents us from understanding the spam filter can be characterized as the reason that prevents us from understanding BOTH the LLM and the human brain.

Your statement doesn't change anything. It's just using sentiment to try to re-characterize a problem in a different light.
by foxyv | 2025-08-14 16:48:04+00:00
Owning a home wouldn't make much sense if we were building tons of affordable housing. However, with the constant artificial shortage created by cities, the rents and prices continue to rise ad infinitum.

This means, as a homeowner, I have a huge advantage over my friends who are renting and paying twice as much for a single bedroom apartment, even including maintenance costs. This will only get worse over time.
by tracker1 | 2025-08-14 16:48:14+00:00
I'm surprised at the books mentioned in the article. While potentially inappropriate for elementary aged children are probably more than okay for teens and high school aged. The restrictions themselves without context, review requirements or any rigorous standards is likely excessive.

That said, there are definitely examples of books that have been put into school libraries that can be considered obscene, that you can't post screenshots of on Facebook or other social media platforms, or quote or otherwise read into a school board or city council meeting. Such as graphically depicting a minor student giving fellatio to a teacher. That are wholly inappropriate in any school setting.

And that isn't to restrict a parent who decides to allow their child access to this kind of material, if deemed mature enough to handle it. Only in that it doesn't belong in a public or school library. They simply aren't meant for children. Aside, I'm even open to an "adult" section of libraries that do offer mature content access/storage for adults, such as Playboy, which has a history of decent journalism.
by rayiner | 2025-08-14 16:48:15+00:00
Your confusion follows from your premise that this is about “banning.” This is about what books are made available to kids in school libraries. It’s a response to a trend in education, which has embraced teaching non-white kids to embrace ethnic identity and think of themselves as oppressed.

Florida Hispanics see these trends as well, and one reason they overwhelmingly supported DeSantis for re-election is that’s not the worldview they want their own kids to have. They don’t want their kids to think of themselves as “Hispanic” (which is an artificial political construct anyway) and have teachers assign them books about how Hispanics are “marginalized.”
by msgodel | 2025-08-14 16:48:39+00:00
There are plenty of guns in Canada. Last time I was there the local post office in the town I visited actually sold rifle cases.

If you look at the US gun violence data the places that have gun control laws tend to be the ones with the highest rates of gun violence. It's cliche but it's true: guns don't kill people, people kill people. You need to ban violent people not guns.
by chollida1 | 2025-08-14 16:48:44+00:00
Agreed on 3D printing but that is a technology that would have failed my screening as proposed.

They haven't continued to see massive adoption and improvement despite the flaws people point out.

They had initial success at printing basic plastic pieces but have failed to print in other materials like metal as you correctly point out, so these wouldn't pass my screening as they currently sit.
by gameman144 | 2025-08-14 16:48:54+00:00
I'm not even in favor of banning/heavily-regulating AI developments, but I think this position here is a little reductive; you could boil anything down to the point of absurdity.

The point of nuclear weapons bans, for instance, isn't to control "evil atoms from touching", it's to prevent the higher-order effects that those atoms touching can cause.
by neilv | 2025-08-14 16:49:03+00:00
> Yet between 2016 and 2019 Flo Health shared that intimate data with companies including Facebook and Google, along with mobile marketing firm AppsFlyer, and Yahoo!-owned mobile analytics platform Flurry. [...] Every interaction inside the app was also logged, and this data was shared.

Proposed resolution:

1. Wipe out Flo with civil damages, and also wipe out the C-suite and others at the company personally.

2. Prison for Flo's C-suite, and everyone else at Flo who knew what was going on and didn't stop it, or who was grossly negligent when they knew they were handling sensitive info.

3. Investigate what Flo's board and investors knew, for possible criminal and civil liability.

4. Investigate what Flo's data-sharing partner companies knew, and what was done with the data, for possible criminal and civil liability.

Tech industry gold rushes have naturally attracted much of the shittiest of society. And the Overton window within the field has shifted so much due to this, with some dishonest and underhanded practices as SOP, that even decent people have lost references for what's right and wrong. So the tech industry is going to keep doing every greedy, underhanded, and reckless thing they can, until society starts holding them accountable. That doesn't mean regulatory handslaps; that means predatory sociopaths rotting in prison, and VCs and LPs wiped out, as corporate veils of companies that the VCs knew were underhanded are pierced.
by juneyi | 2025-08-14 16:49:18+00:00
to simplify this one step further, i've got a throwaway for anything i don't care or plan on just using once, another for tech related, another for all finances related, and so on and so forth. overall, i'm really just managing 5 emails which all can be viewed or organized on gmail and native outlook (don't judge me) app. quite easy
by pixl97 | 2025-08-14 16:49:20+00:00
Mens rea vs actus reus.

In some crimes actus reus is what matters. For example if you're handling stolen goods (in the US) the law can repossess these goods and any gains from them, even if you had no idea they were stolen.

Tech companies try to absolve themselves of mens rea by making sure no one says anything via email or other documented process that could otherwise be used in discovery. "If you don't admit your product could be used for wrong doing, then it can't!"
by Night_Thastus | 2025-08-14 16:49:33+00:00
>In current coding models the transformer bit is just one part of what is really an expert system. The complete package includes things like highly curated training data, specialized tokenizers, pre and post training regimens, guardrails, optimized system prompts etc, all tuned to coding. Put it all together and you get one shot performance on generating the type of code that was unthinkable even a year ago.

This is lipstick on a pig. All those methods are impressive, but ultimately workarounds for an idea that is fundamentally unsuitable for programming.

>That's >90% of all code in the wild. Probably more.

Maybe, but not 90% of time spent on programming. Boilerplate is easy. It's the 20%/80% rule in action.

I don't deny these tools can be useful and save time - but they can't be left to their own devices. They need to be tightly controlled and given narrow scopes, with heavy oversight by an SME who knows what the code is supposed to be doing. "Design W module with X interface designed to do Y in Z way", keeping it as small as possible and reviewing it to hell and back. And keeping it accountable by making tests yourself. Never let it test itself, it simply cannot be trusted to do so.

LLMs are incredibly good at writing something that looks reasonable, but is complete nonsense. That's horrible from a code maintenance perspective.
by jtanderson | 2025-08-14 16:49:51+00:00
Is your example here a bit oblique to the point? I see this more of a failing of the people to properly appreciate and discuss/process the contents of the book, and as well as, in my opinion, socially overcompensating for the diversity in the room?

I definitely see your point around a lot of people trying to be so inclusive, they end up being somewhat racist. But I see this more of a lack of proper cultural empathy/education -- go figure, Dunning-Kruger is everywhere all the time. But as you said,

> This law is about what books are in public libraries.

So why would we ban the books, rather than encourage reading them and having the more meaningful discussions focusing on heritage rather than identity?

As a slightly more abstract aside, identity anything to me is a slippery slope because it will always automatically encourage one to make assumptions; it's a mental shortcut to say Person A == Person B iff PersonA.identity == PersonB.identity. Given that education is hard, learning is hard, and life is hard, I think we need to at least emphathize and appreciate that teachers and the the education system in general need to often fall back on these sorts of mental shortcuts. But that's we need to really invoke our right, privilege, and duty of grassroots participation. Why not walk into that book club that's overcompensating and help them learn what is making you uncomfortable? You might be surprised at how ignorant they were of their own mistakes and that they're willing to learn from your perspective.
by toast0 | 2025-08-14 16:49:51+00:00
> The "confusion" (according to Kodak) arises from the fact that the accountants did not consider (or considered and then discounted) the fact that Kodak apparently intends to put in place financing to help it repay or roll over its debts before they fall due. I'm not an accountant but I'm sure there are many rules around what they can and cannot consider before including such a statement.

Well, from the statement itself, such financing would need to be committed, which likely they haven't done. This might be strategic, if it allows them to wind down their pension obligations and harvest the surplus investments.