MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-14 18:56:04+00:00
It’s not really a co branded card. They send you a Target Redcard you can ignore, but all it does is charge your debit card as usual. There is no credit check.

Your Amex lawsuit link is about Amex prohibiting different discounts based on payment card networks (see #4 at bottom of page 2).

Amex’s contract does not overrule the federal government’s rule that a merchant can offer a discount for debit and cash.

The Supreme Court upheld AmEx’s steering provisions in 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_v._American_Express_Co.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-08-14 18:56:04+00:00
Hackernews really isn't a good place for a serious discussion, so I'll just clarify my position.

I think you're spooked for the same reason I think that all the "AI alarmists" whose alarmism is based on our lack of understanding of LLMs are spooked. That because we "lack understanding" it follows that AI is "out of our control" or is on the verge of becoming "conscious" or "intelligent", whatever that means.

Except this isn't true to me. Yes, we can't predict how inputs will map to outputs, but that's nothing unexpected? This has been true of nearly every ML model in practical use (not just those based on neural nets) for a very long time.

I don't perceive this as a "lack of understanding", in the same way I don't consider it a "lack of understanding" the inability to predict the output of a Support Vector Machine classifying email as spam, or not being able to predict how the coefficients of a radial basis function end up accurately approximating the behavior of a complex physical system. To me they're all a "lack of interpretability", which is a different thing.

This is, to me, qualitatively different from our lack of understanding of the human brain. We know the algorithm an LLM is executing, because we set it up. We know how it learns, because we invented the algorithm that does it. We understand pretty well what's happening between the neurons because it's just a scaled up version of smaller models, whose behavior we have visualized and understand pretty well. We know how it "reasons" (in the sense of "thinking" models) because we set it up to "reason" in that matter from how we trained it.

Our understanding of the human brain is not even close to this. We can't even understand the most basic of brains.

Even postulating that LLMs are conscious, whatever that actually is in reality, is nonsensical. They're not even alive! What would "consciousness" even entail for a pure function? There's no reason to even bring that up other than to hype these things as more than what they are (be it positively or negatively).

> I think the fact of the matter is, if you're putting your foot down and saying LLMs aren't intelligent... you're wildly illogical and misinformed about the status quo of Artificial intelligence

They're just as intelligent as a chess engine is intelligent. They're algorithms.

> Also the characterization in the article is mistaken. It says we understand LLMs in a limited way. Yeah sure. It's as limited as our understanding of the human brain.

We understand enough about how they work that we know just forcing them to output more tokens leads to better results and we have a good intuition as to why (see: Karpathy's video on the subject). It's why when asked a math question they spit out a whole paragraph rather than the answer directly, and why "reasoning" is surprisingly effective (we can see from open models that reasoning often just spits out a giant pile of nonsense). More tokens = more compute = more accuracy. A bit similar to the number of noise removal steps in a diffusion model.
by jart | 2025-08-14 18:56:05+00:00
Lamego only stayed at Apple six months. He was very productive. He filed 12 new patents for Apple. But he apparently had disputes with managers. The details aren't entirely clear. But Lamego ended up resigning. After leaving Apple, he founded his own company, True Wearables, which was also successfully sued by Masimo for trade secret theft.
by diarrhea | 2025-08-14 18:56:12+00:00
In colocated repos, running both git and jj commands is supported. I use it in release workflows which require git tags, which jj does not support creating. However, jj will pick up ("import") on git-created tags just fine afterwards.

AFAIK, jj runs "import" before and "export" (to git) after every invocation. That means it always has a consistent view.

jj can also handle concurrent edits by itself, think in a repo shared across a network. That said, I wouldn't think concurrent git commands are safe.
by canyon289 | 2025-08-14 18:56:26+00:00
Because there is a simultaneous need out of the box generalized models. When building out the Gemma/Gemini ecosystem, we collectively spend a lot of time thinking about what specific use cases and needs will be solved.

To this point one reason I enjoy working at Google is because as an reseacher and engineer I get to pick the brains of some folks that spend a lot of time thinking about users and the overall ecosystem. Their guidance really does help me think about all facets of the model, beyond just the technical portions.
by delfinom | 2025-08-14 18:57:30+00:00
> it would be great to have a cross distribution wiki with separate sections for distribution-specific instructions where it makes sense.

This doesn't work as well as you think.

We did this in one large OSS project for documenting operations just for installs/setup/build/etc.

The problem is:

1. The list of differences get large fast if you aren't within the same family of OS like Debian/Ubuntu/Mint

2. Information will get out of date for some distros over others. Unhelpful pricks start bitching and moaning and nobody wants to deal with it at that point.

3. Unhelpful pricks will also bitch and moan you delete the out of date sections
by hypertexthero | 2025-08-14 18:58:01+00:00
Anyone reading at Kodak, please consider making a camera that has:

1. 35mm-equivalent basic plastic lens, 6 megapixel sensor with big pixels, autofocus, center-weighted metering.

2. No screen to see photos. Only a tiny LCD for basic settings like remaining pictures and remaining battery power.

3. Pictures saved to replaceable built-in SD card, downloadable to computers via USB-C to USB-C connector.

4. Long battery life (one whole day of shooting). Powered by rechargeable AA batteries.

5. Splash proof.

6. Photo sensor that adds grain to blown highlights and lost shadows.

7. Less than $100.

8. Bonus: Open source firmware.

Basically a competitor to the Camp Snap, but better.

Thank you!
by DennisL123 | 2025-08-14 18:58:19+00:00
A winner tree uses extra space, doesn't it? That might exclude it from certain applications to be an alternative. Four-ary heaps are roughly (ymmv) twice as fast as binary heaps by exploiting cache locality in a better way for small key/value types. And it seems to be a sweet spot since eight-ary heaps don’t deliver additional improvements.
by jrflowers | 2025-08-14 18:58:21+00:00
I love these “I am a big brain genius” blog posts.

> Some people hate it and will unfriend you if they even catch a whiff that you've sent one message to ChatGPT. Other people love it and completely outsource their agency and thinking.

>Both sides are the result of stupid, unclear thinking.

Only fools like or dislike a thing, whereas the author experiences an ascendant Third Thing only accessible to him and Other Geniuses (people that give him seventy five dollars)
by shagie | 2025-08-14 18:58:28+00:00
You can also patent the shape of a bottle. https://patents.google.com/patent/USD48160S/en (yes, its an old one).

These fall into the classification of design patent which covers ornamental non-functional elements of a particular item. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

Design patents also cover typefaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... -- note that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States

Design patents differ from a utility patent which covers how something works.
by jsbisviewtiful | 2025-08-14 18:58:56+00:00
I looked at the Instinct 3 with Solar because I really wanted the best battery life out there, only to find out Garmin neglected to include topo maps (I wanted a device for hiking and backpacking so that's disappointing) in the Instinct 3 and despite being $400+ the casing is plastic. Odd choices for that price. I feel like the Garmin interfaces are also just... not great. Way too busy for such a small screen. The Coros watch face I'm using right now includes: time, date, day, elevation, steps, calories burned, heart rate and battery level all on a simple, uncrowded and easy to read b&w face... It's called Particular but I can't find a screen shot of it. It's leagues easier to read than what I've seen of Garmin and Apple (which for some reason still has their faces so locked down it's restrictive).
by badsectoracula | 2025-08-14 18:58:57+00:00
El Capitan being much faster than my desktop doesn't mean that my desktop is useless. Same with LLMs.

I've been using Mistral Small 3.x for a bunch of tasks on my own PC and it has been very useful, especially after i wrote a few custom tools with llama.cpp to make it more "scriptable".
by Spivak | 2025-08-14 18:59:02+00:00
I mean this is more philosophical than anything—if you listened to my conversations but never told anyone what I said, altered your behavior, or took any action based on the information contained therein then how would I or anyone even know.

And I know it sounds pedantic but I don't think it is, it's why that data is allowed to be stored in S3 and Amazon isn't considered easedropping but Facebook is.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-08-14 19:00:02+00:00
> Wayland is an attempt to do one thing, and only one thing. You must bring in the other features (like window management and remote networking) as adjacent components.

It's fine to separate a small core protocol from extensions that flesh out the rest of the features. Wayland, however, did the small core and didn't bother to actually implement the rest, so 16 years on it still doesn't have feature parity.

> "This Phillip's-head screwdriver can't cut cheese or open a wine bottle."

Then stop handing me a screwdriver and telling me I should use it instead of my multitool.
by kashunstva | 2025-08-14 19:00:05+00:00
> service problem and not a pricing problem

Indeed. Recently we purchased season 1 of a reasonably popular U.S. produced show via Apple TV. When played, it is available only in dubbed French in our region (Canada.) None of the info available beforehand said anything about this. Guess where I obtained the subsequent seasons? I will pay for content but not if you lie, or make me jump through ridiculous hoops.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-14 19:01:37+00:00
Yea, these employees are not being "poached." They're not zero-agency deer owned by Masimo, grazing on their land, that Apple came in and stole away. They can decide for themselves that someone else is offering a better business arrangement.

There is a market rate for talent, and if you can't afford the market rate, then you don't get the talent.
by diarrhea | 2025-08-14 19:01:59+00:00
One of my favorite features of jj is file watching. Once set up, jj will snapshot the repo on every filesystem event. This means on every file save, you get a git commit! It provides arbitrarily fine-grained commit history, and works across all tools (not just your IDE). I set it up in the config and it has "just worked" ever since.

The result is that `jj evolog -p` will show detailed history of your actions. But all but the most recent commit are hidden, so neatly tucked away behind the same change as usual.

Another favorite is git no longer yelling at me and having meltdowns about switching branches - "files would be overwritten, please stash". This never happens in jj, by design. It's nicer than "auto-stash" options of recent git versions.
by deeg | 2025-08-14 19:02:19+00:00
Woz gave a lecture in one of my classes years ago and I came away impressed. He was obviously a brilliant engineer. "Naivete" is generally used in a negative manner but he had just enough naivete to get through life happy. He talked about all the chips he redesigned as a teen and it did not sound like bragging at all. We need more Woz's and less Jobs in this world.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-08-14 19:02:26+00:00
A very well-regarded assessment.

Conventional wisdom may not be wise enough when times get too unconventional though :)

And who knows how much is too much?

There is always overwhelming unexpressed pressure before the dam breaks unexpectedly and you are worse off having stock than cash.

It's critical that there be no consensus about an impending downturn, otherwise there may not be enough leverage imposed on the unexpected element of surprise for those in position to be able to weather a storm which wrecks all boats.
by mattfrommars | 2025-08-14 19:02:48+00:00
Looks great to automate workload for Windows desktop application. I'd love to understand more deeply how your application works, so the set of commands your backend send is click, scroll, screenshot. Does it send command to say type character into an input field? How is it able to pin point a text field from a screenshot? Is LLM reliable to pin point x and y to click on a field?

Also, to have this run in a large scale, Does it become prohibitively expensive to run on daily basis on thousand of custom workflows? I assume this runs on the cloud.
by thefourthchime | 2025-08-14 19:03:04+00:00
Something I've been thinking about is language models aren't good at large software, but they're good at little demos. If you could build software by making little boxes, sort of like ActiveX controls back in the day, or microservices, and the model just focused on its own little microservice or object, and then you can build the software by connecting all of these.
Show HN: Occupied Tech Podcast, episode 1: Microsoft [video]
by pbiggar | 2025-08-14 19:03:44+00:00
Hey folks, wanted to link you to a new podcast we're making about how tech and how Israel's occupation of Palestine is enabled through the tech industry.

The first episode today deals with Microsoft, and how they have worked directly with the Israeli Military to power the genocide in Gaza.

I'll be around if there are questions.
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-14 19:04:11+00:00
What I read above is not an evaluation on “encyclopedic knowledge” though, it's a very basic a common sense: I wouldn't mind if the model didn't know the name of the biggest mountain on earth, but if the model cannot grasp the fact that the same mountain cannot simultaneously be #1, #2 and #3, then the model feels very dumb.
by gkoos | 2025-08-14 19:05:29+00:00
I guessit's a mix of market size, monetization difficulty, and investor expectations: - a CLI or build tool can get huge love from devs but still serve a small, finite market - many devs will happily use a free open-source tool but won't pay unless it's mission-critical - funding is biased toward sales-driven models - successful paid devtools usually have enterprise-grade support - PH and X are cool but not for validating a sustainable business
by jart | 2025-08-14 19:05:58+00:00
Maybe if Masimo had made Lamego a significant shareholder, he wouldn't have left his "CTO" role to become a mere Apple employee. Masimo is an $8b company. They created a spinoff called Cercacor which Lamego got to be CTO of. My best guess is it wasn't a real startup like we're used to in the Silicon Valley sense. There wasn't any real opportunity for him to gain generational wealth there if he was successful. Apple not only hired him, but thirty other of their employees too, because Apple recognized that their talent was worth more than a licensing deal. That's the issue with these non-valley enterprises. They're very feudal in the sense that the owners treat their engineers and scientists like ordinary workers, expect total loyalty, and pull out their legal guns when they don't get their way. Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals. A court later found Lamego hadn't made his moves entirely fairly, but I believe if you look at the big picture, Apple's behavior wasn't predatory, but rather liberatory.
by sandworm101 | 2025-08-14 19:06:27+00:00
He also famously engineered a bomb hoax in highschool, down to building a ticking device that was heroically disabled by, iirc, the school principal. Today, such behavior would easily end in terrorism charges.

It is all laughing a fun, until you meet people whose futures were destroyed for doing far less in regards to fake weapons in schools.
by keernan | 2025-08-14 19:06:45+00:00
The article refers to a different case involving Texas in which Clarence Thomas wrote"

>>“The statute advances the state’s important interest in shielding children from sexually explicit content,” Thomas wrote. “And, it is appropriately tailored because it permits users to verify their ages through the established methods of providing government-issued identification and sharing transactional data.”

Once government-issued identification is required, sites are going to start charging money for accounts. This is nothing but a money grab - and since I believe Thomas is in the business of taking money for his vote, it is no surprise he is in favor of government-issued identification cards.
by softwaredoug | 2025-08-14 19:06:57+00:00
I always think about this:

> At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10651136-at-a-party-given-b...
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-14 19:07:33+00:00
> I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to reduce the crime.

This is the bailey of your motte and bailey argument. The motte is the implication that the National Guard should do this (or rather, shouldn't not do this). Regardless of it being good to try to reduce crime, this is a bad way to try to reduce crime.
by Guid_NewGuid | 2025-08-14 19:07:35+00:00
Evidence for the Republican party becoming more authoritarian:

- attempted illegal book bans

- suppression of right to protest and free speech on university campuses with lawfare

- US citizens being black bagged and deported to foreign concentration camps without due process and against court rulings

- deploying the army to the states unconstitutionally

- continued gerrymandering over the ruling of state supreme courts (Ohio)

Evidence for the Democratic party becoming more extreme:

- ... I'm struggling to think of an example, maybe you hold that prosecution of violent insurrectionists and their ring leader, the current president, was political extremism and authoritarian, but one would be so far detached from the reality-inhabiting community if so I don't know what to tell you.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-14 19:07:56+00:00
I certainly don't think it qualifies as whataboutism. I'm neither preaching inaction nor attempting to refute any prior claims. Neither do I attempt to claim a broad general equivalence.

It seems to me that you are disregarding the context? From up thread:

> No political party seems to be on the side of a principled defence of freedom of speech.

I did cite an example, at least indirectly, when I mentioned other countries. Consider the online speech measures in the UK as but one example. Not the same political party to be sure but the underlying ideology is shared. The only significant difference (IMO) is the presence or absence of first amendment protections.
by Muromec | 2025-08-14 19:08:06+00:00
I'm confused. Author puts crypto backdors and IDP with ZKP into the same bucket and calls it "nerding harder". But why? You can have identity provider, several European countries do and you can have subcredentials. You literally can nerd harder here.

Sure, there is a strong ideological argument why you should not have strong identities required in the internet in general (or even in offline) and on porn sites specifically, but the argument is not technical.
by lucas_membrane | 2025-08-14 19:08:08+00:00
That kind of statement is made to warn the investors and potential investors about the contents of the financial statement to which it is attached. The statement will include amounts representing the 'value' of the firm's assets according to the accounting rules for valuing assets. Current earnings being the most important number that investors and potential investors look for in the financial statements, the 'rules' for reporting those asset 'values' are designed to get the current earnings to come out 'right' for firms that are operating more or less normally. In other words, the asset 'values' and the 'earnings' numbers are hypothetical, being based on the hypotheses that either the assets will be of use to the company or that the company will keep operating long enough to write off the mis-valued assets over many years without that amortization of the value ever having a catastrophic impact on earnings. Bottom line on that disclosure is that Kodak's accountants or auditors made them say it and that's because accounting standards make them make them say it, and that's all that it means.

When I look at the company's follow up assertion characterizing the required disclosure as not direful, the first thing I notice is what is not there: they do not deny that the firm is likely to be acquired.
by lights0123 | 2025-08-14 19:08:33+00:00
My tips for speeding up builds (from making this same project but with ebpf):

- switch to ninja to avoid that exact issue since CMake + Make spawns a subprocess for every directory (use the binary from PyPi for jobserver integration)

- catkin as in ROS? rm /opt/ros/noetic/etc/catkin/profile.d/99.roslisp.sh to remove 2 python spawns per package
by ModernMech | 2025-08-14 19:08:49+00:00
When I was a student, we tried to get him to speak to at our school, but Woz wanted mucho $$$$ to speak. But it seems plenty people will pay what he asks. I guess if my job were to just go around talking about random shit I'm interested in, and I can make $10M doing that, I'd be the happiest person ever too. I don't think it's about naivete.

Edit to clarify: I'm not saying he doesn't deserve to get paid, I'm saying his being "the happiest person ever" is directly correlated to his ability to collect millions just shooting the shit in front of a fawning audience.
by bjourne | 2025-08-14 19:08:49+00:00
He's right, but it has been known for decades that learning by doing is the most efficient way of learning. The reason it is not panacea is because it is hard to measure. A test is easier to administer than reviewing source code to determine whether someone can build web sites well. Learning by doing also requires more freer forms of education, hence it is resisted by Conservative politicians who'd rather have the students learn more discipline (i.e., if you aren't suffering you aren't working hard).

Moreover, a country that emphasizes learning by doing over education focused on test taking will likely score worse on international student assessments, such as PISA. For the simple reason that if students are better at doing their own research, writing reports, etc., they are probably also worse at test taking.

There's too much paranoia and prestige involved in education. It would be better if education was based on the science of education, rather than the whims of politicians, but it's not... it's like the prerogative to control the young generation is too important to let people like "professors in pedagogy" decide. Cause what the fuck do they know? I was a kid once and I learned things in school, kids these days suck, yadda, yadda.