MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nerdponx | 2025-09-25 00:32:12+00:00
The "both sides" argument, in the USA, does not at all stand up to even a little bit of scrutiny. Yes, both sides do various bad things, and individual politicians on both sides are varyingly corrupt. But only one side systematically obstructs social, economic, environmental, educational, and medical progress, and actively works to undo progress that has already been made. The other side generally, albeit slowly and stubbornly, moves things in a positive direction.

It's one thing if you genuinely think liberal, center left, and leftist policy is bad compared to authoritarian conservatism. That's wrong, but at least it's a strong and clear position, and the people who hold such beliefs usually do so for various personal reasons that are at least somewhat intellectually and morally understandable, even though they are usually incoherent and inconsistent.

It's another thing entirely to continue to hammer away at the "both sides equally bad" idea. It's flatly wrong, as a matter of simple fact. Pelosi insider trading simply does not compare in magnitude of damage to, say, the president more or less openly taking bribes to allow huge industry consolidation, or unraveling decades of American soft power abroad. You might also want to go look up the actual activity that took place under the Biden executive branch. I don't think anybody will argue against you that Biden was a problematic president. But you can't look at the policy enacted and carried out by his administration and claim that it's all a wash. It would be much more intellectually honest to say you prefer Trump's policy.
by mullingitover | 2025-09-25 00:32:14+00:00
Straight from the horse's mouth:

> ..."we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

- "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page[1]

They weren't wrong!

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Are unique brand names better than generic ones for visibility in AI search?
by piranhas | 2025-09-25 00:32:39+00:00
LLMs attribute brand mentions instead of analysing just your backlink profile like legacy search engines do.

1. My assumption is that currently brand mentions in text are considered but less in images, videos and voice because it is still pretty resource-intensive. What is your opinion on this and when do you think it will change?

2. My assumption is that a clearly distinguishable brand name (e.g. "SupaDupa Tours New York") beats a generic brand (e.g. "New York Tours") because AI can easier attribute the brand mention. In the future it might improve. What's your opinion on this?

P.S. "Apple" on the other hand stands out because it is not used in the context of fruits but technology and is easily distinguishable.
by riemannzeta | 2025-09-25 00:33:03+00:00
I think I basically agree with this perspective, but I might try to add some nuance. As organizations become larger, there is a tendency for them to become less and less efficient. This seems to be linked to the second law of thermodynamics, which applies to information the same way it applies to matter.

One way to address the relative inefficiency of a larger organization is to consume more energy and not worry about the waste on entropy. This works so long as the large organization is growing — i.e., so long as it is able to extract more energy from its environment than it is wasting (in a relative sense) on its internal processes.

The strategies for minimizing entropy within an organization — large or small — seem to boil down to two, which are intertwined: 1) what @pg called "Founder Mode" and 2) alignment around mission and vision. In both cases, the effect is to drive the organization towards a "critical state" in which small details of information picked up at the edges can be shared relatively quickly across the entire organization, allowing every part of the organization to react in alignment to that new information. In the case of 1), this is facilitated by a dictator (i.e., the founder) who everybody willingly submits decisions to when they themselves are unsure of how the founder would decide. In the case of 2), this is facilitated by a shared understanding of what the "right" decision is across the organization in view of the mission and vision, which are clear and crisp enough to answer most questions, even about relatively obscure issues or questions that arise.

The ability to operate at scale seems more or less to be derived from one or both of these. Coase's theory of the firm in The Nature of the Firm can be understood in these terms — that is, 1) and 2) are the mechanism whereby internal management outperforms spot markets in coordinating production.
by nl | 2025-09-25 00:33:27+00:00
It's not reasonable because he knew full well that he didn't represent the evidence in any kind of balanced way. He was paid to push an agenda.

To quote the judge:

> “He cherry-picked and misrepresented study results and refused to acknowledge the role of genetics in the etiology” of autism spectrum disorder or ADHD, Cote wrote in her decision, which the plaintiffs have since appealed.
by nulld3v | 2025-09-25 00:34:06+00:00
I suspect that's due to the GPU and not due to Prism, because they basically just took a mobile GPU and stuffed it into a laptop chip. Generally performance seems to be on par with whatever a typical flagship Android devices can do.

Desktop games that have mobile ports generally seem to run well, emulation is pretty solid too (e.g. Dolphin). Warcraft III runs OK-ish.
by protocolture | 2025-09-25 00:34:07+00:00
>without the requirement of superuser privileges

Like you want to be able to update it without su or that you cant access it at all?

Like you could have a cron running as root that updates etc/hosts every minute based on a userspace text document if you felt like it. It would be incredibly bad practice but I dont get the impression that this is a concern.

>Running a resolver locally, or within the LAN, falls outside the realm of "simple".

Running your own DNS server isnt simple? The standard Microsoft DHCP/DNS process is to take DHCP leases and turn them into DNS entries.

Part of the reason a lot of answers are going to challenge your simple requirements, is that theres a great deal of malware that would love to do what you want to do, and these systems are largely hardened to prevent it.

If this is for an application you want to deploy, I believe "Simple" for userspace, is quite complex to overcome all the things trying to prevent exactly this. My gut feeling is that this desire will evolve into a docker container with a DNS resolver, and just present some kind of interface for adding records. Then just pipe all your DNS requests through the container.
by jpmattia | 2025-09-25 00:35:10+00:00
Like many of you, I serve as IT support for family. Some of those family are beginning to slip cognitively, so I'd like to say: Fk google for doing this. You are confusing my relatives who cannot tell the difference between your ad-spam and actual links, and it is not an exaggeration to say that you are now taking advantage of old people.

I'm trying to install adblockers (uBlock) and move them over to chatgpt when possible. If anyone has better ideas, I'm all ears.
by spoiler | 2025-09-25 00:35:15+00:00
I find Rust more ergonomic than something like C or C++, or even Go.

I feel unburdened while using Rust, which is not something I can say about a lot of other dev environments.

As for Zig... I tried to get into it, and I can't remember the specifics, but they felt like "poor" taste in language design (I have a similar opinion of Go). I say taste because I think some thighs weren't necessarily bad, but I just couldn't convince myself to like them. I realise this is a very minority opinion, and I know great engineers who love Zig.

Zig's just not my thing I guess. Same way Rust isn't someone else's thing.
by tengbretson | 2025-09-25 00:35:20+00:00
> the amount wagered on sports bets has grown from $5 billion to $150 billion annually. 58% of college students have bet on sports. 50% of all men below 50 have an online sports betting account.

If I had my way, everyone who has ever made a "why make it illegal/regulate it? People will just do it anyway."-style argument would be forced under penalty of law to write the above quote 300 times on a chalkboard.
by tzs | 2025-09-25 00:35:41+00:00
Is this why Home Assistant on my Raspberry Pi cannot install the Matter server update from 8.1.0 to 8.1.1 that it is telling me is available?

It gives this error:

> Error during service call to update.install: Error updating Matter Server: Can't install homeassistant/aarch64-addon-matter-server:8.1.1: 401 Client Error for http+docker://localhost/v1.51/images/create?tag=8.1.1&fromImage=homeassistant%2Faarch64-addon-matter-server&platform=linux%2Farm64: Unauthorized ("unauthorized: authentication required")

From the "localhost" in the URL I assumed it was an error with a local Docker instance but I have no idea how HA actually works under the hood. I used the install method where you use the Raspberry Pi Imager to make a bootable HA RPi image and that takes complete control of the RPi. There's a Linux in there, but I've got no login on it. It is a complete black box to me with all my interaction through their web interface or the mobile app. Presumably it has to get 8.1.1 of the Matter server from somewhere, and if that is failing maybe it makes the localhost Docker fail too?
by fooker | 2025-09-25 00:36:15+00:00
Big tech has negotiated this H1B narrative very well.

It kills two birds with one stone -

* Easy excuse to reduce hiring junior engineers just as AI is getting good. People seem to think there are 'slots' to fill with reduced immigration, but no, not this time.

* Streamlined hiring experts. If you want a linux kernel developer with ten years of experience, now you can just get one instead of going through the lottery and waiting ~8 months before they can start working. (And no, you are not going to find many unemployed US citizens with ten years of Linux kernel development experience.)
by joegibbs | 2025-09-25 00:36:38+00:00
I remember that a couple of years ago people were talking about how multimodal models would have skills bleed-over, so one that's trained on the same amount of text + a ton of video/image data would perform better on text responses. Did this end up holding up? Intuitively I would think that text packs much more meaning into the same amount of data than visuals do (a single 1000x1000px image would be about the same amount of data as a million characters), which would hamstring it.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-09-25 00:36:40+00:00
I think it's a mistake to think of these cycles as inevitable, and that it's guaranteed that some small fry will disrupt the current giants. Yes, they may have happened in the past, but large companies are much more cognizant of the cycles of disruption now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. Microsoft was a behemoth in the late 80s and they're currently number 2 market cap in the world. Many folks on this board may be too young to remember Netscape's boast of "The Browser is the OS" in the mid 90s - well, Netscape is long gone and Microsoft is still giant. Only 2 years ago you saw pronouncements that OpenAI was going to be the death knell for Google, and it was it seemed to be the kick in the pants that Google needed to get their AI story working. Facebook just basically bought all its nascent competition (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.)

I think disrupting large players will be much harder than it was it the past.
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-09-25 00:36:55+00:00
The reality will probably be hard to discern. Programming has become the new doctor/lawyer "big money" job in the past 25 years. That has drawn a lot of people unsuited for the work. Add the lack of a meaningful gatekeeping accreditation system like the other professions and you get a system burdened with a lot of dead wood.

The outcome going forward might end up looking superficially bleaker than the recent gravy train of overhiring suggests but that doesn't mean it's a valid indicator. Lots of disingenuous media outlets are cherry picking the COVID tech runup from 2020-2022 as an indication of a trend that collapsed but the real long term trend has corrected back to where it should have been all along.
by chaseadam17 | 2025-09-25 00:38:15+00:00
I think it's part of the reason Bitcoin has been successful - it's a store of value that governments/banks can't inflate away, similar to gold.

But crypto has also made US dollar stable coins popular, which are arguably better than holding some hyper inflating currency like the Argentinian Peso, but the holders of those stablecoins are still "taxed" when the US government/banks inflate the currency (and are worse off than US citizens who should at least benefit a small amount from whatever the printed money is spent on).

The holy grail is a new internet-native stable coin that keeps a relatively steady price but can't be easily inflated away by a small group of people (e.g. backed by a basket of assets), but so far most attempts to do that have failed. I bet eventually we'll have a popular one that works, though.
by GrifMD | 2025-09-25 00:38:22+00:00
Maybe? The Australian tech seen has always felt fairly small to me, at least in Sydney. We've got Atlassian and Canva as the local darlings, and then Google, Amazon, FB, and Salesforce have their offices, though I don't think much real engineering work gets done here. I'm not trying to throw shade at any engineers in Sydney of course, especially at those companies, I just never got the since that the engineering teams were large here.

Maybe I'm too insular, but is there much of a startup seen here, @aussieguy1234? If there is I'd love to hear about it
by ori_b | 2025-09-25 00:38:38+00:00
If you don't think they're capable of listening to the same things as you are, taking into account team guidance, and coming to a reasonable decision, why would you trust them to implement something?

If they're not getting the same inputs to their decisions as you are, why are you hamstringing them?

And if they're not capable of understanding the inputs to their decisions, why are you keeping them around?
by riemannzeta | 2025-09-25 00:38:39+00:00
Suppose we could wave a magic wand and require that some fixed percentage (or more) of every corporation had to be owned by employees. Would that help resolve the problem?

Suppose further that corporate managers were prohibited from making tax-advantaged donations to non-profits except upon a fixed percentage of employees approving the donation. Would that help?

Aside from employees, there are also the communities within which corporations operate. Suppose we required that a certain percentage of any taxable profits be earmarked for donation to non-profits within the communities within which the corporations operate. Would that help? But maybe we would we have to pair this with the proposal above for this to work?
by kragen | 2025-09-25 00:38:55+00:00
I was thinking of things like amox-clav, cefalexin, doxycycline, and azithromycin, and screening the patients for risk factors. Oral antibiotics that are commonly used in empirical therapy (i.e., without cultivating a bacterial culture) and have low risks of dangerous side effects. I suspect that, for example, fluoroquinolones would be less likely to pass the cost/benefit test due to their more serious side effects.
by TheDong | 2025-09-25 00:39:27+00:00
> move them over to ChatGPT

OpenAI has even more VC money to pay back than Google ever did.

Practically all the large tech companies so far have turned to ads and monetizing users rather than charging enough to remain more neutral.

I suspect one day, when you ask ChatGPT "Can you give me a link to mid journey", you'll instead probabilistically get a link to whichever competitor paid OpenAI for the best placement.
by pnathan | 2025-09-25 00:40:08+00:00
Yes, the network effect and cumulative impact is profound.

If I were to make a lightly educated guess - those who were teens in the 40s and 50s saw the world of their parents and their sacrifices, along with the totalitarianism of the USSR and Nazi Germany, and decided to pursue individualism over community. So as they got to an age to participate they opted out, as well as increasing the total social individualism. And here we are.

I don't know exactly what the way out here looks like, but I believe it absolutely means involvement with local organizations. Kiwanis, elks, rotary, religious, etc.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-25 00:41:04+00:00
Google managed to dance the knife edge there for a lot longer than most though. AdWords made so much money in a fairly unobtrusive way, that they were able to scale it out without pissing a lot of people off. That and it was actually even sometimes useful.

They clearly decided to just say "fuck it" though. Sometime after Ruth Porat replaced Patrick Pichette and especially after Sundar took the helm (both happened while I worked there) but most especially in the last 3 years.
by archargelod | 2025-09-25 00:41:25+00:00
That's because youtube allows almost everything sfw to be hosted on their platform and without any limits.

I can imagine if they've added rate-limiting, e.g. 30GB per IP per week - that would've reduced amount of crap, literal white noise and spam/scam videos uploaded to Youtube in several magnitudes. Another strategy is, if a video doesn't get 1000 views after a week - it's deleted.
by chongli | 2025-09-25 00:42:16+00:00
They did pass on a lot of value to consumers. They used their profits to grow, build Gmail, buy and grow YouTube, build Android.

Just running Google as-is without ads would have produced less value in the long run. Plus the SEO tide (which relied on DoubleClick ads that weren't yet owned by Google) began to rise and would've drowned Google Search much earlier if they hadn't grown.

Where I think Google took the bad (for consumers) turn was when they purchased DoubleClick and began to consolidate the entire ad business. Instead of losing money to SEO spammers, they began to make money. This put Google into a conflict of interest against their own users. Ever since then they've been piling onto that conflict of interest, draining more and more value from their products.
by nerdponx | 2025-09-25 00:42:34+00:00
This is quite a deranged rant, but it's at least a window into the paranoid fantasy world of the contemporary conservative right wing, for those of us who are not already familiar with it.

As they say, every accusation is a confession.

Surely the president labeling Antifa a terrorist organization is not a permission slip for violence. Surely accusing trans and queer people of being child molesters with an America-destroying agenda is not a permission slip for violence.

Also it's not like calling people a Nazi is a new thing. That has been an insult used by the left since literally the end of the war in Europe. This fantasy that it's some kind of new insidious dogwhistle for violence against simple innocent good people is not even the slightest founded in reality.

There's actually an element of truth in here. Yeah, the parallels to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany are striking! So the insult bears a little more weight than it used to. And moreover: the conservative right wing, particularly the libertarians and the gun nuts, love to make a big show about having the means and will to carry out violence in order to defend their homes from harm and their nation from tyranny. Is it so hard to see that this is merely that very same thing?

So yeah, it's kind of an invitation of violence against you. But you are the one threatening me. What else do you expect?
by jazzyjackson | 2025-09-25 00:43:07+00:00
Take focus away from the previous outrage from the day before. It was cancelling Jimmy Kimmel, then $100k HB1 visas, before that I already forget, what was it he did the day the Birthday Book dropped?

It doesn't matter if these declarations are suspended or don't go anywhere, as long as it overwhelms the news cycle for the day.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-09-25 00:43:45+00:00
I totally agree - yes, the current AI tools will definitely change, but the difference in AI-tooling specifics is much smaller than the difference between "no AI assistance at all" and an agentic-AI heavy coding process.

And I say this as someone who didn't make the transition after 25 years as a software engineer. While I get a lot of value out of AI, I felt it largely changed my job from "mostly author" to "mostly editor", and I just didn't enjoy it nearly as much, so I got out of software altogether and went to violin making school.
by hlandau | 2025-09-25 00:44:14+00:00
I'm a bit confused.

This is described as being related to 'NitroTPM', which is described as a 'virtual device [...] which conforms to the TPM 2.0 specification'.

Ordinarily, the way you do attestation with a TPM is to perform a TPM quote operation, which provides a TPM-signed attestation of a set of PCRs.

This is... not that. This appears (judging by looking at the source code for some of the provided tools) to be invoking an undocumented(?) vendor-specific command on the TPM device which appears related to the previous Nitro Secure Enclaves support. When AWS introduced Nitro Secure Enclaves, they came up with their own signed attestation document format rather than reusing the TPM standard, then added support for that format to KMS.

The documentation also states: "An Attestation Document is generated by the NitroTPM and it is signed by the Nitro Hypervisor."

This seems to suggest that different entities are responsible for generating AWS's Attestation Document and for signing it, which seems rather odd. What's going on here?

If AWS's claims that NitroTPM is TPM 2.0 compliant are true, it seems like there are now basically two completely different APIs for remote attestation exposed via the TPM virtual device: TPM 2.0 Quote operations and AWS Attestation Documents via an undocumented(?) vendor-specific API.

I can understand wanting to take this approach for consistency with their previous Nitro Secure Enclaves API but it's at the expense of consistency with the existing TPM 2.0 standard. Presumably if you want to use KMS with this you have to use their Attestation Document format rather than a TPM 2.0 Quote, forcing you to use a vendor specific API with it.

Just some thoughts, and this is just my quick impression. I could be mistaken. In any case, having this functionality with a viable KMS tie-in is certainly valuable, so it's nice to see in the sense that you no longer have to create a Nitro Secure Enclave to get this kind of functionality if you don't need the dual compartments separated via a vsock.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-09-25 00:44:25+00:00
So what's crazy about this is that I remember, when I first joined Google in 2011, that they were particularly proud of how people would just stop using URLs and use Google to navigate. So people would type "amazon" to get to Amazon.com instead of actually typing out `amazon.com`, or using a bookmark or directory etc. And they wanted to keep search at a quality that would continue to get people to do that. And later the fear with mobile becoming ascendant was that people would stop using search in this way, etc.

But it looks like they just keep giving people more and more reason to... not do that.