MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2025-09-04 01:20:56+00:00
I've heard this complaint/observation many times and I just don't buy it. For one thing, particularly for large companies, the deduction smooths out. Yes, you can only deduct 20% of the costs this year but you're also deducting 20% from the previous year, 20% from the eyar before that and so on.

Also, the 2017 tax cuts and the recent bill have provided substantial tax cuts to these corporations too.

Usually this subject comes up where people (at least on HN) are telling people to mail their Congresspeople and Senators to get a bill passed to "fix" this and my question is always this:

"What tax cuts are you going to give back to pay for this?"

If we want to end this ridiculous IP transfer to Ireland and royalty payments to offshore profits to avoid taxes at the same time, I'm 100% on board with fixing the deductability of engineering salaries.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-09-04 01:21:20+00:00
> The article and none of the comments mention rewards yet, which are the biggest reason to use cards!

In my observation being that much incentivized by the reward system seems to be a very US-American thing. In Germany, I have never heard anybody seriously talking about that they love the reward system of their credit card. I would claim that at most some (but I think rather few) people in Germany consider some very specific reward that their credit card has as a slight convenience - but nothing more.
by skhameneh | 2025-09-04 01:21:40+00:00
I'll take another look but from what I perceived all attempts to start a thread included tool calling in the payload.

I couldn't seem to get any message through without tool calling instructions in the payload. What you're describing sounds exactly like what I attempted.

I tried something like over 6 different variations of model configs with restarts of Zed in-between. The documentation and what Zed tries to configure are different as well. The fields don't match up with the built in type checking. I tried "openai" with the endpoint configured, "openai_compatible", and even "openrouter" hoping the REST signatures would be match well enough. Each configured with various fields to turn tool calling off and every single request that hit the REST server had tool calling.
by refurb | 2025-09-04 01:21:42+00:00
Precisely.

It's easy living as a foreigner in autocratic countries. You've got a "get out of jail" card called a foreign passport which not only protects you for political reasons, but also gives you an escape hatch for any reason, government or not.

For locals its entirely different. You don't get the "they're a foreigner, so be nice". Victim of crime? Don't bother with the police unless you have a fat bribe. Ripped off in your business? The courts won't care. Accused of a crime? Bribes are your only recourse.

So yes, the mundane day to day is the same, but when problems pop up the difference is like night and day. In authoritarian country you're at the complete mercy of those with more power than you.
by cyberax | 2025-09-04 01:22:15+00:00
And they were right, I think. Twitter's UI has degraded. I can't see this tweet linked from the thread: https://x.com/Grady_Booch/status/1620720537805922306 - it gives me an error. It might have been deleted, but Twitter just says "something went wrong". And I don't think it's even possible to view threads anymore without logging in?

But more importantly, X has not released any substantially new features within the last 3 years. And I bet that it won't release anything new for a while, and anything they _do_ try to release will be laughably broken.
by geye1234 | 2025-09-04 01:22:16+00:00
I'm afraid the physicalist position is absolutely impossible. When I think about something, I'm thinking about something different from the brain state that represents it. There is nothing difficult or subtle about this: if I think about a tiger, I am not thinking about a brain state that is associated therewith.

The physicalist position wants to reduce the mental to the physical. My thought cannot be reduced from the mental to the physical, because my thought is about a tiger, and a tiger cannot be reduced to a brain state.

If physicalism is true, I can't really be thinking about a tiger, because the tiger in my thought has no physical existence-as-a-tiger, and therefore can't have any existence-as-a-tiger at all. But then I'm not really thinking about a tiger. And the same applies to all our thoughts: physicalism would imply that all our thoughts are delusional, and not about reality at all. A non-physicalist view allows my thought to be actually about a tiger, without that tiger-thought having physical existence.

(Note that I have no problem with the view that the mental and the physical co-incide, or have some kind of causal relationship -- this is obviously true -- only with the view that the mental is reducible to the physical.)
by non_aligned | 2025-09-04 01:23:57+00:00
And the data for the two decades before that should be tossed out because of the global housing crisis, the sovereign debt crisis, and all the reverberations from that.

And the data for the two decades before that obviously needs to be tossed out because of the one-off nature of the dot-com boom, the dot-com crash, 9/11, and so on.

And before that... point is, you don't get clean data in economics. There's always something big going on, there are no double-blind trials to run, etc. It's called the dismal science for a reason. But that doesn't make it useless.
by estearum | 2025-09-04 01:24:34+00:00
That's crazy because NYT never reported that. I haven't checked The Atlantic, but I suppose it's much the same story.

NYT reported the WHO's early (and high) estimate of 3.4% CFR (way way below the 4% IFR that you claim) in March 2020 [1] but even in that same article noted that this was probably a high over-estimate.

> Is 3.4 percent a misleading number? We spoke to a number of experts in epidemiology, and they all agreed that 1 percent was probably more realistic (the W.H.O. has also said the number would probably fall)

The real CFR ended up being somewhere between 0.5% and 1%, which is way closer to both the 1% CFR the NYT reported and to the 3.4% CFR the WHO reported than your alleged 4% IFR. Which... again... was never reported by the NYTimes.

Neither the WHO's 3.4% nor NYTimes' 1% estimates are "multiple orders of magnitude" above 0.5% - 1%.

It seems like you lost trust in reputable institutions because you've been lied to incessantly on the Internet about what they said when. It might be worth reconsidering the trust you place in whatever pulled your trust away from these institutions!

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/07/upshot/how-de...

---

Just for context of how insanely made-up your 4% figure is, in March 2020 when NYTimes was reporting "probably close to 1% CFR," our testing infrastructure was extremely lacking. It would be reasonable to estimate less than 25% of cases were detected. If so, a 4% IFR would imply a CFR of at least 16%. But yeah, as mentioned, the NYTimes was reporting a CFR of 1%. Which is pretty close to what it ended up being.
by anigbrowl | 2025-09-04 01:24:58+00:00
As your other comment was flagged to death, no I'm not kidding you. I don't use Zig (or indeed Rust) so I don't have any particular feeling about the personalities or relative merits of the languages, other than that they are inferior because I don't like them as much as my favorites.

I think it's a good report because it's very clearly written and I was able to pick up a great deal of information about their financial situation/dynamics from a quick scan of less than a minute. I think if you're asking people for money, having a very high signal-noise ratio like that is optimal. I can read other formats (eg I have been browsing nonprofit form 990s for many years), but I like communication that is short and to the point.
by hsod | 2025-09-04 01:25:09+00:00
Douglas Hofstadter wrote an essay about this essay in the book “The Mind’s I” which I thoroughly enjoyed reading even if a lot of it is beyond me. There’s a somewhat janky OCR version here http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...

Classic Hofstadter, he introduces a concept called a “Be-Able Thing” (BAT for short)
by m463 | 2025-09-04 01:25:09+00:00
> My argument: video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice.

We might be doing just that now.

The best way to increase your ROI is to fire all your employees. How do we know we're not in the mid-release-cycle of that right now?

I'd guess game levels and assets are becoming ai slop as we speak.
by bn-l | 2025-09-04 01:25:23+00:00
I’m no expert but this sounds like bunk. Doesn’t the body maintain a pretty stable blood glucose level regardless?:

> “These artificial sweeteners do not provide old-fashioned sugar or glucose into your body that is needed to be broken down in your body for energy and normal brain function,” Dr. Segil says. Basically, your brain may not be getting the fuel it needs if your diet is heavy in artificial sweeteners or sugar alcohols, he explains. In theory, that may lead to some people developing issues with memory and cognition at a faster rate than others, simply because the brain is struggling to function as well as it should.

Also does it bundle sugar alcohols with the non-nutritive sweeteners?
by paulcole | 2025-09-04 01:25:27+00:00
Why not word it slightly differently:

“Tell me about a time you moved a file from one machine to another…”

Then have follow-ups ready to go to introduce constraints or issues that would explore the depth of their knowledge. Say for example, “What if that file had been 1000x bigger?” Or whatever.

I think you’ll get more of what you’re looking for with this approach.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-09-04 01:25:46+00:00
> "These companies' revenues aren't emerging from nothing. People aren't paying them billions unless there is value in the product."

Oh, of course not. Just like people weren't paying vast sums of money for beanie babies and dotcoms in the late 1990s and mortgage CDOs in the late 2000s [EDIT] unless there was value in the product.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-09-04 01:26:00+00:00
I have been using (an older version of) Tufte CSS on my blog[0] for years now. I had to tweak it quite a bit before I thought it looked OK on both phones and tablets but I really think it does work well for the longer-form posts I was originally aiming for.

[0] https://sheep.horse/everything.html
by danans | 2025-09-04 01:26:19+00:00
> Fungi and Animalia split from Eukarya. Fungi didn't exist before then.

Plants are also Eukaryotes but Fungi and Animalia have a more recent common ancestor than either has with Plantae.

We and fungi are both Opisthokonts, a distinct subclade of Eukaryotes, but plants are not.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opisthokont
by djoldman | 2025-09-04 01:26:21+00:00
Agreed.

Data curation is barely on the radar of most non-tech industries. Even in tech, it's rare to have any meta data.

This is a huge blocker to many efforts.

Someone somewhere has to go through every table and field and document where it came from, when, and what it actually means.

Very very few places do this.

"Oh yeah I go to gold.inventory. I think it updates every night. Columns? Should be pretty intuitive, just look at the names."
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-04 01:27:44+00:00
The big robot AI issue is: no data!

There is a lot of high quality text from diverse domains, there's a lot of audio or images or videos around. The largest robotics datasets are absolutely pathetic in size compared to that. We didn't collect or stockpile the right data in advance. Embodiment may be hard by itself, but doing embodiment in this data-barren wasteland is living hell.

So you throw everything but the kitchen sink at the problem. You pre-train on non-robotics data to squeeze transfer learning for all its worth, you run hard sims, a hundred flavors of data augmentation, you get hardware and set up actual warehouses with test benches where robots try their hand at specific tasks to collect more data.

And all of that combined only gets you to "meh" real world performance - slow, flaky, fairly brittle, and on relatively narrow tasks. Often good enough for an impressive demo, but not good enough to replace human workers yet.

There's a reason why a lot of those bleeding edge AI powered robots are designed for and ship with either teleoperation capabilities, or demonstration-replay capabilities. Companies that are doing this hope to start pushing units first, and then use human operators to start building up some of the "real world" datasets they need to actually train those robots to be more capable of autonomous operation.

Having to deal with Capital H Hardware is the big non-AI issue. You can push ChatGPT to 100 million devices, as long as you have a product people want to use for the price of "free", and the GPUs to deal with inference demand. You can't materialize 100 million actual physical robot bodies out of nowhere for free, GPUs or no GPUs. Scaling up is hard and expensive.
by runarberg | 2025-09-04 01:27:54+00:00
AI is such a bad and tainted term and since LLMs became so prominent it has kind of become synonymous with LLMs and generative AI more broadly.

I honestly think this is for the better, (un)supervised learning models and other machine learning models with a reasonable number of parameters (k-means clustering, Markov Chains etc.) are usually not called AI any more (and honestly haven’t been for some time; machine learning has been much more popular for at least 10-15 years in my experience).
by thrance | 2025-09-04 01:28:36+00:00
Hating on minorities is nothing new, and has always been a powerful political driver. DEI is just another thing to direct that hate to, it doesn't matter what it actually is or does.

Also, establising a link between DEI, a vague group of very mild and mostly ineffectual incentives, and the rise of right wing ideology is really dumb. No one would care about DEI if it hadn't been made a major talking point by right wing propagandists. If DEI didn't exist it would be something else that would "turn young men to the right".

Don't fall for such basic propaganda. The war on these supposedly unfair hiring practices is being led by rich heirs that never did an honest day of work in their entire lives. Those disenfranchised young men buying the hate are made to turn against their own interests by the very same ones that fucked their opportunities in the first place.
by wahern | 2025-09-04 01:28:51+00:00
AFAIU, in Ancient Greek culture Magi were often considered like Plato's Philosopher Kings. Greeks didn't have an accurate understanding of Zoroastrianism or the structure of Persian government, but for some reason they saw Persian leaders, and Magi in particular, as possessing a synthesis of political, religious, philosophical and scientific virtues. For example, they thought Persian leaders' grasp of astronomy meant the laws they promulgated were what we might call today, science-based. Magi represented idealized leadership rooted in reason, similar to the way today people of one country like to point at some other country du jour as an exemplar of rational governance, especially when critiquing their own government or society.

Aristotle and others specifically said that the Magi did not practice metaphysical sorcery. They believed the Magi could, for example, divine the future, but doing so through their study of astronomy (i.e. their science-y astrological knowledge).

The biblical account of the Magi and the star they followed perfectly matches the mythos of Persian Magi in Greek culture. The story itself tells the reader not only that those rational leaders over yonder were convinced about the importance of Jesus, but that they knew because "science" revealed it to them.
by tuveson | 2025-09-04 01:30:48+00:00
Programming in a structured high-level language like C is much more productive than programming in assembly. Programming in a managed language with GC can be more productive still.

The creation of package managers and the widespread availability of open-source repos means developers don't need to write as much from scratch.

The creation of search engines and Stack Overflow did (and still do) much of the useful things that people use AI for (boilerplate, debugging obscure error messages).

Machines have gotten exponentially faster for the last several decades. This means devs need to spend less time optimizing code. And the time to compile and run speeds up, meaning you can prototype things faster.

Why is it, that somehow none of these inarguable improvements to the speed and efficiency of development haven't lead to a a massive decrease in the number of developers? If we take it as axiomatic that AI significantly improves productivity, why, for the first time in history, does that not result in more programming jobs?
by wisty | 2025-09-04 01:31:45+00:00
Chat gpt 3 was 2020, even if the technology wasn't mature the hype was there informing investment and hiring decisions.

There was also other factors, there were covid booms, covid busts, overcorrections, Elon shoes you can cut by 90% and still keep a product running (kind of) and with X taking the flack other people followed suit without being as loud. There is a fairly major war in Europe ....
by next_xibalba | 2025-09-04 01:31:48+00:00
Don't underestimate the effect of Elon nuking the Twitter employee base when he acquired the company. All the predictions were that Twitter would die. It hasn't. That sent a powerful message to the other leaders of tech companies: "You can do just as much with far fewer people" / "Most of your employees aren't doing needle moving work". Shortly thereafter, Zuck announced layoffs at Meta. These new attitudes towards headcount have cascaded down from the top-tier tech companies down through the ecosystem of companies.
by Andrex | 2025-09-04 01:32:14+00:00
Windows gaming finally falling to desktop Linux, in terms of tech and mindshare among enthusiasts, proves to me that given a sufficiently large timescale open solutions tend to always win against a proprietary ones.

Companies just can't seem to stay focused on their own core competencies after a few decades. On the other hand, even when open projects "die" they can be resurrected ad infinitum.

Just my gut feeling but it seems like closed wins out big in the short term, but open wins in the end. Not applicable to everything I know.
by lisbbb | 2025-09-04 01:32:33+00:00
The main problem I have with cash is that we don't have denominations large enough to buy much these days thanks to inflation. The $100 is the new $20, but ATMs won't serve $100s. I buy gas for my car, it's at least $35 right there. Groceries run $80-$120 every trip now. I don't know if revaluation is possible, but we need it.

I'm not worried about dirty cash as compared to every purchase being tracked and all the fees for using services like Venmo or whatever exchange service du jour, and they all apply their petty moralizing. It's not the way forward if you value freedom and privacy.
by thrawa8387336 | 2025-09-04 01:32:35+00:00
Pretty much, though I would not say they go together. 2nd paragraph is just a separate conjecture.

Personally, don't need that much evidence; are we old enough to remember the hiring gentleman's agreement in big tech?

Let's also not forget one of the main functions of HR, as an industry, these days: friction. You think salaries (and inflation) wouldn't go up if hiring managers had more freedom?
by IAmGraydon | 2025-09-04 01:33:32+00:00
>An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.

Isn’t this just the same as saying an organism is conscious if it perceives? If it is aware of input from one or more senses (and I’m not limiting that to the five human senses)?
by cgio | 2025-09-04 01:34:16+00:00
None of the improvements of the past you outline were advertised as capable of replicating agency. They were sold as tools. Note that I am not making any claim about actual capability for agency, there’s other people more qualified than me to discuss this. Regardless factuality of ability to replace people, this is how it’s sold and arguably also how it’s bought. This gives the view that it has impact on jobs more weight.
by lovich | 2025-09-04 01:34:47+00:00
He was certainly on top of new technology movement but signs were there the whole time.

I wasn’t aware of ChatGPT in 2022 but I was aware that we could not keep data scientists hired long term because several faangs like meta were just dropping 100% increases in salary as the opener to our people for some mega project related to machine learning based on the skill set of the people being hired
by deepsun | 2025-09-04 01:34:59+00:00
They just looked for people like them. To an extent, that's ok, e.g. nerds like nerds. Sometimes a team lead likes very much _certain technology_ and want a person to their team to also like it and not keep whining about it. I've been on both sides, and think it's alright. If the tech choice is the worst problem in that company I'm ok with that.
by ENGNR | 2025-09-04 01:35:10+00:00
Anecdotally I saw a post on reddit about a senior SWE in the USA who was laid off and couldn't get any interviews, with their old job outsourced to eastern Europe. And then this month the people he hadn't even got a response back from started requesting he apply for their jobs. Only one data point but the market might be coming back.
by godelski | 2025-09-04 01:36:07+00:00
> A big insight in machine learning optimization was that

I think the big insight was how useful this low order method still is. I think many people don't appreciate how new the study of high dimensional mathematics (let alone high dimensional statistics) actually is. I mean metric theory didn't really start till around the early 1900's. The big reason these systems are still mostly black boxes is because we still have a long way to go when it comes to understanding these spaces.

But I think it is worth mentioning that low order approximations can still lock you out of different optima. While I agree the (Latent) Manifold Hypothesis pretty likely applies to many problems, this doesn't change the fact that even at relatively low dimensions (like 10D) are quite complex and have lots of properties that are unintuitive. With topics like language and images, I think it is safe to say that these still require operating in high dimensions. You're still going to have to contend with the complexities of the concentration of measure (an idea from the 70's).

Still, I don't think anyone expected things to have worked out as well as they have. If anything I think it is more surprising we haven't run into issues earlier! I think there are still some pretty grand problems for AI/ML left. Personally this is why I push back against much of the hype. The hype machine is good if the end is in sight. But a hype machine creates a bubble. The gamble is if you call fill the bubble before it pops. But the risk is that if it pops before then, then it all comes crashing down. It's been a very hot summer but I'm worried that the hype will lead to a winter. I'd rather have had a longer summer than a hotter summer and a winter.
by jaza | 2025-09-04 01:36:37+00:00
I started university (in Australia) in 2004, not long after the dot com crash. CS enrolment rates were low, kids were getting scared off due to perceived lack of jobs. As a result, there was a shortage of grad talent (companies were already ramping up hiring again by 2004). I got a grad job just fine, in 2008, and I've never been short of work since.

So my advice to high school kids of 2025: right now is the perfect time to enrol in CS. 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads.