MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-05 21:38:47+00:00
I really hate this dismissal of "well it's affecting YOU now so now it's an issue". I'm not just "knowledge worker" and have grown up seeing the dangers of the internet, social media, invasion of privacy, and radicalization through seemingly benign channels. I've witnessed wars, unrest, and oppressions throughout all stages of my life.

So let's not just handwave it as "nothing special" and actually demonstrate why this isn't special. Most other forms of technological progress have shown obvious benefits to producers and consumers. Someone is always harmed in the short term, yes. But society's given them ways to either retire or seek new work if needed. I'm not seeing that here.
by natch | 2025-10-05 21:39:01+00:00
>the Board remains fixated on pleasing Mr. Musk

They state this as if it’s a problem, but it’s a fantastic thing for the company and the stock.

In the counterfactual world where the board did not do this and Musk left, Tesla would be way worse off. There’s also the theory that a new board could treat Musk badly or cut him loose and the company would do better, but I don’t buy that for a second. Put plainly, delusion runs rampant among Musk haters and that must be the reason this letter even exists. Or, some of them may be shorting and trying to avoid the day of reckoning.

And sure, his outspoken personality turns off a lot of people, but that is in the noise compared to the positive execution impacts he has.
by justinator | 2025-10-05 21:39:02+00:00
Really cool, although Connecticut is the last place in the US I'd make a destination to go hiking to. But I see how it's a good place to create a dashboard for, as it contains NO National Forests, NO National Parks[0], No BLM, and only 2300 acres of Wilderness (which this counter dashboard doesn't monitor), so it's much easier to put all these counters in (and the appropriate maintenance)

[0] (basically)
by Jtsummers | 2025-10-05 21:39:22+00:00
It's like many startups: spend other people's money by finding investors.

It's a bit of a semantic game, but investing != spending. Paying someone's salary is not an investment in that you don't get money back from that person, you get something of value hopefully, but not a monetary return from them. Investing in a movie or a startup has an expectation of a monetary return, so the investment is not "spent" (relevant synonyms: exhausted, consumed, depleted) by the investor.

Then whoever is actually making the movie, versus investing in it, is the one spending money. But it's not their money, it's the producers' money.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-10-05 21:40:01+00:00
I don’t like subscribing to things, let me just buy it for some amount of money.

I really really doubt many people on this site have any problems paying fair amount of money to buy their entertainment. Real cost is when the platform tries cutting some part of service or you have a problem renewing the subscription or you move to another country and it causes problems etc.

It is just better to actually own it and steam is really well trusted compared to a company like Microsoft which is bottom of the barrel. GoG model is better though like some other people wrote already.
by ghssds | 2025-10-05 21:41:01+00:00
Microsoft's EDIT, QBASIC, QuickBASIC and MSDOS 6.x had on-screen help in the form of hypertext documents with white links inside green brackets on a black background. It looked good. Windows 3.1x also had on-screen help in the form of hypertext documents with underlined green links on a white background. It also looked good. They cherry-picked their examples by talking about Windows 3.1 without mentioning that. First time I experienced the world wide web, it was using NCSA Mosaic and it featured blue hyperlinks instead of green, which was a surprise.
by tailspin2019 | 2025-10-05 21:41:08+00:00
I don’t understand how correlation/causation errors are mitigated here…

Surely more than 99.6% of people “inhaled air” before a heart attack too.

I’m sure there must be more to it but the way this is reported doesn’t make sense at all.

Would have been useful to mention what % of people had one or more of these “red flags” and didn’t have a heart attack.
by dm03514 | 2025-10-05 21:41:50+00:00
How are you defining “B2C businesses on Main Street.”

The reason I’m wondering is because it’s striking how much more financially challenged my Main Street is compared to Vc texh.

I see so much opportunity for a small medium business consultation in the analytics and process space but these companies are like really strapped for money and largely set in their ways in my experience.

In my experience, people are open to solving their problems. It’s just the money is hard making it financially viable so it’s just the big money is just like an order of magnitude smaller.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I think the general level of sort of like process thinking and data driven decision making in tech is at just like a higher baseline than on Main Street

A lot of my discussions are challenging how to sort of like present the problem in a way that somebody that doesn’t have decades of experience and operations understands.

Another challenge that I face regularly with Main Street companies is just people seem to be happy like they’re not trying to continuously optimize like I’m used to doing coming for a big tech. Even when it’s easy to present like positive ROI opportunities there’s just like a comfort with the way things are done and a lot of people seem just happy governed by their scaling factors in exchange for that that comfort.

TLDR; challenges are financial and mentality.
by DiscourseFan | 2025-10-05 21:42:04+00:00
Its not really helpful though, since to understand a thinker like Marx, for instance, requires careful study and an attention to empirical social trends, which can be demonstrated historically through texts like, say, Pride and Prejudice or Baudelaire’s poetry. The entire content of literary study is not “general rules for life” but careful attention to aspects of the empirical world through things that appear in its history and conditions, which are ever changing and thus require constant re-evaluation. We can hold certain principles above these empirical judgements, but we cannot lay claim to any absolute laws besides, perhaps, that human society is prone to violent convulsions.
by monkeyelite | 2025-10-05 21:42:13+00:00
> you have this idea that PI's hate their work / are gaming the system.

That’s actually not what I said.

> If the PI chooses use some funds from a grant to carry out speculative research. Good. GOOD. That is what scientific inquiry is meant for.

My claim is not about good or bad. My claim is that there is a gap between how science is done and how it is presented to the public.

> This is grants 101

You seem to agree such a gap exists, you just think it’s a good thing or a matter of business.

> because it is not my expertise

So notice when I bring up correct information, I’m told I don’t have the experience/expertise to do so despite my academic union card.

Please do share opinions about software. We have no professional organization. People argue with ideas.

> You are contributing to the decline of American science, and I will not stand for it.

you seem to identify intellectualism as a group of people or an organization.

I think that’s a mockery of truth and ideas.

Yes American science as a family of organizations deserves scrutiny and critiques. Funding these organizations is not an absolute public good.
by blooalien | 2025-10-05 21:42:30+00:00
> ... "it served to ingrain in me the habit of questioning everything and poking at things from multiple angles to make sure I had a good mental model."

Way back in "Ye olden days" (Apple ][ era) my first "computer teacher" was a teacher's assistant who had wrangled me (and a few other students) an hour a day each on the school's mostly otherwise un-used Apple ][e. He plopped us down in front of the thing with a stack of manuals, magazines, and floppy discs and let us have at it. "You wanna learn computer programming? You're gonna have to read..." :)
by za3faran | 2025-10-05 21:43:22+00:00
> Yes, and the same, of course, applies to Arab nationalism, which, at least in part, expressly allied itself with Nazi Germany.

I'm not so sure about that. Are you referring to specific, minority individuals pushing what you are claiming, as opposed to a more systematic approach? And how much of what happened was a reaction to the zionist immigration from Europe?

The fact that by the time of WWII, most Arabs were Muslims - and such an ideology explicitly contradicts Islam. We also know that the movement was heavily in response to (the also misguided) Turkish national movement - Young Turks during the last days of the Ottoman Caliphate.

The Arab nationalist movements in Egypt and Syria were primarily anti-colonial and not really aligned with the Nazis. After WWII, Arab nationalism (e.g. Ba'thism) was shaped by opposition to western imperialism and zionism as opposed to any nazi connection.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-05 21:43:37+00:00
>CS skills are going to migrate more to architecture, rigorous design documents, scalability, design patterns, and managing fleets of AI agents. All that is conceptually hard.

I've heard this a decade ago as well (replace Ai agents with distributed cloud clusters). Instead it seems like industry wants to kick out all the expertise and outsource as much grunt work as possible to maintain what is already there. So I not too optimistic that the industry will be looking for proper architects. We're pushing more CRUD than ever under the guisd of cutting edge tech.

We're not working smarter, we're trying to work cheaper. We'd need a huge cultural shift to really show me that this won't be even more true on 10 years. That's why I'm slowly trying to pivot to a role not reliant on such industry practices
by Avamander | 2025-10-05 21:45:41+00:00
You make an incorrect assumption about my assumptions. Faster computers or decryption techniques will never fundamentally "break" symmetric encryption. There's no discrete logarithm or factorization problem to speed up. Someone might find ways to make for example AES key recovery somewhat faster, but the margin of safety in those cases is still incredibly vast. In the end there's such an unfathomably vast key space to search through.
by gerdesj | 2025-10-05 21:46:14+00:00
OP explains all that admirably in the section entitled: "Terminology: BirdNET vs BirdNET-Pi"

I use both. I have a BNPi at home in our summerhouse with a mic on the outside. We live next to a park and the bird song can be deafening in summer!

I have the Birdnet app on my mobile and its ideal when out walking to do a quick survey or identify a song I don't recognise.

Whilst I'm commenting here, I'll drop a shout out for the "Flora Incognita" app for plant identification.
by radarsat1 | 2025-10-05 21:46:26+00:00
> By treating the outcome reward as a predictable label, we reformulate the RLVR problem into a supervised learning task over a score function parameterized by the policy model and optimized using cross-entropy loss.

Isn't this how the Decision Transformer works? I don't see it in the references, so I'll be curious to compare the papers in more depth.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01345

> By conditioning an autoregressive model on the desired return (reward), past states, and actions, our Decision Transformer model can generate future actions that achieve the desired return.

Lately it has crossed my mind that I haven't seen DT brought up much lately, it seemed really interesting when it was first published but I haven't read much follow-up work.
by edflsafoiewq | 2025-10-05 21:47:25+00:00
The NIST report doesn't engage with training costs, or even token costs. It's concerned with the cost the end user pays to complete a task. Actually their discussion of cost is interesting enough I'll quote it in full.

> Users care both about model performance and the expense of using models. There are multiple different types of costs and prices involved in model creation and usage:

> • Training cost: the amount spent by an AI company on compute, labor, and other inputs to create a new model.

> • Inference serving cost: the amount spent by an AI company on datacenters and compute to make a model available to end users.

> • Token price: the amount paid by end users on a per-token basis.

> • End-to-end expense for end users: the amount paid by end users to use a model to complete a task.

> End users are ultimately most affected by the last of these: end-to-end expenses. End-to-end expenses are more relevant than token prices because the number of tokens required to complete a task varies by model. For example, model A might charge half as much per token as model B does but use four times the number of tokens to complete an important piece of work, thus ending up twice as expensive end-to-end.
by dustingetz | 2025-10-05 21:48:08+00:00
companies outside the venture ecosystem need a lot more help. This is because they’re a lot harder to help. So, expect a Serenity Prayer situation. There is much less you can change. In return, you’re allowed to be older than 35. I would not say the work life balance is that different. bigger companies have deadlines and crises too. The crises are often worse because the management is looser.
by whstl | 2025-10-05 21:49:03+00:00
It's not just this, but that's one technique.

However this example has decoupled component hierarchy and HTML hierarchy. Which demonstrates they don't have to be coupled.

> But this is just bundling the props on a component and using the component itself as a bundle to drill down.

But there is no prop-drilling needed, as long as NavTree and ContentArea are also UI primitives. If you need NavTree and ContentArea to communicate with each other, for example, they're now siblings in the hierarchy, even though the HTML hierarchy is as deep as it needs to be for the design.

Btw: If "NavTree" and "ContentArea" are not primitives, they're the kind of thing that breaks a flat hierarchy and require prop-drilling/context/redux/etc in the first place. This is where one would use configurable primitive components, rather than the "Clean Code"-style extracted code.
by pedalpete | 2025-10-05 21:49:42+00:00
I once worked for VC backed start-up, I've not been VC backed myself, but I worked for Australia's science and technology research agency, so let's somewhat consider what I worked on was funded, cutting-edge development. Normally too early for VC, and often very shiny thing, or polishing things expected to be shiny in the future.

I've only once worked on main street when I was managing the app for a pizza chain.

One day, sitting in a quarterly planning meeting for the pizza company, they were discussing changes they could make to the app and the comment that stood out in my head was "we forecast this change could help us sell x% more garlic bread".

In my head I thought, "I don't care how much garlic bread we sell...this is not why I'm on the planet".

I know not every mains st. business is selling pizza, and lots of B2B companies, VC backed or not, would not excite me.

You're right, helping investors make money isn't very compelling, and I think B2B, has that kind of focus, but many ventures aren't B2B SaaS.

There is lots going on in health, energy, space, etc. right now. I do expect many of these bubbles will pop, but is there something there that interests you?

I didn't see a contact in your profile, but I'm the founder off https://affectablesleep.com, we're not hiring a GTM person, but I'm currently reaching out to a few people for advice. Drop me a line if you're interested in chatting, and maybe I can help you find your next thing too.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-05 21:49:47+00:00
> Since Snowden, we have hard evidence the NSA has been snooping on foreign governments and citizens alike

We also know this is also true for Russia, China and India. Being spied on is part of the cost of relying on external security guarantees.

> Not that other countries are inherently more trustworthy, but the US is a known bad actor

All regional and global powers are known bad actors. That said, Seoul is already in bed with Washington. Sending encrypted back-ups to an American company probably doesn't increase its threat cross section materially.
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-05 21:49:53+00:00
> That's no longer a simple iterator; it's a collection wrapper that represents in-iteration collection.

I am not using a language with iterators in daily work, but that doesn't sound like a real problem to me. The iterator is already provided by the container type and the container already supports removing things:

iter<T>::drop_current () { this->container.remove_at (this->index); this->index--; }

> Also, how do you solve the problem of mutation done through the collection without involving the iterator

Same like you solve mutation done to the container while the iterator exists, when the iterator doesn't allow mutating. That problem already exists.

I fail to see how mutating a container while iterating is more likely to be a bug, than mutating any other thing.
by starkeeper | 2025-10-05 21:51:07+00:00
I wish we had a constitutional amendment that opensourced all AI commercial AI models and requires documentation and links to all training data and base prompts.

They are trained on public data at our expense so We The People should *own* them.

Someday probably sooner then we might even think.... We'll easily run mega huge sized models on our laptops, desktops, and phones. AI should be free. Overhyped and Overpriced. I would love this setup for privacy and security.

Anyways, only tangentally related... (why worry about leaks like this and the hidden base prompts! - they *should all be 100% OSS* - it is the only way to ensure privacy and security).

Also, long timer lurker, first time posting!

I just had to get this off my mind! Cheers.
by philwelch | 2025-10-05 21:51:11+00:00
People aren't helpless pawns and they aren't perfect either. There's variability in the human ability to make rational economic decisions, isn't there? So what do you imagine happens if someone routinely makes bad economic decisions?

I don't think this explains 100% of why poor people are poor, but it doesn't explain 0% of it either. And to bring it back to the original point, we need to recognize that certain economic decisions, like sports gambling, are virtually always irrational decisions, and there's virtually nothing to be gained by protecting the consumer's freedom to make those decisions.

You seem to have a load-bearing assumption that in order to care about the poor, we can't even entertain the notion that any of them could ever possibly have become poor as a consequence of their own imperfections. Why is that? It seems obvious to me that when people end up poorer as a consequence of their gambling addictions, the obvious solution is to prohibit or at least more strictly regulate gambling, not to just leave those people to their fate.

> It is propaganda to "other" the poor. It is much easier to blame irrationality for people being poor rather than the systems we choose to keep in place. Those who convinced you of this falsehood, what are they gaining?

That take feels lazy and a little bit like projection. I'm not "othering" the poor, I'm trying to understand at least one of the problems they face and what solutions are possible. And one of "the systems we choose to keep in place" is this recent innovation of allowing online gambling to proliferate and freely advertise on every platform, which directly contributes to gambling addictions, which can and do ruin people's lives. Who stands to gain? The bookies. Yet you're the one arguing that the addict who blows his kids' college fund betting on football is "making decisions that are locally rational given their options", and I'm the one arguing that we should make it harder for the gambling industry to exploit him.
by cweagans | 2025-10-05 21:51:16+00:00
I'm currently sitting at < 200W, but I expect that to go up with a higher workload. The SER9s idle at 5-7W, but they can run at 50-60W sustained without thermal throttling. Some reviewers have claimed that they can run at 75-80W sustained for 10-15 minutes, but I think that's pretty unlikely.

We have pretty reasonable power rates here (https://www.idahopower.com/accounts-service/understand-your-...), so ~$12-20 per month depending on tier.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-05 21:51:23+00:00
> the should not have kept that data on foreign cloud storage regardless. It's not like there are only two choices here

Doesn't have to be an American provider (Though anyone else probably increases Seoul's security cross section. America is already its security guarantor, with tens of thousands of troops stationed in Korea.)

And doesn't have to be permanent. Ship encrypted copies to S3 while you get your hardenede-bunker domestic option constructed. Still beats the mess that's about to come for South Korea's population.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-05 21:51:45+00:00
This summer it took Amazon 74 days to deliver a book. Not even a new book.

A book sold and fulfilled by Amazon.

Amazon's online system kept pushing back the delivery date one week at a time, so it couldn't be canceled either online or by the phone drones.

After the second delay I just went to a local bookstore and bought it right there.

When the book from Amazon finally arrived, I took it straight to Whole Foods for a refund.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-05 21:51:59+00:00
The hard job market drives more screen time. Less jobs, less money to spend at bars or any other third place that has become paid, less money to network. You aren't spending time honing your craft now, you spend times on hustles trying to launch your social media account or by doing gig work on deliveries and rides hating.

You spend more energy than ever making less money than ever and probably under more stress than ever over all the looming costs. That's not a state of mind where you just sit down at the end of the day and start working on your side project. Anyone who can do that is extraordinary, but I hope that isn't how we expect our future generations to operate.
by protimewaster | 2025-10-05 21:52:01+00:00
One of the things that drives me a little crazy about Steam is that there was actually an earlier digital game store (run by Stardock IIRC) that made the launcher and other tie-ins optional. That one didn't take off, though. Steam required a tie-in to the launcher, and it took off.

I would've much rather had the launcher and all that be optional, but I'm guessing that requiring Steam for games like Half-life 2 probably was the smarter move (from a profit perspective) than having it be optional, so that's the way the market went.
by simonw | 2025-10-05 21:53:15+00:00
Maybe "solved problem" is an overly strong statement here. I was responding to:

> Are there any effective ways to add extra knowledge to an LLM, ways that are more than just demos or proofs of concept?

Adding to the context is certainly "effective" and more than just a proof-of-concept/demo. There are many production systems out there now using context-filling tools, most notably GPT-5 with search itself.

I do think it's only recently (this year) that models got reliable enough at this to be useful. For me it was o3 that first appeared strong enough at selecting and executing search tools for this trick to really start to shine.
by michaelw | 2025-10-05 21:53:34+00:00
Oh this brings back some fun memories. I worked with QNX for the ICON computer at Cemcorp and ESP Educational Software Products.

The OS was so clean but it lacked a lot of basic tooling. Back then there was no GUI or even a graphics library. We had to build or port a lot of things, including a VCS, from scratch. My editor of choice was JOVE (I couldn't get Emacs to build). I remember digging up various papers on graphics and creating our first graphics library.