MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by microtherion | 2025-10-03 17:51:47+00:00
I think it's the opposite: our expectations have RISEN to an extent that it's harder for beginners to get started.

One of my sons was interested in learning programming, but the goal he envisioned was to write an AAA game. It was rather discouraging to have to tell him that it would take a minimum of 5 years (realistically more) to get to the level where he could consider getting hired into a team of hundreds to work on such a game.

In contrast, the first computer I had access to had a whopping 7167 bytes of RAM to work with, and a 25x40 character screen. Correspondingly, our ambitions were much more limited.

I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's magazine (the internet archive has issues until about 1990: <https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal?and%5B%5D=creat...>), and many articles seem to fall into the categories of either being fairly simple (mostly games), or visions of overly ambitious projects that likely never came to fruition (a multi user UNIX system implemented on an 8080 system with 32K RAM and a floppy drive, to be written by somebody who encountered his first computer two years earlier…).

To be sure, there were also quite sophisticated programs, such as a 6502 floating point package co-developed by Steve Wozniak.
by ls612 | 2025-10-03 17:51:54+00:00
I was on the market last year as a fairly strong candidate, my advisors expected me to get a good tenure track job in a Finance department. I had first round interviews at multiple top 10 departments before things really went pear-shaped.

Here's what actually happened. The market looked pretty normal until November 5th, and then after that things went downhill. First the Fed Board of Governors stopped hiring (some regional banks kept hiring but had their offers explode on Jan 20). Then in January universities which had already done their first round interviews started imposing hiring freezes and cancelling flyouts. At the same time the Federal Government completely stopped hiring with DOGE coming in. Private sector hiring has been down for a few years since the ZIRP era ended so that part isn't new.

In the end I got a postdoc at a pretty good US university and will go on the market again in 2026-2027 with a much stronger portfolio than I had last year. Hopefully that will be enough for me, but I know for many others they may not be so lucky.
by keernan | 2025-10-03 17:52:00+00:00
I've struggled with social anxiety for years. Just yesterday I discovered that I am unable to visualize mental images such as faces (aphantasia).

I have always struggled in social settings where I people will be attending whom I've met on multiple but infrequent prior occasions - and I will recognize that I know them from somewhere but will be unable to place them or their name.

This has happened for 40 years when I see my wife's cousins at funerals every 2-3 years (but otherwise never see them). They are so friendly and nice. Smiling and hugging me. But they have to realize that I am never able to use their name because I can't remember it - nor am I able to make inquiries about work or life because I remember nothing about them.

The same happens when I, as a middle manager, travel for multiple day business trips to the home office.

It is incredibly embarrassing which causes me to avoid such settings which in turn makes me seem aloof and unfriendly.
by curioussquirrel | 2025-10-03 17:54:48+00:00
Heya, author here.

I don't necessarily agree with the statement "chronological feeds incentivises spam-posting, posters compete on quantity to get attention" - if someone spam-posts, I am very likely to unsubscribe. This would be true both for chronological and algo feeds.

>> I'm thinking of something like "algorithm as a service," which would be aligned with your interests and tuned for your personal goals.

Now that is something I would be interested in. I believe some of the RSS aggregators are trying to offer this too, but mostly the SaaS ones, not self-hostable open-source ones.
by maxglute | 2025-10-03 17:55:10+00:00
TBH potential future problem, scales to whether/how much construction industry get captured to point where maintenance costs is onerous. Developed west forgets, upkeep doesn't have to be expensive to defer which snowballs costs. The broader consideration for PRC is they are per capita, infrastructure POOR, i.e. less unit of infra in variety of categories per capita - there simply isn't that much excess infra relative to population.

Some of the bad investments won't pay back, will get abandoned with demographic change (baked in lower utilization when population drops), but IMO infra serves 10s millions, cuts millions of barrels of oil imports has good chance of paying for itself. Like 2hour -> 2minute infra for 2B rmb = 0.1% of Guizhou GDP. Seems like a no brainer.
by RaftPeople | 2025-10-03 17:55:11+00:00
Bank teller: "And how can I help you?"

Customer: "PERFORM 500-DEDUCT-ACCOUNT-BALANCE"

Bank teller: "Ok, great, and how much?"

Customer:

"01 TRANSACTION RECORD

05 TRANSACTION-AMOUNT PIC 9(9)V99

MOVE 100.00 TO TRANSACTION-AMOUNT"
by krono | 2025-10-03 17:55:15+00:00
Oh you flatterer!

My top level comment was not a complaint at all, but rather a heads-up regarding the potentially unexpected or often misunderstood effects of applying these font stacks, accompanied by a practical example, and a personal recommendation with my reasoning.

Now, please, don't be so hostile. It's nasty and makes you come across as a lot more stupid than I believe you really are.
by bananalychee | 2025-10-03 17:55:25+00:00
I think the premise, backed up by a couple of random tweets, is questionable, but glossing over that, the conclusion is more or less "just be yourself and you'll have more success". Maybe. But I feel like it's pinning social anxiety purely on neurotic safety-seeking behavior, which is superficial. Surely generalized social anxiety is an unhealthy over-correction, but some personality types have inherently more success socially than others, or in blunt terms, some people are more likeable than others. If you're socially compatible with 90% of the population, it's not hard to ignore the 10% you don't meld with, but swap the numbers and the negative feedback will be overwhelming and makes the majority of social interactions anxiety-inducing. I guess that's why the anonymous Internet is full of disagreeable people.
by UncleOxidant | 2025-10-03 17:55:37+00:00
The Road was the first of his books I read. I read his last two books The Passenger and Stella Maris shortly after he passed. Both contained interesting thoughts on philosophy, science, mathematics. Of the two, I think Stella Maris was better - it's kind of a deep dive into genius and the madness that often accompanies it.

Agree on Steinbeck. Less cruel and more hopeful. My favorite American author. It would have been very interesting to be a fly on the wall in a discussion between an aged Steinbeck and a young McCarthy - one of those questions where if you could have two authors talk to each other over a beer and sit in on the conversation.
by bmau5 | 2025-10-03 17:55:55+00:00
I can see the clear benefits of smart glasses, but can't imagine owning them myself (until there's a local only version). It feels like it will be a social faux pas as well, as I can't imagine being comfortable in a social setting around smart glasses wearers knowing they could be recording anything I'm saying/doing.

I may be the luddite here and I'm sure if they get enough adoption it will eventually be commonplace, but at the moment I'm struggling with this.
by rhcom2 | 2025-10-03 17:55:57+00:00
> You will be depressed after your beloved pet dies.

You'll experience *grief* after a pet dies. We've pathologizing grief to a point that it makes it harder for those experiencing both grief and depression, two separate (but sometimes linked) human conditions.

https://undark.org/2022/07/21/the-hidden-dangers-of-patholog...
by Aerbil313 | 2025-10-03 17:56:16+00:00
Afaict, a good part of racism comes from the fact that human brain automatically labels people different from you as enemy. I assume this was a very useful strategy for millenia, if you saw a person not belonging to your tribe/nation that probably meant armed conflict a decent chunk of the time.

This applies to any kind of difference: clothing, culture, neurodivergence etc. I live in a country with zero racism against black people (all the racism is reserved for immigrants which only differ by culture, not color) yet you can tell black people are still a bit left-out in many social settings.

Due to black population being very low, people rarely ever see a black person here. When they see one, for the brain it's an unknown/unfamiliar, and that means potential danger at the subconscious / first impression level. To put it simply, people get weirded out. Ofc, once you get to know them that goes away.

(This is not to condone conscious racism: goyim, plantation workers and all.)
by klipklop | 2025-10-03 17:56:45+00:00
I am not backing Trump here at all, but in his first term he pointed out how over reliant Europe is for Russian energy. A few Euro leaders practically laughed in his face (publicly, on TV) and told him with smirks on their face that he was mistaken. They attempted to frame him as a crazy person for even suggesting it's a problem. A man like Trump does not strike me as somebody that will forget and forgive that. I would not expect a benevolent US after. Why would anybody help Europe after their refusal to even admit the problem?
by trhway | 2025-10-03 17:56:47+00:00
We had more than half a century of for example sci-fi literature describing that future, and over all those decades nobody was able to come up with even half-good plausible/feasible idea of how to deal with that. That suggests that it is outside of human intelligence capabilities to stop that snowball. Personally, i read a lot of sci-fi in my youth and i'm prepared to accept such my/our fate, even happily working where i can to speed it up (the faster the changes, the faster the human evolution (or at least adaptation) and what can be more exciting than that).

Current humans can't even deal with very simple and obvious issue of global warming. Thus it seems very unreasonable to expect any effective dealing with significantly more complex issues. And thus if not evolution then at least very accelerated adaptation is in order.
by gilli | 2025-10-03 17:57:00+00:00
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by jmdeon | 2025-10-03 17:57:12+00:00
I guess the interesting thing is they built and maintained a nest which looked mostly like a colony. The colony's food source being the fresh falling ants you mentioned.

> "In total darkness, they have constructed an earthen mound, which they have maintained all-year-round by moulding it and keeping the nest entrances open," researchers wrote in a study in 2016, noting these ants are "a far cry from a fully functional colony".
by ctrlp | 2025-10-03 17:57:27+00:00
Appreciate your sharing your experience. I can hear Jim Morrison's incantatory rhythms as you point out..."Indians scattered on dawn's highway bleeding. Ghosts crowd the young child's fragile eggshell mind."

But as you point out, you're bringing a lot to the equation. If all we had were Jim Morrison's lyrics they wouldn't be that interesting. He just wasn't that great of a poet compared to what's available in English poetry. Without the music it doesn't have much magic.

A more irrecoverable criticism is if something lends itself to parody. My sense is McCarthy's prose style is extremely parodyable. How could one distinguish between it and something an LLM generates? Not in the fragmentary incantatory cadence or questionable semantics. Not in the meaning, or the symbolic and metaphoric content? So where then?
by ActorNightly | 2025-10-03 17:57:29+00:00
Its C. the market doesn't follow traditional models anymore.

The whole profession was basically centered around putting a dollar amount on risk.

For example, lets say I give you a chance of either taking $1k now, or playing a game where you have 1 in 10 chance to win $200k. What would you do? The right answer is "sell" the risk to someone. For example, on the average, if I "buy" the game from 10 people, at a price of $10k each, I can realistically win twice what I spend.

Repeat that over x number of steps and more complex games, and that is what the PhDs worked on in terms of pricing.

For most of the time it worked ok. In a few instances (most notably the Gaussian Copula that was a large reason for the subprime house market crisis in 2007) it didn't.

The problem is that now, its impossible to predict whether orange man is going to throw a hissy fit and cause the market to go up or down, or if large investors are going to artificially prop up stock like they did with Tesla.
by kingstnap | 2025-10-03 17:57:32+00:00
Honestly Pytorch is weird imo, I'm surprised people love it so much.

Loss.backward? Tensor.grad? Optimizer.zero grad()? With torch.no_grad()?

What is with all these objects holding pointers to stuff? An ndarray is a pointer to memory and a shape my dudes. A gradient is the change in a scalar function w.r.t to some inputs.
by jtfrench | 2025-10-03 17:57:37+00:00
"Microsoft Silicon", coming up.

Is it practical for them to buy an existing chip maker? Or would they just go home-grown?

- As of today, Nvidia's market cap is a whopping 4.51 trillion USD compared to Microsoft's 3.85 trillion USD, so that might not work.

- AMD's market cap is 266.49 billion USD, which is more in reach.
by port11 | 2025-10-03 17:57:58+00:00
Look, I've no reason to defend him. I do like Basecamp and the books that have been published by the team. That said, I don't care one iota if a millionaire formerly-cool guy digs himself a grave. Okay, that's my online-mandated disclaimer to come across as a neutral figure.

The label is losing its power. The central blocs have been labelling everything they don't like as either far left or far right. The party I mainly vote for in my home country has been accused of being far left, when they've stayed to their traditionally left/center-left discourse.

I think there's a case, in Europe, for accusing the mainstream parties of moving the far left/right goalposts so people who vote for these parties are seen as a marginal part of the electorate.
by audunw | 2025-10-03 17:58:06+00:00
There’s a critical flaw in this argument. Alien intelligence will most likely have been driven by natural selection in a highly competitive environment where they’d sometimes have to eliminate competition to survive.

AI evolves in a radically different environment: they never have to compete for anything other than being the best at serving humans.

To think that some kind of independent agent which is likely to want to harm humans intentionally is irrational. We really have no reason to think that it’s a likely outcome. Will some kind of magic turn these AIs into independently acting agents once they get smart enough? I doubt it

The risk with AI is they get too good at giving us exactly what we ask of them. I’m not taking about paperclip maximising. That’s also a fairly dumb thing to worry about. I’m talking about similar issues as we’re seeing now that we have access to all the hyper palatable foods we could possibly want. We didn’t evolve to deal well with getting everything we could possibly want. The other problems is when we ask AIs to harm other humans for us.

That is, AIs will mostly just magnify the problems we already have with humanity itself. I don’t see a reason to think AIs will become an independent adversary to humans.
by abustamam | 2025-10-03 17:58:18+00:00
Pre-pandemic, at least in my social circles, "Skype" was the term for video calling. "Hey, wanna Skype?" and we'd hop on a discord call.

Post-pandemic, at work and such, "Zoom" has become synonymous for work call. Whether it's via Slack or Google Meet, or even Zoom, we use the term Zoom.

I don't know what the market share is on Skype (Pre-pandemic) or Zoom, but these common terms appear to exist for software.
by toast0 | 2025-10-03 17:58:25+00:00
A proper join is the right answer. But, it's not always possible to make those run well. [1] A "client side join" in the right situation can be much better, but then you probably want to do a 1+1 rathet than N+1. Do the first query to get the ids for the second query, and then construct the second query with IN or UNION depending on what works best for you database. UNION likely bloats your query string, but I've seen plenty of situations where UNION is gobs faster than IN.

Alternately, if you can separate query issuance from result parsing, you can make N+1 palletable. Ex, do your query to get the ids, wait for the results, loop and issue the N queries, then loop and wait for results in order. That will be two-ish round trips rather than N+1 round trips. But you have to search to find database apis that allow that kind of separation.

[1] You can almost always express the query you want in SQL, but that doesn't mean it will have a reasonable runtime. Sometimes server side join and client side join have about the same runtime... if it's significant and you have the usual case where clients are easier to scale than database servers, it might be worthwhile to have the join run on the client to reduce server load.
by cleartext412 | 2025-10-03 17:58:44+00:00
I don't really get the point of disabling Youtube history just to never visit the main page again anyway. That said, recommendation algorithm is actually a valuable asset and it doesn't seem wise to discard it entirely instead of learning how to use it.

Imagine for a second, that you only care about watching cat videos, and arrange your viewing behavior accordingly. The algorithm will be quick to realize your preferences, and your entire home feed will be filled with nothing but kittens. Occasionally it will try to feed you some dogs and such, but Youtube is generous enough to provide "Not interested" and "Don't recommend channel" buttons on every video in recommendations, which are a great tool in shaping the home feed, or forming a nice little information bubble if you will. As for all the horrors of mainstream recommendations described in the article, they would look so out of place in your feed it won't take much mental effort to ignore them (or get rid of with aforementioned buttons).

Occasionally, you might want to watch something other than cat videos, or get sent a link in a personal message. For everything you don't want the algorithm to get the wrong idea about, use separate browser context or private mode.

Now, let's say you're got diverse tastes and like both cats and heavy construction videos. With two topics the Youtube algorithm might still manage to stay on track, but if you try to add more, the feed will quickly degrade to a mess. There is, however, a way around it: don't mix different topics in a single Youtube account. Youtube allows making multiple users on a single Google account, and with container tabs it doesn't even require switching between them.

Of course, and this is one part of the article I can agree with, use the subscribe feed if it fits your workflow, but certain kinds of content are made mostly by small channels on irregular basis, and the algorithm is a valuable tool to discover new ones.
by vessenes | 2025-10-03 17:58:53+00:00
I don't completely agree. Brand value is huge. Product culture matters.

But say you're correct, and follow the reasoning from there: posit "All frontier model companies are in a red queen's race."

If it's a true red queen's race, then some firms (those with the worst capital structure / costs) will drop out. The remaining firms will trend toward 10%-ish net income - just over cost of capital, basically.

Do you think inference demand and spend will stay stable, or grow? Raw profits could increase from here: if inference demand 8x, then oAI, as margins go down from 80% to 10%, would keep making $10bn or so a year in FCF at current spend; they'd decide if they wanted that to go into R&D or just enjoy it, or acquire smaller competitors.

Things you'd have to believe for it to be a true red queen's race:

* There is no liftoff - AGI and ASI will not happen; instead we'll just incrementally get logarithmically better.

* There is no efficiency edge possible for R&D teams to create/discover that would make for a training / inference breakaway in terms of economics

* All product delivery will become truly commoditized, and customers will not care what brand AI they are delivered

* The world's inference demand will not be a case of Jevon's paradox as competition and innovation drives inference costs down, and therefore we are close to peak inference demand.

Anyway, based on my answers to the above questions, oAI seems like a nice bet, and I'd make it if I could. The most "inference doomerish" scenario: capital markets dry up, inference demand stabilizes, R&D progress stops still leaves oAI in a very, very good position in the US, in my opinion.
by js8 | 2025-10-03 17:58:59+00:00
> Nobody is forcing anyone to join the "Resist the violent bully in your doorstep" club.

That kind of club might be fine, but NATO simply isn't it. Again, you're not asking the question, what is in it for the U.S. (to promise protection - with nukes - to those countries).

Look at my country - Czechia. After the end of Cold war, in the context of NATO, we have done more for American security than America did for ours. We had soldiers in Afghanistan and 11 of them died. During the same period, no American soldier has died defending Czech Republic.

> It just seems to happen naturally when the violent bully starts attacking their neighbours.

NATO continued expanding after the end of Cold war, without Russia attacking anyone. I think it was a mistake - EU should have created its own defense, and start from a clean slate.

Anyway, I don't care much about the question of historic guilt. I commented here because I think western "leaders" should be honest about their goals vis-a-vis Russia and Ukraine, and they aren't.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-03 17:59:17+00:00
The 2nd video is not a highlight reel. It's literally just a video of him doing what he does at the University of Pittsburg - inviting people up and having a debate/discussion. None of the conversations have been removed, edited, or changed in any way whatsoever. You can watch the transition between each debate to confirm for yourself.

The clip, which involves an attractive girl flashing him in the middle of a debate, and is literally the most viewed video on his channel - has 10m views. The full stream from that event has 8.4m views. In any case I'd again emphasize that even that clip is not taken out of context. It includes the complete and unedited discussion with the girl.