MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dragonwriter | 2025-11-07 23:04:37+00:00
> There are professional rules that do not apply to non-professionals, including SEC rules. For example, lawyers can't give advice in many situations

For giving legal advice, that's mostly backwards (in most US jurisdictions); its generally illegal for anyone other than a licensed lawyer to do what is legally considered giving legal advice (this is one of many things that constitutes unauthorized practice of law), whereas for a lawyer they are allowed to within certain ethical bounds.
by fluoridation | 2025-11-07 23:05:30+00:00
>emitting a milligram of CO2

In the US, on average, generating 1 kWh produces 364.5 g of CO2. 1 kW may be somewhat pessimistic, but I think it's in the right ballpark for power consumption of DC inference. If processing the prompt took a minute of continuous inference (and I'm going to guess it took a fair bit more), that's 6 grams of CO2.

>What negative externalities?

Off the top of my head,

* All the ways AIs can be misused, either by people who don't understand them (by asking them for advice, etc.) or by people who want to take advantage of others (spam, scams, etc.).

* The power and resource usage of the above, both for inference as well as to deal with them.
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-07 23:05:46+00:00
> You can't simultaneously expect people to learn from AI when it's right, and magically recognize when it's wrong.

You are misconstruing the point I was making.

My point is that DK is about developing competence and the relationship between competence and confidence (which I am also claiming evolves over time). My whole point is that the DK effect is not as relevant to LLMs giving wrong answers and people believing them as the author is claiming.

As someone else pointed out in another comment, the effect of people believing falsehoods from LLMs has more to do with Gell-Mann amnesia.

Tangentially, it actually is possible to learn from AI when it's right and recognize when its wrong, but its not magic, its just being patient, checking sources and thinking critically. It's how all of humanity has learned pretty much everything, because most people have been wrong about most things for most of time and yet we still learn from each other.
by worldfoodgood | 2025-11-07 23:06:00+00:00
I don't think you understand how discourse works?

I made no demands and I made no assertions about entitlements. That reply to me was a strawman.

I made two statements: 1) I suggested people have multiple criteria for selecting a workplace, not just culture. 2) I suggested people should have the ability to voice their input over their work. (Note, that's a weaker claim than "people should have input over their work". Just that they should feel like they are able to voice their input.)

Neither of those two things are demands nor entitlements, and the latter I would assume would be pretty non-controversial unless you believe that bosses should have absolute and complete control over every facet of a worker's job. (I guess I work in tech, where it's pretty widely accepted that people have autonomy to make some decisions on their own about how and what work is achieved.)
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-07 23:06:23+00:00
I had a Zen Stone, which was made by... Creative!

It was much, much better than an iPod. I had an iPod first. I gave it away, because it was too heavy to carry around.

The Zen Stone was essentially weightless and could be operated without looking at it. The only problem I ever had with it was that it couldn't charge and play at the same time.
by EnPissant | 2025-11-07 23:06:30+00:00
The rest of that section is super informative too as cascade contains fillers to make dosing easier.

EcoGeek instructs to use 15 grams which costs $0.65 per load. The 20g used is 133% this amount.

Cascade instructs to fill your dishwasher compartment which is about 71 grams and costs $0.23 per load. The 20g used is only 23% this amount.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-11-07 23:06:35+00:00
Capitalism is based on/grew out of the Norman feudalism, where lords were foreign conquerors who cared nothing about the locals, local land, local societal norms. They only cared about rent extraction for themselves (todays C suit class) and to pay the nobles above them (the market). They simply removed themselves one step, created corporations to remove all personal liability, and ramped up the profit extraction to a global scale. Just look at the first large scale joint stock company, the East India Company. Could corporatism have had a worse/more evil progenitor?
by ofalkaed | 2025-11-07 23:06:44+00:00
J mostly looks good but [) looks almost like a fancy capital D which can be distracting and =# run together at smaller font sizes which is a little weird. Those are the only things that jump out at me but I did not look hard, overall I would say it is one of the better fonts I have tried for J.

The big problem that I am having with this font is that its narrowness makes it difficult to find a fallback font for APL/BQN that plays well.
by mike_hearn | 2025-11-07 23:06:50+00:00
The other irony is that Dunning-Kruger is a terrible piece of research that doesn't show what they claim it shows. It's not even clear the DK effect exists at all. A classic of 90s pop psychology before the replication crisis had reached public awareness.

It's worth reading the original paper sometime. It has all the standard problems like:

1. It uses a tiny sample size.

2. It assumes American psych undergrads are representative of the entire human race.

3. It uses stupid and incredibly subjective tests, then combines that with cherry picking. The test of competence was whether you rated jokes and funny or unfunny. To be considered competent your assessments had to match that of a panel of "joke experts" that DK just assembled by hand.

This study design has an obvious problem that did actually happen: what if their hand picked experts didn't agree on which of their hand picked jokes were funny? No problem. Rather than realize this is evidence their study design is bad they just tossed the outliers:

"Although the ratings provided by the eight comedians were moderately reliable (a = .72), an analysis of interrater correlations found that one (and only one) comedian's ratings failed to correlate positively with the others (mean r = -.09). We thus excluded this comedian's ratings in our calculation of the humor value of each joke"

It ends up running into circular reasoning problems. People are being assessed on whether they think they have true "expertise" but the "experts" don't agree with each other, meaning the one that disagreed would be considered to be suffering from a competence delusion. But they were chosen specifically because they were considered to be competent.

There's also claims that the data they did find is just a statistical artifact to begin with:

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol10/iss1/art4/

"Our data show that peoples' self-assessments of competence, in general, reflect a genuine competence that they can demonstrate. That finding contradicts the current consensus about the nature of self-assessment."
by RyanOD | 2025-11-07 23:07:25+00:00
I've always said, the coaches I work with fall into three categories...

1. They know so little that they don't know what they don't know. As a result they are way too overconfident and struggle as coaches.

2. They know enough to know what they don't know so they work their asses off to know more and how to convey it to their team and excel as coaches.

3. They know so much and the sport comes so easy to them that they cannot understand how to teach it to their team and struggle as coaches.

Now I have a name for #1 group!
by ClimaxGravely | 2025-11-07 23:07:30+00:00
It's built of triangles so a quad is 2 triangles etc.

The advice about using quads I'm not sure is really a tautology. I tend to work with quads until one of the quads is non-planar then I cut it so that when I bring it into a game engine the import/bake step doesn't triangulate the mesh in a way I didn't want it to.
by kleinishere | 2025-11-07 23:07:51+00:00
Didn’t realize this was available.

Similarly published by OpenAI: https://status.openai.com/

30 day comparisons as of writing:

99.61% for Claude.ai 99.22% for ChatGPT

99.92% for Claude APIs 99.25% for OpenAI APIs

Obviously not apples to apples and somewhat up to discretion of what triggers an impact. We’re clearly not at 99.99% yet.
by Kwpolska | 2025-11-07 23:07:51+00:00
> * OPAM. In theory... I feel like it should be great. But in practice I find it to be incomprehensible, full of surprising behaviours, and also surprisingly buggy. I still can't believe the bug where it can't find `curl` if you're in more than 32 Unix groups.

I couldn’t believe this was an actual bug in opam, and I found it: https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/5373

I don’t think that’s an opam bug, it’s an issue with musl, and they just happened to build their binaries with it.
by pqtyw | 2025-11-07 23:08:34+00:00
Yes, exactly. They couldn't afford to crapify their products for short term again and hope to survive. They wouldn't be here if they did that. Now they can.

> well-known positions against the company's current practices

Companies generally don't really have values besides maximizing profits. People working or leading them might. But that almost never lasts more than a few decades at most.
by keyringlight | 2025-11-07 23:08:51+00:00
> The better question is why storefronts don't directly compete on price.

The way I see it, it depends how you see who is who's customer. Is the gamer the customer of the store, or are they the customer of the developer/publisher who put out the game, and in turn is the developer/publisher the customer of the store. The store cut is the price to buy their services, and they can shop around to find different offerings at different prices, just as gamers might be able to shop around and decide what (platform features) matters to them with the options available.
by laboratorymice | 2025-11-07 23:08:54+00:00
> Best case people find out that people are getting paid rapidly different amounts for the same job, get angry, and leave.

This is only a problem if the disparity does not match the difference in contribution. I'm sure most of us have been in situations where ourselves and two other people have the same job and are earning roughly the same, and we perceive the situation as massively unfair because one of them should be earning half as much, and the other twice as much. I've been in teams where I would have been perfectly ok with specific people earning twice as much as myself. It's ok to admire someone's skill, be motivated to reach it, and accept that they should earn more in the meantime.

In practice ego makes truly merit-based compensation impossible to implement. We just often think too highly of ourselves. The other obstacle is that the difference in contribution from a low-performer to a high-performer varies widely with profession, with software development being (in my opinion) one of the widest.
by klipklop | 2025-11-07 23:09:18+00:00
Gabe made his initial fortune working at Microsoft. He almost lost it all putting it into Valve/Steam. At one point they were close to not even being able to make payroll. He bet everything on the company.

You are welcome to start your own progressive game market place for PC. Go undercut him and charge 5% fees. You literally just need to dump game files on a CDN right? How hard can it be? /s

I do find it odd that this account is new and the type of posts it leaves. Seems almost like an LLM...
by FloorEgg | 2025-11-07 23:09:57+00:00
Out of curiosity, if you google "Dunning Kruger Effect" and then look at the images, and see all those charts of confidence vs competence, do you disagree with them?

And as I responded to your other comment, just because the study took measurements of many people at one point in time didn't mean they weren't studying an over-time phenomenon. No one starts out as an expert.
by krackers | 2025-11-07 23:10:58+00:00
The gpt mentioned in the article seems to be the infamous sycophantic 4o. They've probably dialed it down since then, but the timelines mentioned do seem to fit with others' anecdotal observations that the level of sycophancy started increasing like a frog being boiled from mid-2024 onward, peaking at the infamous mid-2025 incident.
by culi | 2025-11-07 23:11:36+00:00
This part of Jordan gets less rain per year than the Salton Sea.

The way that desertification spreads is primarily because the soil has no capacity for holding water. The most common cause of death in deserts is not actually thirst but drowning. The inability to hold moisture means thatwhen there is rain it can turn into flash floods which will then wash away any top soil there already is.

There are countless techniques used by this group to target that specific problem and build soil safely that won't get washed away. As well as storing water in ways that won't lead to evaporation. They build swales and shape the landscape in order to manage how and where the water flows through the land and use windbreaks to resist the harsh winds that may also lead to topsoil loss.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-11-07 23:11:39+00:00
You forgot they broke iTunes Home Sharing on iOS some years ago and have refused to fix it.

Takes over a minute to connect now. (Allegedly the fault of a new, yet horribly inefficient, parser that chokes on large libraries which worked fine a decade ago on phones with half the CPU and RAM.)

Once connected, it won't play DRM-protected tracks I PAID FOR, says I'm not authorized.

I ended up having to break the DRM because Apple can't be bothered to include a functioning music player anymore.

An "iPod with touch controls" is no longer part of iPhone.

An ad-filled music subscription consumption software is.
by immibis | 2025-11-07 23:12:15+00:00
It actually can, depending on where it is. Paperclip optimizers don't optimize for route length - they optimize for paperclips received. When Vodafone or Deutsche Telekom gets your packet, they try to send it to one of their customers, because their customers pay them to receive traffic, even when it's a longer route.

If you're sending a packet from German Shittytel to German Okaytel, and Okaytel just happens to buy a connection to Singapore from Asiatel to get packets to Asia, and Singapore Internet Corp just happens to buy a connection to German Shittytel to get packets to Europe, they'll be glad to send your packet all the way to Singapore so Asiatel will have to pay them for it. But if you sent your packet to a VPN server in Berlin with a neutral peering with both ISPs, the packet would take a nearly common sense route.

In practice, these situations don't happen, at least not this extreme. Partly because ISPs are trying their best not to be the recipient of this. Okaytel doesn't want their packets to be round-tripped through Singapore - that's a bad user experience and they're ultimately paying for it in money as well. So they might negotiate with Asiatel that Asiatel won't tell Shittytel that it's able to deliver packets to Okaytel - in fact there are often BGP attributes they can set to do this automatically. Business is incredibly cut-throat and incredibly stupid. I guarantee Shittytel has a lot more money than Okaytel because they are better at "extracting value". Not only the ISP business is like this btw.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-11-07 23:12:38+00:00
I think he would have been all over AI, and would have pushed Siri ahead instead of letting the product stagnate. I suspect he'd have pushed into robotics as well, especially home automation robots. Home automation in general, in fact.

His whole thing was being the smartest, most tasteful, and most creative person in the room. There was a lot of illusion/delusion there, but even with his failures he was absolutely focused on product design, user experience, and aesthetics in a way that Cook's Apple isn't.

Cook's Apple is a hugely successful predatory and cynical cash extraction bureaucracy, with a world-leading hardware division and a shockingly mediocre and failing software division.

The goal is penny-pinching acquisition, so we can expect more and more of this from Apple until there's a change of leadership. (If we're lucky...)
by com2kid | 2025-11-07 23:13:21+00:00
I've worked in consumer electronics, batteries are built in because reviewers will endlessly trash a product that is just 1mm thicker than anything apple puts out, and they fawn over apple because the products are so thin.

If anyone releases a product that is just a tiny bit thicker than last year, except headlines like "new super-thick phone doesn't fit in pockets, causes back problems".

A small exaggeration? Not by far, reviewers nasty about device thickness.

Then 70% of people shove a case on and it really doesn't matter.

There are good water ingress reasons for non-replaceable batteries, making a device water proof and have a replaceable battery does add a good deal of thickness.

Anyway, you can get a battery replaced at a phone shop for a reasonable rate anyway, so IMHO it isn't as big of a deal now days.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-11-07 23:13:48+00:00
> If processing the prompt took a minute of continuous inference (and I'm going to guess it took a fair bit more), that's 6 grams of CO2.

Neither of us really knows, but I'm going to guess it took a fair bit less. You need to consider the marginal cost of one more prompt, not the cost of running the datacenter in the first place. And with batching, hundreds of requests are executed in parallel on the same hardware. I'll concede that a milligram was an exaggeration though.

For comparison, a typical car in the US emits about 400 grams of CO2 per mile. And I know few people who beat themselves up over the externalities of unnecessarily driving one mile.

> * All the ways AIs can be misused, either by people who don't understand them (by asking them for advice, etc.) or by people who want to take advantage of others (spam, scams, etc.).

This is not an externality because it is not a consequence of using AI for good purposes. It's like saying an externality of using a hammer to build a shed is all the ways hammers can be misused.

Still, I respect you for considering the externalities of your actions. That's farther than most go. But I think they are outweighed by the benefits in this case
by Qem | 2025-11-07 23:13:50+00:00
I tested how PyPy performs on that. Just changing the implementation of Python drops the runtime from ~16.5s to ~3.5s in my computer, approximately a 5x speedup:

xxxx@xxxx:~ $ python3 -VV Python 3.11.2 (main, Apr 28 2025, 14:11:48) [GCC 12.2.0] xxxx@xxxx:~ $ pypy3 -VV Python 3.9.16 (7.3.11+dfsg-2+deb12u3, Dec 30 2024, 22:36:23) [PyPy 7.3.11 with GCC 12.2.0] xxxx@xxxx:~ $ cat original_benchmark.py #------------------------------------------- import random import time def monte_carlo_pi(n): inside = 0 for i in range(n): x = random.random() y = random.random() if x**2 + y**2 <= 1.0: inside += 1 return 4.0 * inside / n # Benchmark start = time.time() result = monte_carlo_pi(100_000_000) elapsed = time.time() - start print(f"Time: {elapsed:.3f} seconds") print(f"Estimated pi: {result}") #------------------------------------------- xxxx@xxxx:~ $ python3 original_benchmark.py Time: 16.487 seconds Estimated pi: 3.14177012 xxxx@xxxx:~ $ pypy3 original_benchmark.py Time: 3.357 seconds Estimated pi: 3.14166756 xxxx@xxxx:~ $ python3 -c "print(round(16.487/3.357, 1))" 4.9

I changed the code to take advantage of some basic performance tips that are commonly given for CPython (taking advantage of stardard library - itertools, math; prefer comprehensions/generator expressions to loose for loops), and was able to get CPython numbers improve by ~1.3x. But then PyPy numbers took a hit:

xxxx@xxxx:~ $ cat mod_benchmark.py #------------------------------------------- from itertools import repeat from math import hypot from random import random import time def monte_carlo_pi(n): inside = sum(hypot(random(), random()) <= 1.0 for i in repeat(None, n)) return 4.0 * inside / n # Benchmark start = time.time() result = monte_carlo_pi(100_000_000) elapsed = time.time() - start print(f"Time: {elapsed:.3f} seconds") print(f"Estimated pi: {result}") #------------------------------------------- xxxx@xxxx:~ $ python3 mod_benchmark.py Time: 12.998 seconds Estimated pi: 3.14149268 xxxx@xxxx:~ $ pypy3 mod_benchmark.py Time: 12.684 seconds Estimated pi: 3.14160844 xxxx@xxxx:~ $ python3 -c "print(round(16.487/12.684, 1))" 1.3
by int_19h | 2025-11-07 23:13:53+00:00
What you wrote is roughly equivalent to this in C:

{ const int x = 1; { const int x = 2; } }

which is to say, there are two different `x` in there, both immutable, one shadowing the other. You can observe this if you capture the one that is shadowed in a closure:

iex(1)> x = 1 1 iex(2)> f = fn () -> x end #Function<43.113135111/0 in :erl_eval.expr/6> iex(3)> x = 2 2 iex(4)> f.() 1
by JKCalhoun | 2025-11-07 23:15:06+00:00
A biologist can correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand "race" in humans to be little different than, say, hair-color. Perhaps there's data showing that brunettes are smarter than blondes?

EDIT: Never mind, user krapp's comment is what I was reaching for, "Race isn't biological, it's a social and political construct."
by parsimo2010 | 2025-11-07 23:15:41+00:00
Dude, are you even trying to argue in good faith? Nobody cares what the King of England would say about this, he's not involved in any way. But the fact that not even the country of Venezuela is denying that they are drug boats is quite informative. Don't you think that if these boats were even remotely innocent that Venezuela would be showing the international community all the proof of the atrocities that the USA was committing?

Just because the USA has committed atrocities in the past doesn't mean that everything the government says is a lie. It's okay to be skeptical but if you haven't found any evidence to the contrary you should start to accept that maybe the US government actually hit real drug boats.
by observationist | 2025-11-07 23:16:07+00:00
Yeah, economics is weird like that, and we should probably push as hard as we can to make sure things are as fair as reasonably possible. I've got no problem with trillionaires or megacorps if the system in which they operate is fair. One thing AI is enabling is systematic uncovering of fraud and waste - we'll be able to scan omnibus bills and find corruption, track politicians, interact with the system and communicate at higher levels than before, and there's a shot at AI empowering and enfranchising people more than they've ever had a chance at before.

If AI coding alone reaches its potential, then a whole class of corporations lose their leverage in the market. In 10ish years, following moore's law, phones will have enough compute and storage to trivially run your own local search and curation of the internet. Sophisticated search engines that outclass anything currently on the market, working in tandem with a personal local privacy respecting agent. That decentralizes things in such a significant way that Google and Apple and all the gatekeepers lose their ability to manipulate and distort.

20 years from now, even if we're somehow just stuck at the current levels of AI, your personal compute will be totally sufficient to provide all the curation, moderation, proactive interaction, and search capabilities without ever having to deal with ads or bots or cloudflare.

There are lots of dangers, and ASI could wreck us, and militarized AI could be a doom scenario, or there could be overbroad stupid regulation that puts control of AI in the hands of a few corps or a government, but there are lots of bright future possibilities, and I don't see any indications that we're directly headed toward any particular doom.