MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JohnBooty | 2025-11-18 19:57:53+00:00
When there are large parking lots, there are multiple cart return areas scattered throughout the lot. Otherwise things would be really inefficient, to an even more nightmarish (and money-costing) degree.

Not sure if you're from the US, but the problem is objectively not as bad here as people say. If you look at various Walmarts (usually these are reliably some of the worst parking lots in any given area) in Google Maps (switch to satellite view) the reality is that the vast majority of people here actually do return their carts properly.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/uWE4wfydda7KtT2W8

https://maps.app.goo.gl/rCBrJKebU33rMq8J6

https://maps.app.goo.gl/5o4GksqTGahBkU816

The last one is by far the worst one I found.
by starchild3001 | 2025-11-18 19:58:05+00:00
What kind of world do you live in? Actually Google ads tend to be some of the highest ROI for the advertiser and most likely to be beneficial for the user. Vs the pure junk ads that aren't personalized, and just banner ads that have zero relationship to me. Google Ads is the enabler of free internet. I for one am thankful to them. Else you end up paying for NYT, Washinton Post, Information etc -- virtually for any high quality web site (including Search).
by hylaride | 2025-11-18 19:58:05+00:00
With even the SP500 being super concentrated in AI-exposed companies, probably a combination of bonds and foreign equities. But hedging does mean being OK with watching any (perceived or real) bubble madness continue. I wanted to put all my wealth into Apple circa 2005, but chose not to because blah blah blah diversification. Obviously I wish I did, but I'm ok with the perfectly sensible decision I made - and I'd be retired many times over had I done it.

Personally speaking, as somebody that was 100% in equities until earlier this year (I'm in my early 40s and had most of my wealth in VOO), I shifted to a 60-40 portfolio - there are ETFs that maintain the balance for you. I did this knowing full well that this could attenuate my upside, but I figured it's worth it than being so concentrated in a single part of an industry (AI within tech) and so much upside was already acquired up until that point. Also, I figured the chances of the 2nd Trump term adding to volatility weren't going to help tamper volatility. On top of that, my income is tied to tech, so diversifying away further from it is sensible (especially the equity parts of my compensation).

But if you're in your 20s, your nest egg is likely small enough that I'd just continue plugging away in automatic contributions. Investing at all is far more important than anything else at that stage.
by g-mork | 2025-11-18 19:59:01+00:00
Same old world thinking.. Google use single PSUs too, real redundancy came from having multiple machines, and Hetzner certainly makes that cheap enough to accomplish on a budget. You can also pay for 10 Gbit as an option with Hetzner, and a bunch of other custom upgrades, but the further you move outside their sweet spot the more it's going to cost.
by DarkGauss | 2025-11-18 19:59:08+00:00
The android app had stopped working for me a couple of months before the new Pebble came out, so my Old Pebble Time was at EOL, and unusable. The new Pebble app by Core devices made it work again.

Rebble didn't do that. They were effective only keeping the old devices on life support. Don't get me wrong, it's awesome that Rebble came along and extended the life of our Pebbles. I'm siding slightly more with Eric and Co. than with Rebble.
by IAmBroom | 2025-11-18 19:59:11+00:00
Poor choice. Animal Farm is way, way more than an allegory of one historical event. It's a broadbrush statement on the kind of people likely to seize power at every opportunity (or if you prefer, the effect unrestrained power has on most people), and a humorous jab at authoritarianism.

The other books mentioned (Gatsby et al.) really require context, but literal pigs sitting down to dinner with powerbrokers is something a 14yo can grasp.
by OptionOfT | 2025-11-18 19:59:22+00:00
Interestingly I think if the AI succeed at the level that a lot of these CEOs hope we're not much better off either.

And the sentiment that goes around is more: reduce the amount of people needed to do the same amount of work:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/09/mckinsey_ai_monetizat...

> McKinsey says, while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet."

The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles.

Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around?
by CamperBob2 | 2025-11-18 19:59:31+00:00
- don't learn from what you tell them

We'll fix that, eventually.

- don't have career growth that you can feel good about having contributed to

Humans are on the verge of building machines that are smarter than we are. I feel pretty goddamned awesome about that. It's what we're supposed to be doing.

- don't have a genuine interest in accomplishment or team goals

Easy to train for, if it turns out to be necessary. I'd always assumed that a competitive drive would be necessary in order to achieve or at least simulate human-level intelligence, but things don't seem to be playing out that way.

- have no past and no future. When you change companies, they won't recognize you in the hall.

Or on the picket line.

- no ownership over results. If they make a mistake, they won't suffer.

Good deal. Less human suffering is usually worth striving for.
by rvnx | 2025-11-18 19:59:39+00:00
Mh ?

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c36...

> Plaintiffs maintain that Google has monopoly power in the product market for general search services in the United States.

> According to Plaintiffs, Google has a dominant and durable share in that market (general search), and that share is protected by high barriers to entry.

> Google counters that there is no such thing as a product market for general search services.

> What exists instead, Google insists, is a broader market for query response.

(+ yes obviously, products like Sheets or Maps were amazing, and are still very much the best.

It was a joke to say that even Google denies its own success, the same way as the earlier comment).
by pjdesno | 2025-11-18 20:00:26+00:00
Note that Claude Shannon's MS thesis was about re-discovering the work of an obscure British analytic philosopher, whose work from about 100 years earlier had been almost completely forgotten. (perhaps a few philosophers and mathematicians remembered Boole, but they certainly didn't teach his work to the engineers who had to design relay-based logic circuits back in the pre-transistor days)
by Eddy_Viscosity2 | 2025-11-18 20:00:30+00:00
> Subtract billionaire activity from your perception of EA attitude

But that's the problem, that is my entire perception of EA. I see regular altruism where, like in the shopping example I gave above, wanting to be effective is already intrinsic. Doing things like giving people information that some forms of giving are better than others is just great. No issues there at all, but again I see that as a part of plain old regular altruism.

Then there is Effective Altruism (tm) which is the billionaire version that I see as performative and corrupt. Even when it helps people, this seems to be incidental rather that the main goal which appears to be marketing the EA premise for self promotion and back patting.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-18 20:01:21+00:00
Brainstorming more on this and checked my shelf, I got a few more. If not difficult per se, I remember them at least as experimental or otherwise postmodern.

Pynchon short stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Learner

Delilo has many short ones including some of his best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(novel), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americana_(novel)

Haddon's breakthrough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Curious_Incident_of_the_Do...

DFW's breakthrough (maybe pushing it on "short" though) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Broom_of_the_System

Ludwig still the reigning champ of short/difficult: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus
by dweinus | 2025-11-18 20:01:29+00:00
This argument warrants introspection for "crusty devs", but also has holes. A compiler is tightly engineered and dependable. I have never had to write assembly because I know that my compiled code 100% represents my abstract code and any functional problems are in my abstract code. That is not true in AI coding. Additionally, AI coding is not just an abstraction over code, but an abstraction over understanding. When my code compiles, I don't need to worry that the compiler misunderstood my intention.

I'm not saying AI is not a useful abstraction, but I am saying that it is not a trustworthy one.
by michael1999 | 2025-11-18 20:02:05+00:00
I see the reverse.

Self-driving jitneys will be able to extend public transit into the cul-de-sac subdivisions that are impervious to useful bus service. Let little 8 seat shuttles bring people out to the main line for trains or full-size busses to carry away. It is terribly inefficient to run a 50 person bus with 3 people in it, one of whom is a paid driver. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/autonomous-driverless...

Same for small towns - they just don't have the population or the density to run large busses with drivers on fixed routes at a reasonable frequency. I've seen smaller city busses with routes that only run every 90 minutes. But smaller self-driving vehicles can collect a few people and run them around. See https://www.chandleraz.gov/residents/transportation/transit/... or https://ridewithvia.com/news/waymo-and-via-announce-strategi...

Or try this - Waymo giving a discount for pickups at station. I used to use the Toronto subway this way - take the subway as close as I could get, and then take a taxi the last couple of kilometres. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/clean-rides-clear-benefits-wa...
by crazygringo | 2025-11-18 20:02:19+00:00
> Humans are just better at communicating about their process.

I wish that were true.

In my experience, most of the time they're not doing the things you talk about -- major architectural decisions don't get documented anywhere, commit messages give no "why", and the people who the knowledge got socialized to in unrecorded conversations then left the company.

If anything, LLM's seem to be far more consistent in documenting the rationales for design decisions, leaving clear comments in code and commit messages, etc. if you ask them to.

Unfortunately, humans generally are not better at communicating about their process, in my experience. Most engineers I know enjoy writing code, and hate documenting what they're doing. Git and issue-tracking have helped somewhat, but it's still very often about the "what" and not the "why this way".
by arcanemachiner | 2025-11-18 20:02:19+00:00
I don't understand anything in your comment, so I'm shamelessly posting some info from an LLM:

> PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) measures datacenter efficiency - it's total facility power divided by IT equipment power. A perfect 1.0 means all power goes to servers; higher numbers mean more waste on cooling/overhead. OVH's 1.24 vs Hetzner's 1.11 means OVH burns 24% extra power on non-IT stuff, hurting margins since electricity is their main cost. Google hits 1.08 at similar latitude.
by simonw | 2025-11-18 20:02:23+00:00
Yeah I agree. I ran Whisper (via MacWhisper) on the same video and got back accurate timestamps.

The big benefit of Gemini for this is that it appears to do a great job of speaker recognition, plus it can identify when people interrupt each other or raise their voices.

The best solution would likely include a mixture of both - Gemini for the speaker identification and tone-of-voice stuff, Whisper or NVIDIA Parakeet or similar for the transcription with timestamps.
by bogomipz | 2025-11-18 20:02:31+00:00
This is incorrect. A lot of these companies are raising debt to pay for these datacenter build outs. And that debt has already been sold to pension funds. The risk has already been spread. See Blue Owl Capital and how Meta is financing its Hyperion datacenter. They raised 30 billion in debt. Main street is already exposed as those bonds are in funds offered by the usual players BlackRock, Invesco, Pimco etc.
by GrinningFool | 2025-11-18 20:03:10+00:00
I'm really not suggesting a ban, there's no way that would fly.

I'm suggesting restraint and responsibility on the part of the organization pushing this. When do we learn that being reactive after the harm is done isn't actually a required method of doing business? That it's okay to slow down even if there's a short-term opportunity cost?

This applies just as much to the push for LLMs everywhere as it does OpenAI's specific intention to support sexbots.

But it's all the same pattern. Push for as much as we can, as fast as we can, at as broad a scale as we can -- and deal with the consequences only when we can't ignore them anymore. (And if we can keep that to a bare minimum, that would be best for the bottom line.)
by gruez | 2025-11-18 20:03:29+00:00
That's where the "randomly choose 50" comes in. Even if your initial list of 100 topics was biased, randomly picking from that list allows you to do a comparison between topics that got randomly picked vs ones that didn't. In other words, a randomized controlled trial, the gold standard in experiments. If the group that got randomly picked got a 40% hit rate (ie. that corresponded to ads), but group that didn't randomly get picked got 41%, then you can probably conclude they're not listening to you, even if a 40% hit rate seems spooky. On the other hand if there were significant differences (eg. 40% vs 20%), then there might be other stuff going on worth investigating.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-11-18 20:03:44+00:00
Simply put, in order for moving off of Cloudflare (or similar) to be practical, bot and scraper traffic is going to have to be reigned in heavily.

Getting bots under control would be better for the health of the web anyway, but the chances of that happening are practically zero. Even if the AI bubble collapses entirely, there's still going to be loads of ill-behaved scrapers and exploit sniffers roaming about.

I don't know if it's possible to fix this issue, short of the entire world enacting strict regulations mandating that scrapers and bots be well-behaved, which is never going to happen and even if it did could end up being just as or more destructive than rogue bots.
by astrange | 2025-11-18 20:04:33+00:00
Google? Push wages down? Google is mostly known for paying top of market to keep a zoo of engineers whose only output is blog posts about how smart they are because they solved a problem they also caused.

(presumably because if they touch the ad system it might break)

> a16z and YC must hate this. It puts a cap on their returns.

And a16z's main business is investing in financial scams.
by showerst | 2025-11-18 20:04:36+00:00
I think a lot of the following comes the old-fashioned nature. In an age of hyperscalers that want to sell you a private cloud and full stack certification to make it your job to use their software and want to charge you $500/mo for a server with 64GB of ram and decent bandwidth, Hetzner will just rent you a server, relatively cheap.

Amazon has _95 pages_ of EC2 instance types. They have so many products that I literally had to google the name to know what product type to put into the estimator to get a boring server.

What's all that data center best practice get you[1], the customer, if it doesn't provide lower prices and higher availability?

[1] -- I'm assuming you are not Netflix. After some scale all those crazy AWS services are pretty great to have.
by _menelaus | 2025-11-18 20:04:47+00:00
The cost for mech turk:

We paid something like $10 per hour and people loved our tasks. We paid a bit more to make sure our tasks were completed well. The main thing was just making the data collection app as efficient as possible. If you pay twice as much but collect 4x the data in the task, you doubled your efficiency.

Yeah I think its impossible to get good gaze accuracy without observing the device reflection in the eyes. And you will never, ever be able to deal well with edge cases like lighting, hair, glasses, asymmetrical faces, etc. There's just a fundamental information limit you can't overcome. Maybe you could get within 6 inches of accuracy? But mostly it would be learning face pose I assume. Trying to do gaze tracking with a webcam of someone 4 feet away and half offscreen just seems Sisyphean.

Is EyesOff really an important application? I'm not sure many people would want to drain their battery running it. Just a rhetorical question, I don't know.

With the baby autism screener its difficult part is the regulatory aspect. I might have some contacts in Mayo Clinic that would be interested in productizing something like this though, and could be asked about it.

If I were you, I would look at how to take a mobile photo of an iris, and artificially add the reflection of a phone screen to create a synthetic dataset (it won't look like a neat rectangle, more like a blurry fragment of one). Then train a CNN to predict the corners of the added reflection. And after that is solved, try the gaze tracking problem as an algebraic exercise. Like, think of the irises as 2 spherical mirrors. Assume their physical size. If you can locate the reflection of an object of known size in them, you should be able to work out the spatial relationships to figure out where the object being reflected is relative to the mirrors. This is hard, but is 10-100x easier than trying end-to-end gaze tracking with a single model. Also nobody in the world knows to do this, AFAIK.
by ossm1db | 2025-11-18 20:05:08+00:00
TL;DR The article (from Sept 2019) applies the 80/20 rule three times in succession to illustrate that 50% (0.8^3) of consequences come from 1% (0.2^3) of causes. Thus, "I encourage all business owners to ... block three to four hours out of their day ... to work on the A-level tasks and projects that really matter. Avoid distractions"

Not unfamiliar advice with a simple principle: identify and focus on your priorities. That is the heart of the matter, and is why this advice works. David Allen in "Getting Things Done", and other well-known authors and speakers have similar techniques.

Which is to say that it is very likely for someone either to have experienced or to have seen this.
by JohnBooty | 2025-11-18 20:05:22+00:00
I talked to a guy who used to run a grocery store. There were low-income housing apartment buildings nearby. People would walk to the store, buy groceries, and then just roll the damn carts back to their buildings down the street.

Sounds terrible but the owner didn't mind, or at least didn't discourage it. Those people didn't have cars and if they had to carry groceries home by hand they'd just buy less groceries or perhaps not shop there at all. He would just drive a pickup truck to the apartment building at the end of the day to collect carts.

When he began the story I thought it was about to be a racist story about "low-income" people (bit of a barely-disguised dog whistle there) but it wound up being pretty cool. An ad-hoc system that worked to everybody's benefit.
by Spoom | 2025-11-18 20:05:22+00:00
Anecdotally as someone in a large tech company, fairly common and much easier to get than a lot of visa classes. But then, you have to be Canadian or Mexican (and the Canadian one is generally easier).

Also keep in mind that it's a non-immigrant, non-dual intent visa, so if you end up wanting to stay, you'll need to adjust to another class at some point.
by yrro | 2025-11-18 20:05:24+00:00
In practice this can be made to work but a networking expert can probably explain better than me why splitting a prefix into chunks smaller than a /64, and assigning them to virtual networks within a host is a bad idea.

In Hetzner's specific case: they won't give me one or more additional /72s: only a /56 if I pay for it. Per server.
by pyuser583 | 2025-11-18 20:05:26+00:00
Interesting. I always associate "1 + 1 = 1" with idempotency. Here, "1 + 1 + 1 = 1", but "1 + 1 = 0".

I'm not a math whiz, so I'm just stuck with "1 + 1 = 2."
by varispeed | 2025-11-18 20:05:33+00:00
The EU has been taken over by terrorists and law enforcement does nothing. People behind Chat Controls should be arrested.

These proposals are against German laws and other EU countries. It can be treated as terrorist attack attempt.

It creates psychological and physical harm, indiscriminately for ideological gain. Textbook terrorism, except done by nice people in suits and there is no blood (yet).
by green7ea | 2025-11-18 20:05:39+00:00
I have an HP ZBook g1a ultra in Austria. I've had mine for about 4-5 months and I got the 64gb version because I needed a new laptop and the 128gb wasn't yet available. It should now be widely available everywhere.

It's pricey but I have to say it's the best Linux laptop I've used. I'm a Linux user so for me that's as good as it gets :-).

https://geizhals.at/hp-zbook-ultra-g1a-v193148.html
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-18 20:05:50+00:00
> ICE agents are masked because people think they can violently interfere with federal law enforcement

Not a problem for all other law enforcement. The precedent being set--that masked men can disappear people from the street--is dangerous and un-American.

> People voted for the guy that promised mass deportations, and the government is entitled to carry out that policy and respond to violent resistance to those operations

Sure. None of this requires a mask.

Also, the only injuries ICE officers have suffered have been due to e.g. being dragged by a car [1]. None have been due to someone tracking them down ex post facto.

> Megyn is reacting to people trying to smear Trump as a “child rapist” and “pedophile” based on zero evidence

She argued Jeffrey Epstein is not technically a pedophile. (A defense she similarly mounts with zero evidence.) She described a 15-year old as "barely legal," which is nonsense and disgusting and deeply unsettling given she literally has a daughter around that age.

And until now, Trump has been going out of his way to block the government from fulfilling his campaign promise around the Epstein files. (After his AG lied that they don't exist.) As a result, it took Democrats in the Congress releasing the e-mails to get Larry Summers to step down [2].

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/09/12/dhs-statement-ice-office...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/larry-summers-jeffrey-epstein-ema...
by abustamam | 2025-11-18 20:06:24+00:00
Wow this gives me anxiety just reading. My 2012 BMW has a warning everytime I turn it on. "DO NOT RELY ON BEEPS" (I'm paraphrasing of course.)

And yeah, I don't let tooling on my car replace common sense driving habits. I still turn my head when reversing, even if I can see what's behind me on the camera. I think it's crazy that people rely so much on unreliable tech on their cars.
by balamatom | 2025-11-18 20:06:46+00:00
TIL! Good to know!

>or any other kind of gas, liquids, substances or similar materials

Very gentlemanly, no? Penetrating and even non-penetrating weapons are fine, but no permeating ones please, that's ignoble like ew.

A naive class analysis would say, but of course our glorious peacekeepers would immediately agree to not gas each other right after they figured out the stuff. Otherwise they'd just have all gassed each other to death by now. And then us few poor survivors would be left with nobody to gas us, and the environment probably ruined.