MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-08 15:30:11+00:00
> My Google Pixel 10 has both an in-the-screen fingerprint reader, and a Face ID, and I use both. They're both useful in different situations.

That sounds great.

> Some iPads have the finger print reader on the side of the device, on the power button.

My main iPad is a Mini (latest gen). It has the Touch ID on the top. I find it to be a bit "flaky." It often misses prints. However, I think it works amazingly well, given that it's just a strip.

I also have an iPad Pro, with FaceID. That works nicely. I like that it works in both portrait and landscape. That didn't happen in my older phones, but seems to be the case in my latest (17 Pro).
by vasco | 2025-12-08 15:30:16+00:00
As long as it is to advertise in their own platform sounds great. I'd rather have nice restaurant suggestions on top than McDonald's and Dominoes or whoever paid the most every day. Using Uber eats is like some app from the past with ads as global banners that are the same for all users. If you're going to throw me ads at least use my history to try and do something useful.
by gruez | 2025-12-08 15:30:30+00:00
>Since when does any organization factor in inflation for renewals from vendors?!

Don't ask me, ask the person who posed the question of inflation in the first place. That said...

>All the purchase renewal decisions I've been part of have been:

All but one of the reasons you listed are tied to inflation in some way. Inflation affects everything in the economy, so a company that doesn't raise prices in line with it is losing money. Even SaaS businesses with low marginal costs aren't exempt, because they still need to pay salaries for developers and support staff, both of which roughly track inflation. Therefore if business see price hikes that raise with inflation, they can assume that competitors will raise prices as well, and it's not going to be worth switching unless they're already on the fence for some other reason.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-08 15:30:32+00:00
One of your remarks regarding attribution and compensation goes back to 'Xanadu' by the way, if you are not familiar with it that might be worth reading up on (Ted Nelson). He obviously did this well before the current AI age but a lot of the ideas apply.

A meta-comment:

I absolutely love your attention to detail in this discussion and avoiding taking 'the easy way out' from some of the more hairy concept embedded. This is exactly the kind of interaction that I love HN for, and it is interesting how this thread seems to bring out the best in you at the same time that it seems to bring out the worst in others.

Most likely they are responding as strongly as they do because they've bought into this matter to a degree that they are passing off works that they did not create as their own novel output, they got paid for it and they - like a religious person - are now so invested in this that it became their crutch and a part of their identity.

If you have another train ride to make I'd love for you to pick apart that argument and to refute it.
by cogman10 | 2025-12-08 15:30:33+00:00
IMO, it's something more cynical. It's not bowing to pressure or whatever. Rather, the guys running marketing have realized a trick to getting attention is making some innocuous political statement that ultimately causes social media to freak out. For example, having a trans person advertise their beer.

These giants know that people are lazy, they aren't likely doing the effort to see all the product holding. And that people will forget the outrage when the next thing comes up. It also helps that a lot of the dumb reactions have been things like people buying their product only to angerly shoot it with a gun or run it over with a truck.

When time passes, so does the outrage. And what they've actually bought is a bit of unearned goodwill and forgotten badwill.
by terminalshort | 2025-12-08 15:30:34+00:00
DEI is a blatant violation of title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and any company that engages in it or any form of racial discrimination by any other sickening PR sanitized name like "affirmative action" should be aggressively prosecuted.

> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer -

> (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; or

> (2) to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
by coldtea | 2025-12-08 15:30:42+00:00
>LLMs are text model, not world models and that is the root cause of the problem.

Is it though? In the end, the information in the training texts is a distilled proxy for the world, and the weighted model ends up being a world model, just an once-removed one.

Text is not that different to visual information in that regard (and humans base their world model on both).

>Not having a world model is a massive disadvantage when dealing with facts, the facts are supposed to re-inforce each other, if you allow even a single fact that is nonsense then you can very confidently deviate into what at best would be misguided science fiction, and at worst is going to end up being used as a basis to build an edifice on that simply has no support.

Regular humans believe all kinds of facts that are nonsense, many others that are wrong, and quite a few that are even counter to logic too.

And short of omnipresense and omniscience, directly examining the whole world, any world model (human or AI), is built on sets of facts many of which might not be true or valid to begin with.
by zenoprax | 2025-12-08 15:30:50+00:00
ChatGPT offered a "robotic" personality which really improved my experience. My frustrations were basically decimated right away and I quickly switched to a more "You get out of it what you put in" mindset.

And less than two weeks in they removed it and replaced it with some sort of "plain and clear" personality which is human-like. And my frustrations ramped up again.

That brief experiment taught me two things: 1. I need to ensure that any robots/LLMs/mech-turks in my life act at least as cold and rational as Data from Star Trek. 2. I should be running my own LLM locally to not be at the whims of $MEGACORP.
by prodigycorp | 2025-12-08 15:30:50+00:00
> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools?

Leadership in IBM also thought that Watson was like what what OAI/Anthropic/Google are doing now. It wasn't. Watson was essentially a ML pipeline over-optimized on Jeopardy, which is why it failed in literally every other domain.

Outside of Jeopardy, Watson was just a brand.
by czl | 2025-12-08 15:31:01+00:00
> I do not believe there exists a way to safely use LLMs in scientific processes.

What about giving the LLM a narrowly scoped role as a hostile reviewer, while your job is to strengthen the write-up to address any valid objections it raises, plus any hallucinations or confusions it introduces? That’s similar to fuzz testing software to see what breaks or where the reasoning crashes.

Used this way, the model isn’t a source of truth or a decision-maker. It’s a stress test for your argument and your clarity. Obviously it shouldn’t be the only check you do, but it can still be a useful tool in the broader validation process.
by anthk | 2025-12-08 15:31:14+00:00
- Use Dillo with gopher/gemini plugins. Add mpv+yt-dlp, the some of the HN comments in this page has my hints posted.

Cookies setup for HN:

~/.dillo/cookiesrc news.ycombinator.com ACCEPT .news.ycombinator.com ACCEPT_SESSION hn.algolia.net ACCEPT .hn.algolia.net ACCEPT_SESSION hn.algonia.net ACCEPT .hn.algonia.net ACCEPT_SESSION

- Use ZRAM:

sudo modprobe zram sudo zramctl --find-size 64MB sudo swapon /dev/zram0 -p 99

- Tiling sucks on small resolutions. Use CWM or IceWM.

- XTerm it's very small and works fine. I can posts Xresorces there.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-08 15:31:22+00:00
Public companies are interested in quarterly profits. But for the most part still have longer term goals and don’t purposefully make decisions that will make the company worse off in the long term.

Apple is not going to sell off all of its real estate into separate company, force the other half to rent it and then sell off the rental holdings. Even when it was almost bankrupt it didn’t “shut down the company and give the money back to shareholders”.

The former is a standard PE play. I’ve been part of the “roll up small companies and enshittify them and go public” playbook. I was the lead architect at the parent company designing the software system that integrated the disparate systems of the target companies.

Funny enough I worked for a startup that I loved in 2018-2020 and only left because a job at BigTech fell into my lap. After leaving BigTech in 2023, the company that acquired the startup I worked for (a PE backed acquire and enshittify company) offered me a job as the architect to consolidate their systems based on a referral. I booed out after having a lot of discussions with their internal management and one with a representative from their investor.

It’s hell being under the thumb of a PE companies management (not the internal management) they second guess everything and the level they were hiring me for, I would have dealt with the PE investors representatives directly
by DoctorOetker | 2025-12-08 15:31:24+00:00
I am not claiming nomadic hunter gatherer societies were safe spaces, but there is a recurring misconception: people assume the nomadic lifestyle was harder and less desirable, otherwise humans wouldn't have made the transition to agrarian society.

Could perhaps slavery possibly be the bigger reason agrarian lifestyle "outcompeted" the nomadic lifestyle?

It's easy to proclaim a higher mean life quality in agrarian society if we discount the lives of the slaves.

With nomadic tribes, there is a constant churn of neighbor tribes, so hypothetical nomadic slavery would be much easier to escape than say the Roman Empire, where only near the boundaries of the Empire one might durably escape.

In an agrarian society neighboring villages etc use the same kinds of marks to discriminate the slaves from the citizens, so even if you escaped your master and the village, you'd end up needing to pass countless other villages which would recognize your assigned status, and turn you in for some reward / improved bilateral relations / ...

Today countless research indicates that permaculture, agroforestry, etc. are more productive than monoculture.

It is perfectly possible for nomadic cultures to be more efficient, and to provide more free time (a dangerous thing, since infighting and warring takes time), yet be "outcompeted" by systems of slavery!

For the leaders (of either nomadic tribes, or agrarian empires), the agrarian empire affords much more fruits of course!
by thijson | 2025-12-08 15:32:42+00:00
You can, it's called OTEC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_thermal_energy_conversio...

Just like this scheme, it's not very economically efficient.

Carnot efficiency is proportional to the temperature ratio between the hot end and the cold end in degrees Kelvin. If both temperatures are in the 200's, then efficiency will be low.

OTEC does provide lots of potable water though, so that's one advantage.
by fusslo | 2025-12-08 15:33:04+00:00
thanks, that makes sense. I don't see how a worktree is more convenient in that case.

Maybe from the kind of work I do? either CI is failing because of something really simple, or something really complicated that means getting a product setup and producing debug messages. If it's a critical fix on branch A, then I'm not working on branch B. I'm testing branch A locally while CI does its thing
by Spivak | 2025-12-08 15:33:08+00:00
Which is why the model that would actually be good for consumers and the model that absolutely no content producer wants which is splitting content creation from distribution isn't going to happen. Let a bunch of companies compete over being the best streaming platform and then let those companies all compete for licensing deals for content.

I think a big copyright holders in a strange way actually don't want a repeat of cable. They want all content to be exclusive by default to their own streaming service.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-08 15:33:09+00:00
> This is a constant source of litigation in public and private companies alike. A recent prominent case on the public side was National Amusements constantly fucking up the sale of Paramount if it didn't have special goodies for Shari Redstone.

Instead they had to give “goodies” personally to Trump in the form of a $15 million bribe…
by jraph | 2025-12-08 15:33:26+00:00
> Nobody should leave gainful employment to attempt to compete.

That's not what I'm saying. You can thrive with an open source business model. I'm working for such a company.

Falsewoods software founders still believe about free and open source software in 2026

1. That's it's 100% made unpaid, outside business despite the numerous clues that it's not

(note to whom might read this thread: I edited my previous comment to tame it and make it a bit more constructive, piker cited something that doesn't appear anymore in my comment but that I indeed wrote)
by sqircles | 2025-12-08 15:33:44+00:00
There are entire niches of us that make a living (not at IBM) making certain IBM products actually do what they're supposed to. From my vantage point I see essentially zero maintenance going on with their products. I sincerely don't understand the market (why do people keep paying hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for non-existent support?) - but whatever.
by underlipton | 2025-12-08 15:34:20+00:00
This seems to be the handbook for price complaint inspections following a complaint to the relevant authority (in this case, the Maryland Office of the Attorney General).

https://mda.maryland.gov/Documents/HANDBOOK%20130%20Examinat...

Practically-speaking, stores have at least as long as it takes for an inspector to come out to the physical location. So, yes, it's a bit of a loophole, but I imagine that if you're mispricing as a matter of course and getting hit with complaints and constant inspections, you're probably going to eventually get fined (unless you're paying off inspectors). Store operations are usually designed to catch mistakes, as half the job is making sure items are stocked and labeled correctly. (I think most stores would prefer to transition to essentially local warehouses that delivered to customers from online orders, so that they wouldn't have to deal with any of this, but then they'd lose out on impulse purchases.)
by gedy | 2025-12-08 15:35:04+00:00
> Instead, they should put their effort on pipeline.

Previous company "did that", but what it amounted to was young HR women filtering all candidates before engineering saw them or their resumes, and you had to pick from their not-so-great candidates they got based on gender or race. Also interviewers could not see what other interviewers said - so we got bypassed as well behind the scenes
by antonvs | 2025-12-08 15:35:08+00:00
Interestingly, coding models often struggle with complex type systems, e.g. in Haskell or Rust. Of course, part of this has to do with the relative paucity of relevant training data, but there are also "cognitive" factors that mirror what humans tend to struggle with in those languages.

One big factor behind this is the fact that you're no longer just writing programs and debugging them incrementally, iteratively dealing with simple concrete errors. Instead, you're writing non-trivial proofs about all possible runs of the program. There are obviously benefits to the outcome of this, but the process is more challenging.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-08 15:35:26+00:00
> > and creators have a strong incentive to protect their credibility.

> I haven't seen this play out very much to be honest.

"Credibility" means "relative to the interests of their audience". Faux News has a completely different, almost inverse metric for "credibility" with their "Aliuns made the pirramids!" fanbase. CNN follows a more strict "if it bleeds it leads" policy to keep their audience believing them.
by metajack | 2025-12-08 15:35:27+00:00
This isn't that hard. There are various employee groups around identities (Women in Tech, Asian Pacific, Black, LGBTQ, etc). Membership is not exclusive to those groups but also open to allies. As an example, I used to participate in the Women in Tech one at both Mozilla and at LinkedIn. Often I just listened, but I also helped organize a few events with them, contributed ideas for those events, and when they started a structured mentoring program I was one of the mentors.

There are also optional and non-optional hiring trainings that address these kinds of topics which you can do. I was a hiring manager for a while so I also spent some time doing some of these optional things to improve my chances of building a diverse team. This mostly included helping with sourcing candidates and a few times meant speaking up when I could see that identity biases were being used in evaluations.

But often just simple things are all you need. For example, when picking a group dinner destination making sure various culinary requirements are accounted for (either cultural or dietary) or finding team building activities that are inclusive.

I never once had an issue finding some of this to put on these perf reviews. Most of this is just under the category of being a good human who respects and values others.
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by exabrial | 2025-12-08 15:35:54+00:00
I'm convinced this was a psyop actually, with the intent of delaying other country's 5th gen programs or development of quantum radars. It definitely had some cost overruns but I think its performance as a fighter is pretty impressive.

Criticism is fair however: they did probably extend themselves too far with the helmet technology, and I do have concerns about touch screens in cockpits (a touch screen requires you to take your eyes off of a target to move your hand to the right location, rather than locating a button by touch).
by coldtea | 2025-12-08 15:36:02+00:00
>The basic design is non-deterministic. Trying to extract "facts" or "truth" or "accuracy" is an exercise in futility

We ourselves are non-deterministic. We're hardly ever in the same state, can't rollback to prior states, and we hardly ever give the same exact answer when asked the same exact question (and if we include non-verbal communication, never).
by dangus | 2025-12-08 15:36:41+00:00
Maybe the answer is yes, after a certain amount of time has passed.

It would be a great compromise to our insane copyright periods that currently exist if you ask me.

The industry can keep it insanely long copyright lengths but maybe after 20 years the whole world should be free to distribute Seinfeld and Friends and just pay a standard royalty rate so that content rights holders don’t become consolidated empires that are too big to compete against realistically, becoming inevitable monopoly players.
by hansvm | 2025-12-08 15:36:53+00:00
I think I see the definitions we're disagreeing on. I'll lay out what I meant and then address your thing.

1. A couple levels up, the function somebody requested being continuously differentiable was the "benefits." You seem to be looking at the total post-benefit income instead.

2. It's not totally clear, but you _might_ also be using "monotonic" to refer to "monotonic increasing" or "strictly monotonic increasing" instead (the total income function in my example isn't even monotonic, so this is just me reading between the lines in the wording of your reply).

The cliff issue still exists though (and still exists in the differentiable version -- you want bounds on the derivative ideally to prevent the cliff issue, and for unrelated reasons you probably want other properties like the benefits not increasing as a function of pre-benefit income). Suppose you have a strictly monotonic increasing function mapping pre to post benefit income. That function can still, e.g., have a long region with a high slope, followed by a long region with a low slope, and some curvy thing connecting those. It's still continuously differentiable and strictly monotonic increasing, but the incremental value of work in the low-slope region is low (by definition). You might make a dollar in pre-benefit income and $0.10 in post-benefit income, so at minimum wage you're back to a <$1/hr situation unless you can make enough money to push substantially past the right side of that low-slope region (which we're assuming exists, else it basically says you have a 90% tax rate if you make too much money, and in-context "too much" would be near poverty levels, so even people wanting that sort of thing for the ultra rich wouldn't think that to be a good idea).
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-08 15:36:56+00:00
a) I find myself fairly regularly irritated by the flow of human-human conversations. In fact, it's more common than not. Of course, I have years of practice handling that more or less automatically, so it rarely raises to the level of annoyance, but it's definitely work I bring to most conversations. I don't know about you but that's not really a courtesy I extend to the LLM.

b) If it is, in fact, just one setting away, then I would say it's operating fairly similarly?
by pixl97 | 2025-12-08 15:36:56+00:00
> when even a child can understand that if I ask them to make paperclips they shouldn't go around and kill people.

Statistics brother. The vast majority of people will never murder/kill anyone. The problem here is that any one person that kills people can wreck a lot of havoc, and we spend massive amounts of law enforcement resources to stop and catch people that do these kinds of things. Intelligence little to do with murdering/not murdering, hell, intelligence typically allows people to get away with it. For example instead of just murdering someone, you setup a company to extract resources and murder the natives in mass and it's just part of doing business.
by mdasen | 2025-12-08 15:37:06+00:00
At this point?

I remember when Microsoft Office truly felt like a monopoly. In the 90s, nothing could really read/write Microsoft formats reliably. People weren't using PDFs as much and teachers, jobs, etc. all expected you to be sending them .doc files.

Yes, Microsoft wrote the spec fox .docx, but submitted it as an ECMA standard and that meant that people could create alternatives that could read/write .docx quite well. Sure, Microsoft has a little bit of a leg up, but it's nothing like the monopoly they had on .doc.

Today, we expect programs to be able to read and write Microsoft Office formats. In the 90s, we truly didn't. Yes, there might be some advanced things that don't always work, but it's so different today.