MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-08 15:22:04+00:00
The OP was actually not questioning that at all. It was lamenting that they are bending the knee to someone unworthy of it, in furtherance of a culture war spearheaded by said someone. In particular, a glorified reality show egomaniac who treats their current job as a glorified reality show.

It certainly isn't useless information that the person is currently president, but that alone doesn't say much, because no presidents have ever acted this way before. The difference here is that this president is also a power-tripping glorified reality show egomaniac. Thus, the operant term is the latter, not the former.
by cmcaleer | 2025-12-08 15:22:09+00:00
MS (or any large company for that matter) didn’t participate in BLM discussions and get speakers to describe themselves and list their pronouns because they thought it was virtuous or right, they were just following the cultural zeitgeist in a way that they thought would make them more money.

Walking it back is just the same behaviour manifesting in a different way. Investors don’t value DEI in the same way they did before so it becomes an expense with no value to shareholders, so it gets cut.

It’s very cynical but nothing about this should be particularly shocking.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-08 15:22:31+00:00
> I built a casino. A casino that does not call itself a casino, but it is the biggest, [...]

That's what people involved in the creation of the stock market must have thought.

Aren't all financial systems about this one thing? Buying and selling risk for profit?

If you want to work on something else than a casino you should probably steer clear of any finance.
by heeton | 2025-12-08 15:22:43+00:00
If you remove a reaction to politics and/or management practice, this is quite an obvious question, no?

Hypothetically: Substitute Microsoft for a company with “zero downtime” as one of their company values.

Now imagine you were asked “What impact did your actions have in contributing to zero downtime at Hostingsoft?”

That wouldn’t be a controversial question.
by gjm11 | 2025-12-08 15:22:45+00:00
I am not 100% convinced by this. The matchup between their painting-based economic index (it's the first component from a PCA analysis, the data for each painting being a vector of pixel-counts for colours in each of 108 bins based on HSV) and GDP growth is pretty dubious, and in places where the two vary together the painting-based metric frequently changes several years before the allegedly-corresponding change in GDP growth.

They have ad hoc explanations for the divergences and try to make lemonade out of the lemons by claiming that their index reveals "higher-frequency fluctuations that traditional series smooth over" but I am willing to bet that if they had had to predict the divergences before doing the calculations they wouldn't have been able to.

I think this is probably mostly pareidolia.
by mc32 | 2025-12-08 15:23:55+00:00
Whatever they do, companies should not be doing quotas other than bringing in the people who will propel the mission.

Instead, they should put their effort on pipeline. From kindergarten, drive kids to want to participate in a dynamic economy instead of pursuing selling themselves short and perhaps getting involved in the underground economy, dead-end jobs, etc. Go give it a go in all areas of the nation that are under-served. That is the way to do it. If you do it any time later, like at hiring time, then you risk hiring on things other than merit.
by cl3misch | 2025-12-08 15:24:14+00:00
That's handy and obviously a major security increase compared to sharing on Discord, but I feel compelled to quote the age README:

> Keep in mind that people might not protect SSH keys long-term, since they are revokable when used only for authentication, and that SSH keys held on YubiKeys can't be used to decrypt files.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/age?tab=readme-ov-file#encryp...
by losvedir | 2025-12-08 15:24:22+00:00
"needs to be sacrificed"? You yourself give other options.

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

* Old Google Pixels had it on the back, conveniently able to be accessed with your index finger as you take the phone out of your pocket.

* Current Google Pixels have it where you just touch the screen.

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.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-08 15:24:29+00:00
> So it needs to know facts, albeit the currently accepted ones. Knowing the facts is a good way to compression data.

It's not a compression engine - it's just a statistical predictor.

Would it do better if it was incentivized to compress (i.e training loss rewarded compression as well as penalizing next-word errors)? I doubt it would make a lot of difference - presumably it'd end up throwing away the less frequently occurring "outlier" data in favor of keeping what was more common, but that would result in it throwing away the rare expert opinion in favor of retaining the incorrect vox pop.
by sys_64738 | 2025-12-08 15:24:30+00:00
The great unwashed masses will still continue to pay it. It's not a sizeable increases that they'd be willing to move elsewhere. People rationalize it in the context of it's only a buck a month and other things increase by more. M$ are not stupid but do know what they're doing. May take is. Don't do drugs. Don't do subscriptions. Don't do MICROS~1.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-08 15:24:46+00:00
Paramount bids $30 all cash for all of Warner Brothers Discovery. Netflix bids $27.75 “for Warner’s studio and HBO Max streaming business” only [1]. (“$23.25 in cash and $4.50 in shares” [2].)

The latter leaves behind “sports and news television brands around the world including CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., and Discovery, top free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as the profitable Discovery+ streaming service and Bleacher Report (B/R)” [3]. (Paramount is effectively bidding $5.9bn for these assets.)

Note that Zaslav, Warner’s CEO, is a prominent donor to Democrats [4], as is Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder [5]. (Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO with Greg Peters, is mixed, leaning Dem [6]. No clue on the latter.) Ellison is a staunch Trump ally. The partisan tinge will be difficult to ignore.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/media/paramount-makes-hostile-t...

[2] https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-to-acquire-warner-...

[3] https://www.wbd.com/news/warner-bros-discovery-separate-two-...

[4] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=david+...

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/reed-hastings...

[6] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Ted+Sa...
by stackskipton | 2025-12-08 15:24:54+00:00
>Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?

IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.

They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.
by rtkwe | 2025-12-08 15:25:02+00:00
There's a hell of a lot of power vested in the executive branch especially in the DOJ to really mess with companies and the real protection against it's misuse was the agreement that the President didn't directly instruct and control who the DOJ actually indicted. It used to be a notable event when a president even appeared to hint that he was encouraging investigations (not even indictments) into specific companies now we've got a president explicitly demanding the DOJ indict specific people and find any reason to do so, see Comey and Letitia James's recent indictments.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-08 15:25:06+00:00
LLMs are text model, not world models and that is the root cause of the problem. If you and I would be discussing furniture and for some reason you had assumed the furniture to be glued to the ceiling instead of standing on the floor (contrived example) then it would most likely only take one correction based on your actual experience that you are probably on the wrong track. An LLM will happily re-introduce that error a few ping-pongs later and re-establish the track it was on before because that apparently is some kind of attractor.

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.

Facts are contagious: they work just like foundation stones, if you allow incorrect facts to become a part of your foundation you will be producing nonsense. This is my main gripe with AI and it is - funny enough - also my main gripe with some mass human activities.
by Zaskoda | 2025-12-08 15:25:11+00:00
I disagree. Sort of. I agree that the things you listed like altcoins and stablecoins and NFTs aren't that valuable.

Note: I hate using the word "blockchain" to describe these decentralized networks hosting distributed ledgers, but it seem to be the word most people recognize. With that in mind:

Bitcoin was a first generation blockchain technology. It's the gold backed standard that supports the rest of the ecosystem and it always will be. That network should never do anything but be money.

Ethereum and all of the networks that replicate what it does are second generation blockchain technologies. They generalize what blockchain does to the degree that we can write arbitrary programs. It is a global decentralized computer, albeit a rather limited one. People use them mostly for finance because people have no idea what else to do with them.

Third generation networks are on the way. My favorite example is Polkadot and what Gavin is doing with JAM. This brings us a bit closer to what "Web3" was supposed to be about. JAM is something new, something different, upon which you can run all kinds of blockchain networks. Very few people understand how Ethereum works or how to use it. JAM is even more difficult to get your head around. But it is a radical paradigm changing technology.

The noise of altcoins and NFTs is the result of hype and greed. It overshadows Web3. It makes it nearly impossible for anyone working on Web3 tech to get any kind of coherent messaging out to the masses. And it will be that way for a while. But not forever.

All this to say that it's not wasted effort and it's not a dead end. It's just that what is valuable in the scene is almost impossible to see due to the overwhelming hype and nonsense.
by butvacuum | 2025-12-08 15:25:13+00:00
As far as I'm aware- if it's called an ARM CPU it's either the v7 or v8 instruction set with the possibility of extra instructions (changes to ARM die) or a tightly integrated coprocessor (via AXI bus, adjacent to the ARM silicon on the same substrate).

There are different Coretex series that optimize for different things- A and X for applications (phones, cloud compute, SBCs, desktops and laptops), M for microcontrollers, and R for realtime.

This doesn't apply if the company has an ARM founder and/or architecture license. (I think that's what they're called) Eg- Apple and their M series SOCs are not Coretex cores, but share the base instruction set- but only if Apple wants it to.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-12-08 15:25:26+00:00
How many russian soldiers died in order for them to control Belarus?

How many russian soldiers died in order for them to undermine European security by persuading the British electorate to vote for Brexit?

How many russian soldiers died in order for them to have a US administration that is trying to force an allied country to capitulate to a genocidal terrorist regime?

The Ukrainians are fighting a hot war today because they recognised and wished to release themselves from the shackles of russian soft power.

War isn't only fought with tanks and bombs and guns.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-12-08 15:25:30+00:00
Background: I live within the US Federal Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a regional electric grid operator. The majority of energy is generated by nuclear + renewables, with coal and natural gas as peakers. Grid stability is maintained by among the largest batteries in the world, Racoon Mountain Pumped Storage Facility.

Three Gorges Dam is capable of generating more power than all of TVA's nuclear + hydro, combined. In the past decade, TVA's single pumped-storage battery has gone from largest GWh/capcity in the world to not even top ten — largest facilities are now in China.

µFission reactors have recently been approved for TVA commissioning, with locations unconfirmed (but about one-sixth the output of typical TVA nuclear site). Sub-station battery storage sites are beginning to go online, capable of running subdivisions for hours after circuit disconnects.

Tech-funded entities like Helios Energy are promising profitable ¡FusioN! within a few years ("for fifty years").

----

All of the above just to say: +100GW over the next decade isn't that crazy a prediction (+20% current supply, similar in size to two additional Texas-es).

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
by feznyng | 2025-12-08 15:25:37+00:00
As you said, you need to have a proper legal entity for about 2 years before this becomes an option.

My low-stakes conspiracy theory is that MS is deliberately making this process awful to encourage submission of apps to the Microsoft Store since you only have to pay a one-time $100 fee there for code-signing. The downside is of course that you can only distribute via the MS store.
by dginev | 2025-12-08 15:26:00+00:00
Tell us what you would need described in a tutorial to be productive, as well as your background with the technologies involved (TeX/LaTeX, perl, XML, XSLT, HTML). Probably best as a new issue:

https://github.com/brucemiller/LaTeXML/issues

It's a pretty deep rabbit hole, but I wholeheartedly agree most standard package support incantations should be easy and few to use.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-08 15:26:29+00:00
I've seen that argument repeated ad-nauseum.

It makes sense if you're desperate for free will to be real, but you really have to work for it. Especially when you add in the countless other studies showing that a lot of the reasons we give for our actions, especially in quick or ambiguous choices, are confabulationalist post-hoc constructions. Our own introspection seems mostly to consist of just "making stuff up" to justify the decisions we've already made.

I mean, a reasonable person could argue their way past all the evidence without totally denying it, but "free will" just isn't the simplest explanation that fits the available data. It's possible that free will exists in the same way it's possible that Russels teapot exists.
by shadowgovt | 2025-12-08 15:26:37+00:00
And, of course, since businesses are fundamentally in competition, that puts them in an interesting position: even if it's a net negative for the entire industry to capitulate to the bullying tactics of the executive branch, you can get a leg up on your competition by having one fewer giant complicated court case to worry about (even if the case is guaranteed to lose, it still costs money to defend it).
by anthk | 2025-12-08 15:27:17+00:00
Just use Dillo. It's something has videos, use mpv+yt-dlp.

~/.config/mpv/config:

#start ytdl-format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best ao=sndio vo=gpu,xv audio-pitch-correction=no quiet=yes pause=no profile=fast vd-lavc-skiploopfilter=all #demuxer-cache-wait=yes #demuxer-max-bytes=4MiB #end

~/yt-dlp.conf

#start --format=bestvideo[height<=?480][fps<=?30]+bestaudio/best #end
by netruk44 | 2025-12-08 15:27:37+00:00
I used to work at Microsoft and I can tell you this was absolutely not true during my time there.

As an engineer, you needed to have an answer to that question or else you could not be promoted (at least in some parts of the org chart).

It was a box that your skip levels needed to see checked in order to approve promotions. My lead told me as much in exactly those words.
by victorbuilds | 2025-12-08 15:27:47+00:00
The device (BISC) is a single CMOS chip, thinned down to 50 μm, that slides into the subdural space (between skull and brain).

The specs are pretty wild:

Form Factor: It rests on the brain "like a piece of wet tissue paper."

Resolution: 65,536 electrodes with 1,024 simultaneous recording channels.

Bandwidth: 100 Mbps wireless link (custom ultra-wideband radio).

Power: Fully wireless via an external relay station.

The differentiator here seems to be the non-penetrating approach. Unlike Utah arrays or Neuralink threads that penetrate the cortex, this sits on top, which theoretically minimizes tissue scarring/reaction while maintaining high data throughput (100x current wireless BCIs).

Paper: Stable, chronic in-vivo recordings from a fully wireless subdural-contained 65,536-electrode brain-computer interface device
by reenorap | 2025-12-08 15:28:15+00:00
I worked at a crypto exchange and after I came to the conclusion that 99% of crypto was scams and rugpulls, I sold all my crypto and vowed to have nothing to do with it. It's more of a religion than a financial instrument and absolutely nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble, basically tulips with the religious promise of a better world. The number of employees that lost money on rugpulls while I was there, but "still believed in crypto" was staggering.
by dangus | 2025-12-08 15:28:17+00:00
Yes, I read her whole “sorry not sorry” letter where she weaves a literary spiderweb trying to justify her position and making it all about her victimhood.

It was certainly a better excuse for creative writing than Cho Chang or Seamus Finnigan but she did a very poor job of convincing me that her main focus isn’t dehumanizing trans women.
by rglullis | 2025-12-08 15:28:24+00:00
I don't know how else to get my point across: what I am trying to say is that there is nothing "smart" about an automaton that needs to resort to A* algorithm implementations to "solve" a problem that any 4-year old child can solve just by looking at it.

Where you are seeing "intelligence" and "an existential crisis", I see "a huge pattern-matching system with an ever increasing vocabulary".

LLM's are useful. They will certainly cause a lot of disruption of automation on all types of white-collar work. They will definitely lead to all sorts of economic and social disruptions (good and bad). I'm definitely not ignoring them as just another fad... but none of that depends on LLMs being "intelligent" in any way.
by setr | 2025-12-08 15:28:52+00:00
It’s a tax. You could describe any beneficiaries of a tax in the same manner; we’re paying taxes to at least partially cover group X - homeless, scientists, military, retirees, veterans, etc.

There’s no debt being paid; money is simply taken from Peter, and money is simply given to Paul.

It’s not a retirement program, it’s retirement subsidization.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-08 15:29:08+00:00
> but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt

I'll believe that when I see it. They had a decade headstart with all of this, and yeah, could have been at the forefront. But they're not, and because of the organization itself, they're unlikely to have a shot at even getting close to there. Seems they know this themselves too, as they're targeting the lower end of the market now with their Granite models, rather than shooting for the stars and missing, like they've done countless of times before.
by coredog64 | 2025-12-08 15:29:09+00:00
Aside from the alleged "culture war" aspect, looking at the 2024 report you can see that the category "Asian" is at 36%. Roughly 5% of the US population can tick the "Asian" box on the census. There are a lot of people on both sides of the US political aisle asking why this is the case. Making it harder to tease that data out might limit blowback from low-effort attempts to smear the company.
by kangs | 2025-12-08 15:29:11+00:00
it's actually just trust but verify type stuff:

- verifying isn't asking "is it correct?" - verifying is "run requests.get, does it return blah or no?'

just like with humans but usually for different reasons and with slightly different types of failures.

The interesting part perhaps, is that verifying pretty much always involves code, and code is great pre-compacted context for humans and machines alike. Ever tried to get LLM to do a visual thing? why is the couch at the wrong spot with a weird color?

if you make the LLM write a program that generate the image (eg game engine picture, or 3d render), you can enforce the rules by code it can also make for you - now the couch color uses an hex code and its placed at the right coordinates, every time.
by Romario77 | 2025-12-08 15:29:19+00:00
I wouldn't describe it as improved necessarily, but successfully integrated. This happened many times - youtube by google for example. Facebook acquisitions are pretty successful too (not looking if it was good for humanity, just from business perspective).

Some companies like Amazon buy companies and let them run almost independently - IMDB for example, Zappos, Twitch, Whole Foods, Zoox, Audible.
by mfalcon | 2025-12-08 15:29:22+00:00
I had been working on NLP, NLU mostly, some years before LLMs. I've tried the universal sentence encoder alongside many ML "techniques" in order to understand user intentions and extract entities from text.

The first time I tried chatgpt that was the thing that surprised me most, the way it understood my queries.

I think that the spotlight is on the "generative" side of this technology and we're not giving the query understanding the deserved credit. I'm also not sure we're fully taking advantage of this funcionality.
by ipdashc | 2025-12-08 15:29:29+00:00
Most of human history, sure, but I'm talking about the last few centuries. We've had plenty of organizations of that size; corporations, governments, militaries.

But why on Earth is the total size of the organization relevant? That's the whole point of a hierarchical design, one manager just needs to know the people or abstracted teams that sit below them. Even in a "modern" org there's nobody sitting looking at a spreadsheet of 200k employees going "gee how will I figure out who to promote, better sort descending by lines of code written".

And yes, we've been talking in circles at this point. I agree a fully vibes based "promote who you feel like" approach has all those flaws, which is why I'm saying you need both quantitative and qualitative data. But in general qualitative should hold slightly more weight in complex, non-linear, interaction-heavy jobs like engineering, because it's hard if not impossible to find fair metrics for literally everything an employee possibly does.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-12-08 15:29:59+00:00
>The Data: Before the ACA, Maine implemented this. Anthem requested a 20% rate hike due to adverse selection. After the pool was implemented, the rate hike dropped to under 2%.

>This shows we can protect the sick without forcing the healthy to pay $25k/year premiums to an oligopoly.

So in effect give the oligopoly tax money so they keep their rates the same for the sick and the well? Isn't that what Congress is basically currently fighting over (federal money vs. state?)

Congress also intentionally removed the unpopular requirement to have to buy insurance (either through your employer or the ACA market), essentially re-creating one of the death-spiral conditions in the first place. It's been the Republican goal all along to get the ACA to die in a death spiral so we can go back to forcing people into medical bankruptcy, like God intended.