skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In the real world, a "co-founder" is someone who founds the company.

In the real world too, not all founders are there at the exact moment the company is incorporated. If I incorporate a company, 6 months later have little accomplished, then realize I need skilled people to come all-in for equity -- they're certainly going to be co-founders.

In this case we lack the full story, but this company likely would still be considered very early. They're raising a seed round and asking someone who would be critical for growth to risk everything only for equity (presumably). If he wasn't critical, the entrepreneur would likely wait until after funding and hire a founding engineer.
The argument they're making (which I think is actually a fairly good one) is that this is to users benefit; the economic incentives for advertisers to circumvent anti-tracking tech are quite large. They claim that entirely preventing tracking is brittle; it's likely to be continual game of whack-a-mole that de facto will allow users to be tracked. Instead, giving advertisers a little more of what they actually want (better targeting) without the intermediate step of doing that by tracking users directly removes the incentive to pierce privacy.

Personally, I'm not a fan of advertising for reasons beyond privacy; it's also simply attention-sapping mental noise. Yet I'm not sure that's relevant here; removing some harm might be better than nothing even if I'm not happy with the end result.

The informed-consent angle seems fairly superficial. Yes, that matters - but the essential case is only if the tech is _not_ privacy preserving. Additionally, the ability to experiment is essential; to the extent this doesn't harm users and truly is small-scale I we should embrace experiments even if we don't personally at first glance embrace this specific one. It may seem polite to ask users for consent even here (and clearly that would have been the better PR choice), but I'm also not a fan of largely irrelevant consent forms, especially when asked prematurely - that's pretty close to spam. Sure, on Hacker News that may seem like an important question, but that's hardly a normal or representative slice of the population, and I'm just not sure I share the outrage here.

What exactly is the shadiness you're referring to here? Is it a lack of trust concerning their intentions? Is it a lack of trust that this is privacy preserving? Is it that you don't believe this experiment is small scale (enough or at all)? Or is that you don't trust they'll actually evaluate the experiment fairly, instead opting to push things through?

Another thing coloring my perspective here is that the open web sure seems to be heading in the wrong direction. Chromium is pretty dominant and none of the chromium derived browers appear to have resources (or willingness to spend them) to significantly depart from Chrome while still providing prompt security updates. Webkit is languishing and poorly updated in practice by users. De facto google seems to be pushing users towards at least pervasive tracking and leverage by google; Apple seems to support mostly those web features that don't risk competing with their app store. This isn't great; I'd love to see some competition.

Perhaps Firefox could somehow provide opt-in but noisy questions for users that want that, without harassing the likely large majority that doesn't see the point. It's a shame to chase away users over something like this, that's for sure.
Tell that to the people who keep getting elected. Takes time to repair poor decisions resulting from electorate whims.

https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/04/senators-call-pos...

https://fortune.com/2024/04/10/usps-dejoy-price-hikes-custom... | https://archive.is/b03We
Ask HN: What's your perfect Hacker News?
I am a big lover of HN since 2016. This place is great and the conversation is great (most of the time). I do have some major gripes with HN as of late and I can’t help feel like it’s transforming into a place much different. But that’s just my opinion.

But forget about my thoughts. I’m just looking for yours…

If you could change HN, which features would you love to bring in? Which features would you remove? What is your perfect HN?

I am very aware that this submission is likely to be ‘disappeared’ in minutes. This is why I feel a little scared too scared to attach my main profile with thousands of karma to this post. HN in 2024 is not the HN of 2016 in my view. Eggshells!
I just have a really shit server
I imagine those class names are the vocalizations of some hapless user agent.

> Open up wide! Here comes some 'content'! Quit complaining, you can handle it!
There's always risk in running complex software
Normally a product shutdown has a contained set of affected users, but this (incredibly computationally simple) service getting turned off will linkrot a noticeable fraction of the internet. This is shittier than usual.
This is why Lenat and CYC had settled on micro-theories. They found it impossible to build a useful universal ontology so had to fracture them on domain boundaries.
What alternate business model would you employ if you ran Embarcadero?
Kernel 6.10: Keep the updates coming
> Do we really want government bureaucrats being the only ones with access to your conviction records??

I sense a tone of sarcastic incredulity in this question but... yes? If you want to run background checks on people that's one thing, but A) it should cost money if for no other reason than to stop people scraping other's information for no reason, B) it should only be accessible if you can provide a justification for why you need that information, like you're trying to hire someone for a job or something.

Like in a minority of cases, for example the sex offender registry[1] comes to mind, I can understand why the public has an interest in having that information be readily available. For your average Joe Blow with a parking ticket or who stole a beer once? If he's done his time, leave him be.

1: Of course that system has all kinds of it's own issues but that's another conversation.
Very sweet, better than 99% of the internet already
This author strikes me as one of the greatest "counter examples" for our hiring system. They sound more useful and experienced (IMO) than myself and most coworkers I know, and I think most companies would be lucky to have them. Dark times we're in... darker times ahead.

> How do we try to exist when we need income, but almost all jobs have become impossible fantasy roles overloaded with divergent tasks trying to cram 5 departments worth of concurrent work into single people? Is it time to rip up our tech industry membership cards and just leave all the roles to overworked amateurs who only know the broken world since they haven’t ever seen a functioning company with professionals in single-purpose professional roles? I don’t know anymore.

Nailed it! I think the cynical answer here is obviously "yes". This was a problem 10 years ago and continues to get worse, not better. After layoffs and outages and enshittification, it all seems to be "holding together", so I'm truly not sure what the "breaking point" is. Probably social revolution or labor camps (half kidding).

> The tech roles at most companies are completely busted it seems. I didn’t sign up to be a “software servant” to non-technical product teams who just define tasks and priorities for actually capable people to implement every day. Somewhere along the way the entire industry lost its heart and now most companies are more interested in “playing company” instead of actually carving out created creative contraptions? There is a thing called “Engineering-led management” where, imagine this, the people doing the work are also the ones defining the product and talking to users and defining requirements while implementing features all themselves. You can’t create good products if you have less capable “product idea people” controlling implementation capability. Office Space wasn’t supposed to be our destiny.

This was probably my favorite part. As one of the "5+ years at <big tech corp>" people, this is inescapable in my experience "from the inside". I'll also note I don't make $5-10k per day like the author assumes, nor do any of my peers, even the "extremely highly paid" ones. The peak is mostly $2-4k per day but most people make 0.5-1k per day. I highly recommend http://levels.fyi as a reference for these types of data points.

- or not, from comments they seem to have a bit of a "reputation" in the redis community. I don't have time to figure out how veritable these claims are. At a minimum they sound experienced and talented enough to get into one of these high paying tech firms they seem to not be able to get into. I don't think it's indicative of an "individual problem" in the current environment.
This is unprecedented in Big Tech.
How Does the Largest Library Decide What Becomes History?
Thank you, I found out I have Vega 6 which apparently is gfx902.
"Sergiu exuberantly offers up shot glasses of mulberry vodka, pine-needle vodka, strawberry vodka, “medicine” vodka, “78 per cent proof” vodka"

Although Moldova has vodka-drinking Slavs in it, the beverages described are not vodkas. Vodka is made of cereals or potatoes, whereas these are nicer-flavored, fruit-based distilled beverages that locals call "rakiu", in English it would be schnapps:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnapps
> We’ve been clear in our policies that advertisers should not send sensitive information about people through our Business Tools. Doing so is against our policies, and we educate advertisers on properly setting up Business Tools to prevent this from occurring. Our system is designed to filter out potentially sensitive data it is able to detect.

Please stop denying the fact that you could have disabled usps when they sent the sensitive data. But why would facebook/meta do it when they need so data.

And, why is USPS even using meta etc..
Have you tried connecting with the actual hostname directly instead of an alias?

Edit: nvm the author said it’s down
AGI requires much more than knowing facts, things like planning and spending different amounts of time "thinking" depending on the query or task

That being said, adding a graph based knowledge graph is gaining in active research and I suspect will improve outcomes
> If the treatment is expensive, then only net-productive individuals would be able to afford it, meaning we would gain the benefit of contributors contributing for longer, without net-recipients receiving for longer.

Because rich people are "net-productive" and poor people are "net-recipients"?

This is wrong on so many levels. And even today rich people live on average longer. Can't see the benefit myself.
I just turned 40 and have a very, very vibrant social life and am out doing things just about daily after work. But I also don't have children, live alone, and I live in a big city surrounded by things to do. My friends with children at this point have them old enough to be hands off (not their taxi/babysitter) or they're raising newborns.

I absolutely don't go hard like my 20s and I'm usually home before 10pm but that's more so because my job is in the morning and I need my brain power to do it good well enough to keep it.

I have a lot of friends in their 25-50s that live in the same neighborhood as me or are within a 5-10 minute bike/walk/uber.

So there's definitely people outside of the stereotypical age range still socializing heavily. I see the same bicyclers riding together all the time here and they look in their 40-60s. I go roller skating and play hockey with some beer leagues and almost everyone is around 40.

With all of my free time and being trapped at home with cabin fever I've taken up a lot of my old kid hobbies like hockey and skating, playing guitar, etc.
>AI is one of the few technologies that doesn't just fail to do it's job but it fails and you might never notice until the error is already very costly if it hallucinated something crazy.

Because this is what is used to deal with non-formal and unstructured data, if you build something that would be always accurate to the task, then you would have solved it formally.
I hate using usps address change because they always leak my address.

I didn’t do it once when I had a short stint and that addrsss isn’t leaked…
v1 was very wide reaching but worked in a dumb way.

v2 had a pathetic reach and worked in a mediocre way.

Youtube premium does basically the right thing, so it would be nice if google talked to google about how they made it happen.
Agree with @PaulHoule, that basic RDF triple style KB's probably aren't sufficient in and of themselves. Buuuttttt... You can "cheat" a bit and use reification so that triples can themselves become the subject of another triple, which lets you create "subjects" like "bayesianPrior" or "strengthOfBelief" or "beliefHeldSinceDate" and other things that you can then wire into your reasoning system, to enable bayesian reasoning, modal logics, temporal logics, etc. Given all of that, can you represent everything you'd need for AGI? Weeeelll... a qualified "maybe" seems appropriate here.

The thing is, we don't have AGI, so nobody can say with absolute certainty what we need to enable it. A complete answer to that question would be tantamount to developing AGI which would make the whole discussion moot. But I think it suffices to say that there is "some there, there" in terms of using semantic KB's in conjunction with LLM's to enable richer experiences that have "more intelligent" behavior. Will it get to AGI? No idea. But it's something.

There's still a bit of "stuff" to question though. For example, how will an AGI handle paraconsistent logic? That is, logic that deals with contradictions better than classical logic, where a contradiction in the premises allows literally anything to be "proven". Humans deal with (apparent) contradictions more or less seamlessly most of the time, albeit experiencing various degrees of cognitive dissonance when trying to consider mutually contradicting beliefs that are both held as true. Just so long as we don't have to collapse our beliefs down to the level of rigour of classical logic, we can usually deal with contradictory beliefs. Making a machine deal gracefully with that stuff is still an open area of research.

Anyway... if you are interested in pursuing this further, one specific project I'm familiar with (but not directly involved with) is PR-OWL or "Probabilistic OWL" which adds Bayesian probability to OWL.

https://www.pr-owl.org/
It is completely legal to pass a C++ object through varargs.
It makes sense that USPS considers it a bug to freely give away the data that it sells: https://postalpro.usps.com/mailing-and-shipping-services/NCO...
That's how every single natural language QA system worked before LLMs.

For example START https://start.csail.mit.edu/ works that way.

Now LLMs can do the natural language to formal language conversion in both directions. LLMs are good at translation though not so well at exact recall. They are doing this though it goes by the name 'function calling'.
Ya'll will be missed! I never even went! But I'd be hanging out at Emissary coffeeshop as usual & sure was obvious there was a neat crew of people in the area.
Or you can just run IRC client on start. Just trap SIGINT and SIGTSTP, run simple or modified client that cannot do exec or escape to shell and you are done :)
Honestly I prefer type face logos. Way cleaner and zero issues
Awesome response, thank you! I’ll be learning more about Cyc.

What is the purpose of your report? In other words what interest does ISO have in KBs?
They could just create a custom license based of Apache 2.0 that allows sharing but constraints some specific behavior. It won't be formally Open Source, but will have enough open source spirit that academics or normal people will be happy to use it.
It even works offline, just slam harder for “over the air” transmission. Has a shorter range though…
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

Can you think of any laws that have loopholes but we're still better off for their existence?
I wrote a lot about this stuff in a technical report for ISO that is about to be published but, unfortunately, will be another ISO document that will cost 133 Swiss Franc.

I'd probably be willing to spring for that. Is there anything else you can say now to help one identify this when it drops? And/or can you say any more about when we should expect to see this become available?
Crystals! (Tangent, but fun)

Lab Grown Quartz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcu8Lz5PHMw

Alan Holden
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp6bN9vN6e4
Mac mini but previously the iMac G3 was $999.
Not an especially insightful article. BS is an imprecise term that's no improvement on hallucination and actually suggests a hidden agenda from the LLM. 'Hallucinate' captures rather well a state of blissful ignorance of how nonsensical and surreal the LLM's malpropism is, rather than a malign intent to deceive from 'BS'.
Do you think Google and Bing are endorsing top results, and in particular endorsing a result like that in the specific context of what manufacturers I consider buying from?

That's the only way they would be disagreeing with me.
Companies like Cohere are focusing a lot on this. It is a bit surprising if OpenAI does not already do it?
If it could spit out the analysis as spreadsheets that used standard formulas and only use the LLM to generate the formulas, it could be verified. Errors would slip through, but no worse than people applying the wrong formula based on a quick internet search that calculates a close but incorrect answer.
> Who is being canceled?

Cultural (mis)appropriation is being canceled

About time
Anyone can do that by paying for it
back up now!
As someone who works with the data from some of the vendors outlined in this article (and many others), I can confidently say, this data is not just public records, and the term "public records" is used to be deliberately obscure. What they really mean is the data that you give to other companies. It could be public records, such as real estate records, it could be "public" in the sense of details you publish online yourself, such as on LinkedIn or Facebook, or it could be details like who you bank with, the approximate values in each account, or what you like to spend your money on.

This is one of those things some people are okay with, up until the point where they get bitten by it. It's weird enough when someone sends you a congratulations on your new baby when you haven't told anyone, but it's really weird when you get the same congratulations for the baby didn't have.

Except replace "having a baby" with "went to prison." I think even you'd be upset if you started losing out on job opportunities because one of these services confused you with a convict of a similar name or address. Or your neighbors start dealing in scuttlebutt regarding something from these platforms.
GraalVM's Truffle languages try to make this easier. You still have to write a parser and an interpreter. But from these you get a compiler for free. Plus tools like a debugger, I think maybe a language server as well. And your language can easily call out to the Java standard library, which solves the problem of standard packages. But you're tied to Java.
Right. And they are meant (?) to be transparent.

Only individual's information must be kept private.
Companies taking very public stands for one political candidate or another is probably not a great evolution in our polarization.
Ask HN: Is Serverless Overkill?
I just can't help observe that my developer friends increasingly build on the "low-end", serverful platforms instead of serverless. Many call serverless overkill for the (commercial) apps they want to build. Will this be an ongoing trend?

In recent years, many new serverless service providers have been released for everything (Neon – Postgres, Cloudflare D1 – SQLite-like DB, GCP Functions, Vercel edge functions, etc.). However, people have been complaining about their complexity and overkill in the beginning.

More recently, I've witnessed friends prefer serverful providers for their apps because they offer more control, and are cheaper and simpler to get started with (their words). Serverful platforms like Render, Railway, or Fly.io have also become a bit more popular.

Both approaches come with their trade offs and limitations, especially at different scale and costs.

So, which way, western man: is Serverful the Future? Quo vadis, web development?
I dug out my Twiddler like a month ago but still haven't been back.

I was barely competent as a coder last time around (using TabSpaces layout). I'd love to one day be good at this. Its wild how much text entry I do on a phones touchscreen and I'm done ways it's pretty nice, but I'd love the eyes-free one-handed type-as-i-think capability that Twiddler alone can bring me.

The touchpad seems smart enough an upgrade. I'm pretty sure the joystick is digital 8-way, but even if it's analog I barely ever used it. Ideally I'd love for there to be a solid position tracking standard they could drop in, so that it's be viable with XR or for headless gestures. But it doesn't seem like there's off the shelf options for that? Years of positioning & every input device has DIY'ing a whole damned software stack.
Do non-technical people think of `goo.gl` as Google?
You are right. And I said the same thing. Tailwind is CSS but that has nothing to do with markup which is strictly HTML.

Markup is the description of the contents of the document. CSS is the styling of the document and has nothing to do with description of content. That is the realm of HTML.
well it will break something alright
https://artificialanalysis.ai (groq)

Quality to Price graph suggests gpt3.5 was the worst now 4o-mini inched out all others of that lower league. It supposedly gets you flash/llama3-70B tier quality at around llama3-8B price.
I'd appreciate a changelog page similar to https://news.ycombinator.com/security.html I'm sure the admins are improving things behind the scenes but it's mostly unnoticed and so users might think development has been stale for years. Did they upgrade servers? Fix aspect ratio on mobile?

There must be dozens (hundreds?) of developers on HN who could help implement a dark mode. On the one hand I'd be great if somebody built a prototype that can be easily copy&pasted (HN whole CSS is tiny). On the other hand YCombinator is attached to literal billion dollar company so why do work for free?

Remove: Maybe move the /jobs and even the monthly threads to a separate website. Jobs postings aren't really articles, shouldn't require upvoting/ranking or comments.
Companies that penetrate networks uninvited looking for vulnerabilities to create blog content should be prosecuted IMHO. This piece in particular sounds like a hit piece thinly vailed as a vulnerability disclosure.

“We thanked them for their co-operation”. Sounds kinda like extortion.
Then they could have their largest benefactor first pledge $100 Million to fund them. Then after suddenly insist they are woefully falling behind google on developing the tech and insist the organization be handed over to his sole control to help them catch up. After being told he's wrong, he could then get upset and renege on his pledge after giving only 10% of his commitment - they'd be left scrambling running out of funds and realize that being dependent on donations at their scale isn't working and they need a way to earn a profit or partnership to self-fund.

Oh and after pulling the pledged money, that other party could go buy a social media site and use it to whine about how they aren't a non-profit anymore... while knowing they're the cause of it.
Recommended by 9 out of 10 independent laptop repair shops!
What a major victory for birds all across the globe. A feather is not ours to steal and parade around as if it’s our own culture. Maybe the ASF could replace this with a lock of human hair instead.
60-year-old German man likely seventh person to be effectively cured from HIV