skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's probably a market failure if you can make loads of money (profit rather than revenue) doing mundane things. If your moat isn't something like novelty or patents or concentrated unique expertise then you should be just scraping by in an ideal scenario. You might say they have trust or brand recognition or whatever, but that shouldn't prevent new entrants in a market where the products aren't developing quickly and you can undercut them by taking a smaller margin.
This is an interesting observation! It seems like the "deep modules" heuristic has validity under it, but Darmani is looking for a more universal, rock-bottom way to define the principle(s) and their boundaries.

Darmani, is it fair to say that each interface should pay us back for the trouble of defining it—and the more payback the better? And given that, accounting for the ROI is either very complex work, or just intuitive gut instinct—as you point out in the Chicken nuggets example?

On the one hand, this is the stuff of religious wars. On the other hand, I see value in having a mental model that at least prompts our intuition to ask the questions: What is this costing? And how much value is it adding? And how does that compare to some completely different way of designing this system?

E.g., for users of certain systems, the cost of a GC may be roughly 0 as measured by intuition. I'm thinking of a system where the performance impact is in the "I don't care" zone, and no one is giving a single thought to optimizing memory management. For other users in other contexts, the rest of the interface of the GC becomes relevant and incurs so much cost that the system would be simpler overall without garbage collection.

Many other systems sit somewhere in between, where a few hot loops or a few production issues require lots of pain and deep understanding of GC behavior, but 99% of users' work can be blissfully ignorant about that.

And in many of these contexts, well-informed intuition might be the best available measurement tool for assessing costs and benefits.
In the US especially post WW2 we implemented a zoning system which mostly groups the same type of building (residential, commercial, industrial) together.

In a place with residential zoning you can't just build a pub without getting an exception to that zoning approved.

So many Americans living in residential suburban houses have to get in their car and drive 5-20 minutes to get to some sort of commercial center, strip mall, shopping area, etc. that has stores, bars, and restaurants.

There is starting to be a major pushback on this as people realize that having nice towns (not even necessarily cities) with dense mixed-use centers of walkable apartments, townhouses, shops, restaurants, bars, etc. is actually both pleasant and good for business. In the strict separate-zoning model you tend to get more chain establishments and fewer interesting local options because things are spread out and there isn't enough foot traffic in any given place to win over new business.
That's certainly true, but I think it's also true that you have more contextual information about the trustworthiness of what you're reading when you pick up a book, magazine, or load a website.

As a simple example, LLMs will happily incorporate "facts" learned from marketing material into it's knowledgebase and then regurgitate it as part of a summary on the topic.
The "ideally profitable" part you're looking for are called "private prisons", and they come with a host of side effects that are nothing short of horrific. When a corporation becomes incentivized to strip people of their freedom (regardless of whether they do it correctly or incorrectly), bad outcomes occur.
So that's what I remember hearing this years ago: those silky looking teabags diffuse microplastics. Easy to avoid those.
I used to work at Lexmark in the same lab as the son of Neil Muyskens, who founded Unicomp.
Wow - this is great, thank you
I think these are just really common hallucinations that can be caused by a lot of things. I've had them when nearing heat stroke, but also from various substances. I write it off as brain doing what brain does best; over active pattern matching due to stress or the like. Hearing music in white noise, "whispers in the walls" etc. Very different from actually hearing personified voices.
I just read last year's predictions and won't read them this year.
Using the real world- as in vision, 3d orientation, physical sensors and building training regimes that augment the language models to be multidimensional and check that perception, that is the next step.

And there is very little shortage of data and experience in the actual world, as opposed to just the text internet. Can the current AI companies pivot to that? Or do you need to be worldlabs, or v2 of worldlabs?
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42490850
> record a real telephone in the US and accurately capture the feeling of a long-distance call

Aside from the signalling, it would be tricky to mimic the tinny hollow sound that came on a long-distance analog connection. Sideband modulation used to reduce the bandwidth, which requires an accurate local oscillator to reconstruct, lest the voice acquire a hint of Donald Duck. Hundreds of channels each separated by a few hundred Hz of gap, all slightly bleeding into each other, the warble of modems and murmur of other speakers making noise that's not exactly white noise in the background, a propagation delay of tens of milliseconds producing an audible electronic echo/ringing, etc. Lots of people at the time would have been familiar with that sound, and it would have been hard to fake.
other big overlooked area — paper cups are covered inside with hydrophobic film that is made of plastic, and given extra hot water makes plasticisers get off substance, chances are all those paper cups are releasing lots of microplastics into hot water. ask for mugs folks.
> For whatever reason (maybe post 2to3 PTSD), Python community seems not extremely eager to jump on latest versions of Python

I suspect this is a mix of Python 3 being “good enough” for most cases and companies not updating their stacks that often. I think most of us came into Python professionally around 2.7 so the need to keep updating our version hasn’t been heavily ingrained into our thinking.
I think you would be shocked at how effective stupid techniques like this, and other marketing strategies, actually are.
- Large release from Boston Dynamics

- Meta releases serious enterprise self-hosting Llama platform

- Apple Intelligence remains useless

- Trump begins to show serious signs of mental decline. Not tired like Biden, but overly paranoid and delusional like Putin.

- GPT-5 is almost the same as GPT-4, but it doesn't have a recognizable tone
Trickle down economics isn't something you either "believe in" or "don't believe in". It's a disproven theory that does not work.
this is from the same journal with the black plastic cooking utensils that has been remove from a major index. https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/12/journal-that-publishe...
> If I had to place a bet on whether the files on my desktop will outlive the files on my Google Drive, I wouldn't take it.

I have files on my desktop which have lived on it (and its predecessors) for longer than Google Drive existed. Some might be older than Google itself. That's probably not an uncommon case. You say "you changed computers and the data is gone", but it's far too easy to copy your documents folder (or equivalent) from one computer to the next, either directly or through an intermediate burned CD or external disk (which ends up also becoming an informal backup of that old data).

Meanwhile, I have already lost access to at least one Google account (the one which was originally my Orkut account); if I had any files on it (instead of just using it to log into Orkut), I would have lost them.
"that works"..... while not linking to something using the protocol, just linking to a tech spec.
At least in zsh, you can do `exec > >(spacer)` but it seems to break the tty by stripping control characters from input.
> This is why LLM AI generated slop degrades blogs into slop delivery services. =3

Not sure what LLMs and AI have to do with any of this.
There are many ways to decide to not read this writer, and they're all good!
First time I heard of _why - interesting dev story. Thanks!
Ironically, if it plays out this way, it will be the biggest boon to actual AGI development there could be -- the intelligence via text tokenization will be a limiting factor otherwise, imo.
LLMs are pretty good at attacking the "you don't know what you don't know" problem on a given topic.
C++ is an absolute blast
People are working -very- seriously on trying to kill hallucinations. I'm not sure how you surmised the use case here, as nothing was given other than an example of a hallucination.
Welcome to the digital archive of the Timbuktu Manuscripts
PARC isn’t part of Xerox any more. https://www.news.xerox.com/news/xerox-announces-donation-of-...
Even if you do go to the builder, what are they going to tell you other than “yup. Lock got busted: here, here, and here, you should probably call the <people who investigate break ins for a living>”?

I feel like the notification already does exactly that, no? “Hey, your phone looks busted, go call the <people who investigate sophisticated cyber surveillance targeting for a living>.”

And from the angle of “yeah you guys installed the locks wrong and they just opened the door, you should fix that”- does anyone reject the idea that the vuln would get reported to Apple, and that they’d be on it like crazy?
> My home in Texas had an IP address which a lot of databases had as supposedly being in Montreal.

J'ai dû apprendre le français parce que les bases de données géo-IP sont des déchets.

So many sites defaulted to French due to shit geo-ip databases. So many account lockouts because of fears credentials got hijacked due to shit geo-ip databases. So many "sorry this isn't available in your country" messages because of shit geo-ip databases. So many stores defaulting to Canadian dollars because of shit geo-ip databases.

They're so annoying to be on the receiving end.
I'm not a chemist, but skimming the paper it certainly sounds like the cellulose itself is what they are measuring:

> Following, ATR-FTIR analysis was performed in the teabags as well as in the leached mixture of nanoparticles plus fibers (Fig. 3). Both teabags and the leachate suspension matched their polymer composition being two of them petroleum-based polymers like nylon-6 (NY6, sample 1) and polypropylene (PP, sample 2), the third one (from the supermarket) being cellulose (CL, sample 3), a bio-based polymer.

I didn't see any mention of plastic binders or other material in the cellulose sample, just references to cellulose.

On the other hand, it was curious that they purchased the synthetic bags empty, but cellulose bags filled with tea, when it is pretty easy to find empty paper tea bags, so maybe there is something particular about the specific type of cellulose tea bag they chose?
Unironically, youtube is a great place to find actual experts on a given subject.
Oh my. I hadn’t thought about the adhesives. And just at a gander at the study’s figures, their various microplastic signals from the cellulose bag are hard to distinguish from the pure nylon and polypropylene ones. That’s a sobering thought…
I don't have a great way to think about the distinction between computation and communication. It seems to me that the "bits/s" measure they're using doesn't even have the right units? That said, information seems fundamental and almost physical, whereas something like "FLOPS" feels tied to a general class of implementations.

Maybe you can imagine that some part of your mind really doesn't need a very high bitrate description of the world. For example, we read novels and play text-based adventure games, and that's sufficient to conjure a rich inner world. And at what rate do we read? Probably not more than a few bits/s, I would guess? Let's see... Google's AI says

> The entropy rate of English is between 0.6 and 1.3 bits per character.

Let's just say 1 bit per character for round numbers.

It also says,

> A typical novel page usually contains around 3,000 characters

so, 3 kbits/page. Divide by 10 bits/s, and you get 300 seconds/page = 5 minutes/page.

This seems too long to me. I think we read faster than that.

And that's ignoring that "a picture is worth a thousand words".

So, if there is a single information bottleneck into the "conscious mind", my guess is that it has a higher bitrate than the quoted 10 bits/s.
Nothing builds a better strawman than a foundation started with "So".
The directly translated ruby version (from stack overflow of course) is even shorter:

def fib(n, cache=Hash.new{ |h,k| h[k] = k < 2 ? k : h[k-1] + h[k-2] })
cache[n]
end

It runs out of stack around 7146 on my machine at least. The python one is limited by the recursion depth limit in my test but of course that's configurable at your own risk.
Haha, thanks! Yes, sometimes I do it too, but for this spacing thing I kept hitting enter and never realized this was an actual problem that I could do something about!

Also, I have to say, getting a 3D printer has definitely done this for things around the house. Every small niggle that used to fly under the radar and tolerated now has a tiny plastic thing fixing it once and for all.
It's just woolly. Don't philosophers talk about causal models and mental states and simulations and China brains and aspects of externalism instead of just saying "I think AI researchers are wrong, I think it's like this instead"?
Your reply is rather long so I'll only respond to 2 sections to avoid us speculating randomly without actually referring to data or running actual experiments.

To clarify:

> That's why I find the prospect of making posting expensive threatening to society's capacity for beneficial change.

I suggested making it cost something. "Expensive" is a relative term and for some reason you unjustifiably assumed that I'm proposing "expensive", however defined. Incentive design is about the marginal cost of using a resource, as you later observed when you suggested $5.

We often observe in real life (swimming pools, clubs, public toilets, hiking trails, camping grounds) that introducing a trivial marginal cost often deters bad actors and free-loaders[^0]. It's what's referred to in ideas such as "the tragedy of the commons".

> An approach that might help is something like this: Require companies to charge a very small set amount to make each individual post

Yes that's a marginal cost, which is what I suggested. So basically, we agree. The rest is implementation details that will depend on jurisdiction, companies, platforms and so forth.

> I don't think that adding a cost to the posts will end up paying for mental healthcare without careful regulation.

Without data or case studies to reference, I can't speculate about that and other things that are your opinions but thank you for thinking about the proposal and responding.

> Where are all the foundations helping provide moderator mental health treatment? This is a pretty widely reported issue; I'd expect to see wealthy benefactors trying to solve it, yet the problem remains unsolved.

I don't mean to sound rude but have you tried to solve the problem and start a foundation? Why is it some mysterious wealthy benefactor or other people who should solve it rather than you who cares about the problem? Why do you expect to see others and not yourself, solving it?

Raising funds from wealthy people for causes is much easier than people imagine.

---

[^0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem
A jukebox in your head! Great unless it malfunctions (e.g., gets stuck on one song like "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer...", a friend's musical nemesis):

https://www.yahoo.com/news/grandma-got-run-over-reindeer-130...

Truth is, there's almost always some music playing in my brain.
It is more accurate to say they are thinking in terms of “brand safety” or liability, that is, being safe from being blamed for making a mean robot.
I like to think it's more than a nit to pick, but does anyone else absolutely despise the way the sql is written in the example? Join table1, table2, table3, table4... then the "on" logic in the where clause, without explicitly defining which columns belong to which table? Completely unsupportable and wastes so much time years from now. Please don't write sql like that, everyone.
Consider the liabilities, expectations, and political issues if Apple was doing such support work in-house. For the last - Apple has large, profitable operations in a fair number of the countries which might be targeting certain dissidents and journalists. Mr. Cook does not want any "you are aiding our worst enemies..." pushback when he is negotiating with the governments of those places.
A worked example of copy-and-patch compilation
I think my point was:

> Pacman would install the system-wide stuff

Most system-wide stuff is userspace. I was more referring to a divide between the OS-core (kernel, drivers, init scripts) and userspace. Upgrading userspace should not incidentally not allow the system to boot.
I believe parent comment was referring to tools to bypass paywalls when they referred to the "normal tricks", like archive.org, archive.is, 12ft.io, manually setting a googlebot or other search engine indexer UA, clearing cookies, modifying the HTML of the page locally to remove hidden attributes or scroll locks, etc
I hear the argument that we need "harsher punishment" pretty much every time any kind of social problem gets discussed in media.

I don't think that the US lacks harsh punishment at all - compared to peer countries, prison conditions are terrible, the incarcerated population is massive, etc.

What I do agree with is that enforcement feels ineffective. Every time a criminal commits an offence, they are spinning a roulette wheel and hoping it doesn't land on "go to prison". Making sentences longer and conditions worse doesn't change the odds that a particular criminal will end up punished, it just means the downside is worse (and increases prison populations). Even when a criminal is caught, they're often bailed and able to abscond. The question should be how to increase the effectiveness of enforcement whilst preserving rights and protections against wrongful punishment.

The other side of the equation is looking at the carrot, not just the stick. If life sucks and people turn to criminality because they feel like they don't live in a society that gives a damn, you have to improve society so people have something to live for.

I think a lot of this weirdly needs to be "vibes based policy" as it were. People need to believe that justice will be done in order to feel secure, and to feel that if they were to commit a crime that they wouldn't get away with it. Objective reality doesn't control behaviour, peoples' beliefs do.
Just make sure the mugs weren't washed with Jet Dry...

Avoiding toxic and questionable substances really does get exhausting after awhile. It's everywhere. I'm able to draw a reasonable line (for me) without getting too nuts about it. Hoping AI ends up helping with this.
SQLite only knows nested loop joins and the bloom filter can just tell us "no need to do a join, there is definitely no matching entry".

If it has a false positive all the time (the worst case) then the performance is the same as before the bloom filter optimization was implemented (besides the small bloom filter overhead).

As the bloom filter size in SQLite directly depends on the table size I estimated a false positive rate of 63.2% due to this bug, while it could have been just 11.75%.
Not really... What I see in practice is that Python's shortfalls are being covered by throwing more hardware at it. (Beside of the more efficient, but also more complex: rewriting in C).

There are all kinds of micro-optimizations, as in: one has to know which Pandas operations are going to be more expensive than others, and organize the code accordingly, but these things often teach programmers the wrong ideas. It's not uncommon in Python world that a superior solution (from algorithmic perspective, i.e. the one that should use less time or space) is in practice inferior to a solution that's implemented in C. And so, writing more efficient Python code comes down to knowing which functions are faster or cheaper in some other way, but it doesn't generalize and doesn't transfer to other languages.

What usually happens in situation like this is that the developers of the language (or a product, a framework etc. that suffers a similar fate) start optimizing the bad solutions (because they are the go-to tool for their users) instead of actually improving the language (the product, the framework etc.) To give some examples of this happening in Python: there's a lot of work dedicated to the performance of lists and dicts. But, if anyone really wanted performance, they'd have to look for more specialized collections, rather than optimizing very generic ones.
Again, you seem to be conflating YouTube’s DMCA process (which is designed to optimize the experience for YouTube, not to maximize the rights of YouTubers) with what the law actually specifies. The filer must provide contact information (paragraph iv), which can be used to serve process.

> (i) the signature of the copyright owner or an authorized agent;

> (ii) identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple works are on a single site, a representative list of such works;

> (iii) identification of the infringing material or activity (or the reference or link to such material) and information reasonably sufficient to permit the OSP to locate the material (or the reference or link);

> (iv) contact information for the copyright owner or authorized agent;

> (v) a statement that the person sending the notice has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; and

> (vi) a statement that the information in the notice is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the person sending the notice is authorized to act on behalf of the copyright owner .

I agree the system is intentionally asymmetric, because it was built by people who understand how quickly material proliferates once it’s been posted to the Internet. That makes it abusable to chill speech, as in this case. But the law was also written with an expectation that anonymity does not guarantee full participation in civil society.
Why corporations? They need to be state-run, of course, with all employees being public servants directly. And prisoners need to make government money by building roads, houses, etc.
Most of them can never be released anyway, too dangerous when young and too sick/needing too much in the way of medical expenses, when old.
Politicians do come in different flavours. There are some elected officials with good intentions. See again the AOC/Pelosi rift.

The more we regulate to get money out of politics, the more good people will have a shot at being elected.

These are all common progressive values. No true progressive supports wealthy unethical politicians gaining more power. Anyone telling you so is not speaking in good faith, or they are misinformed.