skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A video from Reason magazine a few days ago[0] mentioned a deal between the Libertarian Party leadership and Trump in which they selectively didn't run their candidate in several states in order to help Trump. If this is true, Trump could have reneged, but evidently decided whatever political blowback for pardoning Ulbricht (which is probably small potatoes at this rate) wasn't worth the credibility cost.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhDKYYdD2vY
Clink-X xCraft is a mini PC with a modular, customizable design
if only sadly the AGI would be x times crueler than our barons
when did the government EVER go
for anything taking cost into consideration? :)
It’s also just good politics. There are a vocal group of voters that are in favor of this, so it gets those people on his side. And no reason not to (politically), as most people just don’t care about this topic, or if they do and disagree with the decision, this isn’t going to be the action that moves the needle for them on how they feel about Trump or the Republican Party.
Doesn't part of the reason for the decline have to do with how people are waiting to get married and prioritizing schooling and career? Free daycare allows you to pursue a path that sets you up for the years after the kids go off to school. But I see no reason people who have kids who don't use daycare shouldn't get that credit too.
iMessage-inspired website to chat with famous tech people
I love go-releaser.
I believe it is a great choice for Go-based projects.
I use it for multiple side-projects of mine (that are written in Go).
A person who was laid off said it was supposed to be Wednesday but HR flubbed the e-mail timing. Presumably once the e-mail went out, they were like “well, guess we might as well make it effective now instead of in 2 days…”
I worked with IBM at one time, who were convinced that they could build a real time workload arbitrage system, whereby loads could instantly move from one cloud to another based on spot price rates offered by cloud providers. Nice idea that quickly ran into the reality of platform stickiness (and sweet reserved-instance pricing).
I don't really understand what it is about. The general idea is be less distracting, but that's pretty vague, a lot of things are not distracting, in fact most things aren't, we just don't notice and that's the point.

The criteria seem to be "attention, periphery, durability, light, sound, and materials". Very broad. It looks like it even addresses openness and repairability with "an instruction booklet with a list of replacements and compatible parts", something I really care about, but how does it relate to calm?

Maybe it will be clearer when the certification document is out.
This reminds me of the antics of streamer DougDoug, who often uses LLM APIs to live-summarize, analyze, or interact with his (often multi-thousand-strong) Twitch chat. Most recently I saw him do a GeoGuessr stream where he had ChatGPT assume the role of a detective who must comb through the thousands of chat messages for clues about where the chat thinks the location is, then synthesizes the clamor into a final guess. Aside from constantly being trolled by people spamming nothing but "Kyoto, Japan" in chat, it occasionaly demonstrated a pretty effective incarnation of "the wisdom of the crowd" and was strikingly accurate at times.
The context for this thread is about keeping persons on even when they are either no longer adding value, or even potentially detracting. In Ive's case, he absolutely created many successful aspects of Apples design language. But, he also put an over emphasis on minimalist design over function. The butterfly keyboards are one example. Was the removal of the ESC key something that happened on his design watch? The reduction of ports on their highest end pro models? Those are design decisions that have been undone as Apple realigns with the actual needs of its users rather than trying to dictate how they should use their hardware.
Base-Rate Blindness
> Small or modular reactors in the US are more than 10 years away, probably more like 15-20

Could be 5 to 10 with $20+ bn/year in scale and research spend.

Trump is screwing over his China hawks. The anti-China and pro-nuclear lobbies have significant overlap; this could be how Trump keeps e.g. Peter Thiel from going thermonuclear on him.
Looks like the intention is to force courts and legislative decision on a constitutional matter. I guess most in congress want to keep the babies and the young. The general population is usually emotional and protective about culture and race. Trump had to do it to appease them and make it someone else’s problem
who isn't at least they upfront
if only $500bn was enough to make more powerful and power efficient chips…
That thread has a lot of good observations in it. I was probably wrong in framing the problem as "ergonomics".

> Dr. Michelle (@MichelleSaidel): I think because it takes away control from the child. Play is how children work through emotions, impulses and conflicts and well as try out new behaviors. I would think if would be super irritating to have the toy shape and control your play- like a totally dominating playmate!

> Alex Volkov (Thursd/AI) (@altryne): It did feel dominating! she wanted to make it clothes, and it was like, "meanwhile, here's another thing we can do" lacking context of what she's already doing

> The Short Straw (@short_straw): The real question you should ask yourself is why you felt compelled to turn it back on each time she turned it off.

> Angelo Angelli JD (@AngelliAngelo): Kids are pretty decent bullshit detectors and a lot of AI is bullshit.

> Foxhercules (@Foxena): […] I would like to point out again that the only things I sent this child were articulated 3d prints. beyond being able to move their arms, legs and tails, these things were made out of extruded plastic and are not exactly marvels of engineering. […] My takeaway from this is that, this is what children need. they don't need fancy with tons of bells and whistles with play on any sort of rails. And there's not a thing that AI can do to replace a Child's imagination NOR SHOULD IT.
I think it has its place.
For 'background filler' I think it makes a lot of sense; stuff which you don't need to care about, but whose absence can make something feel less real.

To me, this takes the place / augments procedural generation stuff. NPC crowds in which none of the participants are needed for the plot, but in which you can have unique clothing / appearance / lines is not "needed" for a game, but can flesh it out when done thoughtfully.

Recall the lambasting Cyberpunk 2077 got for its NPCs that cycled through a seemingly very limited number of appearances, to the point that you'd see clones right next to each other. This would solve that sort of problem, for example.
less distracting, less distracting, less distracting than what?, oh ! oh! I know this one
its called lowering the bar, all the way, from where a device or a technology does something that saves you time and effort, to where it costs you time and attention from the things you need to do, but thats ok.
where is a ludite with a big wrench
Some info from a previous thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33045520
Division by zero.
I think you’re being short sighted. Imagine feeding in your favorite TV shows to a generative AI and being able to walk around in the world and talk to characters or explore it with other people.
So far not much beyond this list of targets to identify https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
If we look at the processing requirements in nature, I think that the main trend in AI going forward is going to be doing more with less, not doing less with more, as the current scaling is going.

Thermodynamic neural networks may also basically turn everything on its ear, especially if we figure out how to scale them like NAND flash.

If anything, I would estimate that this is a space-race type effort to “win” the AI “wars”. In the short term, it might work. In the long term, it’s probably going to result in a massive glut in accelerated data center capacity.

The trend of technology is towards doing better than natural processes, not doing it 100000x less efficiently. I don’t think AI will be an exception.

If we look at what is -theoretically- possible using thermodynamic wells, with current model architectures, for instance, we could (theoretically) make a network that applies 1t parameters in something like 1cm2. It would use about 20watts, back of the napkin, and be able to generate a few thousand T/S.

Operational thermodynamic wells have already been demonstrated en silica. There are scaling challenges, cooling requirements, etc but AFAIK no theoretical roadblocks to scaling.

Obviously, the theoretical doesn’t translate to results, but it does correlate strongly with the trend.

So the real question is, what can we build that can only be done if there are hundreds of millions of NVIDIA GPUs sitting around idle in ten years? Or alternatively, if those systems are depreciated and available on secondary markets?

What does that look like?
Among other things this guy was trying to have people murdered.
Yes, but you can perform the essential functions with buttons on the GTN650 or 750 (or xi). Frequency changes, direct to, etc are all still accessible on physical buttons, which makes a big difference in turbulence.
This shift from hands on research to project management is pretty similar in industry from what I have seen. All of our principal applied scientists basically do the same thing. They don't really spend any time actually getting their hands dirty. Maybe other companies are different?
how I wish that was a joke...
They’re a big company. You could tell a story that they’re less efficient than OpenAI and Nvidia and therefore need more than $500b to compete! Who knows?
I already feel like text models are already at sufficiently entertaining and useful quality as you define it. It's definitely possible we never get there for video or 3D modalities, but I think there are strong enough economic incentives such that big tech will dump tens of billions of dollars into achieving it.
Researchers make leap in quantum computing
That was not going where I expected it to go.

Please also account for all the marketing companies on top of the social media game on all platforms kept busy with the AI hype.
It's actually wireless, via 5G as part of the AI designed MRNA vaccine.
I'm not sure that's how capitalism works.
Ulbricht was indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge.

The case was dropped after NY conviction since he was sentencing to life, so there was little point in continuing.

Clearly that was a mistake if a lack of an attempted murder conviction helped him get a pardon.
That’s a great idea, but I feel like it might be hard to get it to be correct enough
Oh but crypto mining was bad lol wheres the power going to come from
Possibly a deal with the Libertarian Party, which chose not to run their candidate in several states to help Trump: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhDKYYdD2vY
So were most aristocrats of the time. Applying presentism doesn't invalidate the idea.
This is exactly while I'm building my app now with the expectation that these assets will be exponentially better in the short term.
Modern monetary systems function through two main channels: government spending and bank lending. Every dollar in circulation originates from one of these sources - either government fiscal operations (deficit spending) or bank credit creation through loans. This means all money is fundamentally based on debt, though "debt" has very different implications for a currency-issuing government versus private borrowers.
Government debt operates fundamentally differently from household debt since the government controls its own currency. As former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan noted to Congress, the U.S. can always meet any obligation denominated in dollars since it can create them. The real constraints aren't financial but economic - inflation risk and the efficient allocation of real resources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU

The key question then becomes one of political priorities and public understanding. If public opposition to beneficial government spending stems from misunderstanding how modern monetary systems work, then better education about these mechanisms could help advance important policy goals. The focus should be on managing real economic constraints rather than imaginary financial ones.
How reliable do you find the calories-burned data from fitness trackers to be? Are there any brands that have higher accuracy than others? Are there any hardware features like pulse monitoring that improve the accuracy?

I find that the raw step count varies up to 66% between my phone and my wrist-worn tracker and I can't close that gap just by making sure my phone is never left behind.
Does trump also support needle exchanges and safe consumption sites?
Wait, you put me through all that so you could do "I wasn't replying on the substance, I said currently!"

Okay lol
In a lot of fields, postdocs are required if you want a shot at a tenure-track position.

For the most part, it’s just another artificial rung the system uses to justify exploiting people.
why signal even have that side channel???

even matrix encode image and other data in the e2e p2p message flow
Easier: Trump likely committed that the federal agencies wouldn't slow roll regulatory approval (for power, for EIS, etc.).

Ellison stated explicitly that this would be "impossible" without Trump.

Masa stated that this (new investment level?) wouldn't be happening had Trump not won, and that the new investment level was decided yesterday.

I know everyone wants to see something nefarious here, but simplest explanation is that the federal government for next four years is expected to be significantly less hostile to private investment, and - shocker - that yields increased private investment.
what are they going to use to sue - DMCA? OpenAI (and others) are scraping everything imaginable (MS is scraping private Github repos…) - don’t think anyone in the current government will be regulating any of this anytime soon
I think HN sunk the battleship game?
Given the source, I'm skeptical it's not just a troll, but found this explanation [0] plausible as to why those vague spam text exists. If true, this trolling helps the spammers warm those phone numbers up.

0 - https://x.com/nikitabier/status/1867029883387580571
> We have accounts from the ancient Greeks of the old-school's attitude towards writing. In the deep past, they maintained an oral tradition, and scholars were expected to memorize everything. They saw writing/reading as a crutch that was ruining the youth's memory.

Not exactly.

We have accounts from figures who became famous by going against popular opinion, who aired those thoughts. It probably was not the mainstream belief, in that place, at that time. Don't try and judge Ancient Greece by Socrates or Plato - they were celebrities of the controversial.
I’d love to see that. Could you simulate iMessage?
The moon program was $318 billion in 2023 dollars, this one is $500 billion. So that's why the tech barons who were present at the inauguration were high as a kite yesterday, they just got the financing for a real moon shot!
when i feel like casually listening to something, instead of netflix/hulu/whatever, i'll run a ~3b model (qwen 2.5 or llama 3.2) and generate and audio stream of water cooler office gossip. (when it is up, it runs here: https://water-cooler.jothflee.com).

some of the situations get pretty wild, for the office :)
This is a great idea, and it looks like you've done a great job! I share your enthusiasm for these printers. I have a Rongta receipt printer sitting on my desk that I like to play with :-)

I have a business usecase for something like this (now that Chrome doesn't allow printing to ESC/POS), and exposing the printer interface as an HTTP API is a clever and great solution! But, sending the data through a third party is a complete no-go for us for reasons of compliance. For this architecture to work for us we would have to host it on our VPN and serve it from our own domain as our customers have a strict whitelist.

As cool an idea as this is, honestly though I don't think this should be a SaaS. Certainly it doesn't fit the typical mold of SaaS where there's nothing to install because it's all delivered through the web. Given you have to install a local Pi or other, you lose all the benefits of SaaS and also incur all the downsides of SaaS. It feels like it was shoehorned into a SaaS because otherwise it would be very hard to monetize. I don't blame you for that because it is indeed a hard problem to figure out how to get paid (in fact I've abandoned good ideas prevously because it was either SaaSify something that shouldn't be a SaaS or else face huge obstacles getting paid), but I wanted to share my thoughts honestly.
I doubt these are permanent jobs. This project will create a ton of temporary work though!
I guess these people are betting small and efficient models are not the future.
Have they built their own ASICs for inference like Google and Microsoft have? Or are they using NVIDIA chips exclusively for inference as well?
I put the word "some" in front of "crypto" for a reason.

There is some crypto that we know how to break with a sufficiently large quantum computer [0]. There is some we don't know how to do that to. I might be behind the state of the art here, but when I wasn't we specifically really only knew how to use it to break cryptography that Shor's algorithm breaks.

[0] https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/
I don’t know if this counts as tiny but I use llama 3B in prod for summarization (kinda).

Its effective context window is pretty small but I have a much more robust statistical model that handles thematic extraction. The llm is essentially just rewriting ~5-10 sentences into a single paragraph.

I’ve found the less you need the language model to actually do, the less the size/quality of the model actually matters.
I am active in libertarian circles and Ulbricht was a cause celebre. The 2024 election was a game of inches, and many libertarians I know voted Trump purely on this issue. It is possible this was a key way Trump eked out a victory.
That doesn't quite work. Trump lost on January 6th - the vote went against him.

I think the Rubicon was more this election. Caesar was in a position where, if he didn't bring his army to Rome, his political enemies were going to destroy him. Trump was in a position where, if he didn't win the election, his political enemies (and the legal cases arising from his various unusual activities) were going to destroy him.

But I wonder if that's really where we are. I wonder if we're not more at the time of Marius and Sulla, and the real Caesar is still 40 years away.
I would find this easier to celebrate if it was a commutation and not a pardon, or if it was a pardon that went hand in hand with a change in the laws he broke.
Hiring a hitman is legal now.
Platform economics "works" in theory only upto a point. Its super inefficient if you zoom out and look not at system level but ecosystem level. It hasn't lasted long enough to hit failure cases. Just wait a few years.

As to openai, given deepseek and the fact lot of use cases dont even need real time inference its not obvious this story will end well.
The judge factored it into the sentencing, though. He likely did actually try to hire a contract killer - twice. In both cases he sincerely believed the murders were successfully committed, and he sent a lot of money to the assassins after being sent (doctored) "proof" of their killings.

I think it's fair to say judges shouldn't factor non-charged allegations into sentencing, but I think he's at least morally culpable, here, and should at the very least be expected to now show public contrition for repeatedly trying to murder people drug kingpin-style.

I doubt he will ever admit it, but now that he's free I still would like it. I don't care about people enabling drug sales but I do care about people with a God complex who feel entitled to end the lives of those they oppose (in one case because he thought someone stole from him, and another because he thought they would dox him).
That's already a thing, it's a just a normal courier service.
generally you are somewhat right, but it's complicated by country. for example it would be less surprising that a UK-style 3 year PhD might want a couple more years training after.
They will have an endless wave of commoditization chasing behind them. NVIDIA will continue to market chips to anyone who will buy... Well anyone who is allowed to buy, considering the recent export restrictions. On that note, if OpenAI is in bed with the US government with this to some degree, I would expect tariffs, expert restrictions, and all of that to continue to conveniently align with their business objectives.

If the frontier models generate huge revenue from big government and intelligence and corporate contracts, then I can see a dynamo kicking off with the business model. The missing link is probably that there need to be continual breakthroughs that massively increase the power of AI rather than it tapering off with diminishing returns for bigger training/inference capital outlay. Obviously, openAI is leveraging against that view as well.

Maybe the most important part is that all of these huge names are involved in the project to some degree. Well, they're all cross-linked in the entire AI enterprise, really, like OpenAI Microsoft, so once all the players give preference to each other, it sort of creates a moat in and of itself, unless foreign sovereign wealth funds start spinning up massive stargate initiatives as well.

We'll see. Europe has been behind the ball in tech developments like this historically, and China, although this might be a bit of a stretch to claim, does seem to be held back by their need for control and censorship when it comes to what these models can do. They want them to be focused tools that help society, but the American companies want much more, and they want power in their own hands and power in their user's hands. So much like the first round where American big tech took over the world, maybe it's prime to happen again as the AI industry continues to scale.
What do you think the Greenland and Canada thing is all about?

Sort things out with Venezuela and this issue resolves itself (for a little while, at least).
All well and good, but how well will it work if the pattern continues that the best open models are less than a year behind what OpenAI is doing?

How long can they maintain their position at the top without the insane cashflow?
so we all individually can just decide a law is unjust? that'll be fun
Apologies from me also, for misreading your comment and getting a bit defensive!

I don't think locking comments out of threads would be in keeping with HN's mandate. We try to optimize for intellectual curiosity [1]. Preventing users from commenting, and reading each other's comments, would go against that.

I also feel like it would be a shallow technical trick to avoid facing the deeper issue of us all learning how to be with each other, including with others who come from different backgrounds and have different views [2]. I'd rather face the hard problem squarely and see what we can do about it together—even though this brings many cases that suck and feel awful.

Also, I don't think the community would like it. HN users would probably just keep posting until they got a thread where they could comment. I try not to fight the community in that way. Having made the mistake of doing so in the past, I can tell you that (1) you can't win, and (2) it is painful!

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 is a longer post about that if anyone wants more