skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can imagine that hopping between these places might be fun for someone in their early 20s who is unattached and can focus all of their time on the grind. Live cheap, build stuff, have more of an impact than you would at a faang or m7 or whatever we’re calling them now. Maybe you make it big, or maybe you just build a network and get good experience, but not a terrible outcome either way. But yeah, once family and life outside of work need time and comp, no thanks.
You give them shares like every employee has. Employee-owned just means that you need most of the company to agree with it. As long as there is a fair playground where your on boarding investor doesn’t end up eating all the shares then it could work. Ideally your investor would come on as an employee validating their stake instead of an outside pressure.
As a programmer (not a designer) I like tailwind bc I can keep my styles and markup in the same file.

It’s a nice workflow.

Idk what the “tailwind look” is. Tailwind is basically a bunch of css classes with a single rule per.

I bet lots of startups are just using shadcn or something like it, which are bootstrap type big design frameworks
Tl;dr people, especially kids, who are supported in chasing their curiosity will learn things
> I recently told the CEO of a recruiting agency about this compensation model. She told me that if you even mention crypto, more than half your engineering candidates will immediately say “no” to your company.

For good reason. Also, their 'sister article' about the details of the token are a private google doc. Quite promising.
Taiwan renders pretty good for me: https://topography.jessekv.com/?lat=23.9339&lng=121.0158&mod...

Do you consider open-sourcing the code behind it?
> This is not public domain.

MIT, ISC licenses etc offer minimum anti-liabiliy CYA here and are what I typically use. They are a hack to get around the fact you cannot actually public domain code without legal risk.

> So... you benefit from copyright laws.

I sometimes exploit laws that I feel should not exist at all specifically to target corporations who abuse them the most. In my preferred world where copyright and patents did not exist, I would not need to play such games.
No, ample evidence shows that vitamin D (or vitamin D deficiency at least) is causally related to multiple diseases. The evidence is pretty overwhelming. Eg here's a just published review on D deficiency causality for Covid based on applying Hill's Criteria for causality https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/17/3/599 and a prior 2022 paper on the same subject https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35308241/

Some vitamin D skeptics claim tat there's insufficient evidence from RCTs but few people question the causality of smoking's influence on cancer despite no RCTs for that---that relationship was established also via Hill's Criteria.
This is a glib, but important insight. If the split between founders and early employees is fundamentally off, then we should see many more early employee types start companies and take the other side of that bargain. In fact, they do not!
What has your experience been like? What are the drawbacks besides the cost and proprietary nature?
The surnames with the suffix -enko are the most known and common Ukrainian surnames. Where "en" is roughly son-of or a child-of equivalent in English, and the "ko" means a smaller, baby version. For example Kovalenko where "Koval" means blacksmith, Petrenko where Petre or Petro if from a biblical name Peter.
Except captcha is not supposed to be security for the user, but security for the website.

But in the end it is not (effective) security for a website, is an antifeature for users and is profit for google.
No one is doing that. Reality is employees want the upside without the downside risk.
> Much of the community wants to talk about this ongoing story as evidenced by the upvotes and comments.

Indeed, which is why they are talking about it more than any other topic right now (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43003292 for a partial list). I realize that you and many others feel it's not enough, but this is always the case with every Major Ongoing Topic (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

If HN didn't have user flags and moderators, these stories (not just the current topic but the current affairs of any moment) would dominate the site completely and HN would cease to be HN.

> Sometimes you need a pressure release valve in the system.

I agree! Perhaps we're only disagreeing about the diameter of the valve.

> I'm not sure this specific post would have been received as enthusiastically if other similar stories were able to get through

Yes in the sense that, with some exceptions, the selection of particular articles isn't the high-order bit. The high bit is discussion of the MOT that they're in the orbit of.

> you almost certainly wouldn't have to answer so many questions about your own role in moderating this site

That's definitely wrong. However many users are upset about flags on this MOT, thousands more would be clamoring if they felt like HN was being taken over by it (or politics in general). The bulk of the community here is pretty zealous about preserving HN for its intended purpose.

Basically what I do is try to minimize community pushback by opening "valves" enough to satisfy (well, never to satisfy but at least to reduce the pain) one constituency, but not so much that it causes greater pushback from a different consitutency. The hope is to find a saddle point where we can temporarily hang for a while.

It's hard for people with strong passions on any $Topic to relate to this because they are the most vocal and think they are the community. So they are—but others are too. Users have the luxury of seeing themselves and their viewmates (if I can put it that way) as the community, and others as NPCs or Neanderthals. I don't have that luxury because I've learned the hard way what happens when we neglect the bulk of the community in favor of any vocal contingent—a horrible experience I hope to never have again.

I hope that doesn't sound dismissive—I've enjoyed this conversation!
Personal Software: The Unbundling of the Programmer
Awesome-LLM-Judges
No, it's not 9.7% more claims, it's spending 9.7% more on claims.

And that means very little without an understanding of the total cost of claims denied. How many claims would still be denied?

Do denied claims even follow the same cost distribution of allowed claims? Maybe I'm wrong, but I imagine very expensive claims are denied more commonly than very inexpensive claims.

I think it's pretty clear that even if that extra 9.7% was paid out, there would still be a huge list of denied claims, and the psychos that celebrate Mangione would still be calling for murdering people in the healthcare industry, if they're basing their calls for murder on the fact that claims get denied commonly.

The US healthcare system is fundamentally broken by absurd costs all around. It is not really broken because a tiny fraction of workers make large bonuses. That doesn't help, but it is not the root of the issue in the slightest.
Even Wikipedia is a problem though. There are so many pages now that self-reference is almost impossible to detect. Meaning, the citation of a statement made on Wikipedia that uses an outside article for reference, which is an article that was originally written using that very Wikipedia article as its own citation.

It's all about trust. Trust the expert, or the crowd, or the machine.

They're all able to be gamed.
It was in Canada although I don't imagine that has any bearing on the situation. It was also at a Catholic private school that shared the property with the church. I literally walked like 20 meters from the school building across the parking lot to the church and it typically only took 1 hour or so. In my own memory, people would get out of school for all manner of reasons, from sports to even family vacations, for entire days with no one batting an eye. I find it hard to imagine any school system so strict that a kid couldn't get dispensation for 1 hour of extracurricular activities during the school day.
For more extensive discussion see my X thread here: https://x.com/KarlPfleger/status/1888649974621347950
I don't remember if I did any special config in iTerm or installed a nonstandard package (I don't believe I did), but in Mac I often find it easier to just pipe a result I want copied into the `pbcopy` command in order to capture it in the clipboard, rather than trying to highlight what may be a long output.
Another option when you do want to compare computers, or if you suspect the OS is the problem, is to boot a live cd/usb of some Linux distro and do some benchmarking or stress testing there.

Just did it last Saturday in fact.
iOS 18.3.1 patches USB Restricted Mode disabling exploit
The implication being most overweight people are lazy and impulsive. This is totally broken, there are factors that make some people more inclined to put in weight and what these drugs demonstrate is that our environment of unlimited and manufactured food breaks the normal mechanisms keeping people in a healthy weight. These drugs aren't a magic bullet, what you're able to do on them is exercise the control that many people who don't struggle with their weight can do every day.
I think what you said is the same as what your comment said? "Requires no non-trivial thought besides recall" seems remarkably similar to "once you have recalled an item, checking that it fits the constraints is trivial"

Or are you pointing to a nuanced difference between "easy" and "trivial" that I'm not understanding? Or do you think it requires non-trivial thought before the recall step?
Or you could have "fixed" the comment.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/first-na...

the name that was given to you when you were born and that comes before your family name
I agree. I don’t live in Atlanta anymore and I now work remotely. But these numbers jibe from what I saw when I worked there as far as what the well known Atlanta based companies were paying. Companies like Delta, Coke, Home Depot, GE (GE Transportation), etc

https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/senior-softwa...

https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/Software-Engineer-V-Sa...

It’s also around the same range I’ve seen from other major cities that aren’t on the west coast.

Before anyone replies, yes I’m well aware of what BigTech and adjacent pays and I did a stint in BigTech.

While I pivoted to cloud consulting specializing in app dev in 2020 and that help me get to the tip top end of “enterprise dev”, I could have lived comfortably in Atlanta off of that income
Seems you’re not well versed in basic English.

If I can reason it doesn’t mean I’m always reasoning or constantly reasoning or if I know how to do reasoning for every prompt. It just means it’s possible. How narrow or how wide that possibility is, is orthogonal to the claim itself. Please employ logic here.

Ok math guy. Imagine I said numbers can be divided. The claim is true even though there is a number that can’t be divided. Zero.
Because you won't find anyone competent to take on the terrible shit-shoveling gig that is being the CEO for an equal share in the business.
> Why does no one run a completely employee owned tech company. What is the disincentive for modeling your company as employee-owned and operated. It seems that would be the best path to an efficient company and a focused company that’s not angled to be taken over by outside aggressive for profit interest and dismantling.

It is very tough to pull off an employee-owned company over the long term.

1. How do you handle it when someone leaves? How do you handle a new employee when they come in? There are many ways to do it, but I don’t think I’ve seen an implementable way that keeps incentives aligned.

2. What happens when the company is extremely successful? In many examples I have seen, the employee-owners give themselves substantial raises and/or distributions, become way better off than they ever expected, then they aren’t really motivated to do the hard things that make a business work over the long run.

Source: A friend of the family who buys up employee-owned SMBs, gets them back on track, and then sells them.

Note that often times the “employee buyout” is a founder/owner who can’t sell at a price that they like, so they basically sell it to less sophisticated buyers (their employees).
Thanks, that is very informative!

I have heard about the tokenization process before when I tried stable diffusion, but honestly I can't understand it. It sounds important but it also sounds like a very superficial layer whose only purpose is to remove ambiguity, the important work being done by the next layer in the process.

I believe part of the problem I have when discussing "AI" is that it's just not clear to me what "AI" is. There is a thing called "LLM," but when we talk about LLMs, are we talking about the concept in general or merely specific applications of the concept?

For example, in SEO often you hear the term "search engines" being used as a generic descriptor, but in practice we all know it's only about Google and nobody cares about Bing or the rest of the search engines nobody uses. Maybe they care a bit about AIs that are trying to replace traditional search engines like Perplexity, but that's about it. Similarly, if you talk about CMS's, chances are you are talking about Wordpress.

Am I right to assume that when people say "LLM" they really mean just ChatGPT/Copilot, Bard/Gemini, and now DeepSeek?

Are all these chatbots just locally run versions of ChatGPT, or they're just paying for ChatGPT as a service? It's hard to imagine everyone is just rolling their own "LLM" so I guess most jobs related to this field are merely about integrating with existing models rather than developing your own from scratch?

I had a feeling ChatGPT's "chat" would work like a text predictor as you said, but what I really wish I knew is whether you can say that about ALL LLMs. Because if that's true, then
I don't think they are reasoning about anything. If, however, there was a way to make use of the LLM technology to tokenize formal logic, then that would be a different story. But if there is no attempt at this, then it's not the LLM doing the reasoning, it's humans who wrote the text that the LLM was trained on that did the reasoning, and the LLM is just parroting them without understanding what reasoning even is.

By the way, I find it interesting that "chat" is probably one of the most problematic applications the LLMs can have. Like if ChatGPT asked "what do you want me to autocomplete" instead of "how can I help you today" people would type "the mona lisa is" instead of "what is the mona lisa?" for example.
No I’m not asking that.

Your insinuation is that a startup that can barely support 1 employee would need 10 employees day 1 instead of growing as it goes. VC money isn’t the only way to expand your business. If you’re not racing to market then there’s really no need to be successful 10+ employee company on day 1.
Your view was completely my view until 7 years at Google.

When I joined, I was shocked how high the turnover was. And not anecdotally! there were stats you could slice and dice every which way, and...it was shocking.

How!? This was paradise.

After clearing enough years, and getting enough advice from people at 50+ who stayed at BigCo, once you got a pile o' money, it looks more like:

$170K/yr + $30K bonus + $100K/yr RSUs at Google - $150K/yr existential dread.

vs. startup:

$150K/yr + $15K bonus + $2.5K/yr (1% chance of $250K/year)

Increasing the money pile becomes not worth it once you've stacked Google RSUs, and the choking existential dread of what goes on inside BigCo is worth the pay difference.

I know that sounds nuts. Hell, when I was doing my big "Where do I go now that I've sold my startup?" interview rounds, I also interviewed for positions with a couple ex-Googlers who told me it'd be awful to join there.

I thought a lot about it and decided they were wrong, they didn't understand how little savings I had.

And they were wrong: it was totally worth building the money pile so I could move on like they did, to more productive areas where there's room to grow.

aside: I'm not sure anyone would get $220K/year base then only get $100K/year base. I usually see roughly the same base, frankly, its usually a bit higher than Google's.

another aside: stereotypes are stereotypes, from what you characterize startups vs. BigCo as, I think you'd be very surprised how many Googlers feel about workload
You can see a table of the deficits per year here [1], which should answer your question.

[1] - https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-deficit-by-year-3306306
No one is going to make a loan for such high risk to get a 5% return.
Software Eats the Economy–and AI Eats Capitalism
In the beggining, we were doing text recognition. We trained OCR by transcripting unclear scanned text.
hahahaha. this is such a joke.
>Both programs are very good, the specific PI is going to be much much more important than any generic advice you glean from this thread.

I completely agree with this- your advisor will be the most influential factor of your phd years, for better or worse.

Also, some programs have a reputation of enrolling a lot more students than there is actually room for, with purposeful high attrition during the first couple of years. I am not sure if Stanford or Cal have this reputation or not, but might be something to look into.
Poor Nixon, just 60 years too early
Terrifying story and example. Im glad it worked out and I think there are a number of factors that this illustrates. One is the time and incentive differential between doctors and the patient. Im guessing you and your wife spent multiple magnitudes of order more time trying to get to find a cause. You have one wife and one unborn child, while doctors have dozens of patients a day. A doctor can never devote as much time and emotion as a patient. This isn't a condemnation, but a statement about reality.

Medical training and experience can reduce the impact, but not overcome it. It is a reason why someone can't entirely outsource their heath to the medical system, and something that I think people miss when they set medical expectations.

From the perspective of the medical system, it is a numbers game, where the optimal number of deaths is non-zero. More time and effort spent in one area means less in another. Saving one life might cost two others.

Because of this, I think it is most useful to discuss ways to increase medical efficiency. Better data transfer, better collation, better processes. AI/big data review has a place in this, but we should be aware of it's limitations, particularly on the data it doesn't capture.
I once ended up being the beneficiary of Crucial making a gambit on "Mac memory", which was standard DDR memory with a different label on it. The SPD literally showed it as a different, non-Mac-specific SKU. Luckily, few people fell for this, and Crucial later unloaded the "Mac memory" at a discount relative to standard DDR memory.
I forgot to mention that the client software does have access to your user account on the local machine as well. That's always been the case with just about all software. These days one must look into a local firewall and sandboxing for further protection.
Well, there's also Dick Van Dyke, who's remained very physically capable as well as mentally sharp.

All of this varies, FWIW, with genetics and self-care. Over 30 is still pretty young, but nothing is universal; your heritage basically locks in your potential. There are chronically ill young people who feel much older than some 70 year olds.

Also, hearing loss is strongly correlated with loss of mental acuity and worse; hearing aids are essential if you have loss. Get your old self some current AirPods Pro.
A Conversation with Ilya Sutskever on AI as Synthetic Life
1% can't be fair or unfair out of context.

sometimes "founding" contributors join long after founding.
sometimes they join during funding.

Neither case justifies a number either. Think founding team secures $3M based on something, wants to bring in engineers.
Founder(s) worked for 1 year researching on their own dime.

Then it's also about who bears the load. Founders typically bear the load, if other members do that, they should be cofounders.

Otherwise, it's more or less pareto / power law with a risk adjustment.
Nah, that's just the listener's ego overreacting to someone acknowledging that the obsolete, and factually inferior language they like is in fact obsolete and factually inferior. For a long time the world bought into C is best for X, Y and Z things and it's the only real choice... so people did that human thing and tied their identity to using that particular language, their subconscious has decided that they are being called inferior because they think the tool is their value rather than their ability to reason deeply about what computers are going to do.
I would posit that whoever is saying they’re unreliable has an agenda. Are they 100% accurate in the sense of being able to determine whether you’re 6.2 vs 6.3% Italian? No, there’s always a small degree of uncertainty as more genomes are sequenced and reference panels are updated, but at this point unless you’re from an isolated tribe in the Amazon or some incredibly niche case they’re very representative.

Most people don’t necessarily understand recombination and that if three of your grandparents are Danish and one of your grandparents is, Italian, then you are going to be on average 25% Italian… but that it’s also a distribution centred around 25%. By luck of the draw you could be 3% or you could be 45% Italian genome-wise. People might base their identity on being 1/4 this or 1/8 that, and be upset when an ancestry report gives the actual %.
I have a few questions regarding your story versus what the public understands. I see you have been positively harangued for your comment, please view my questions as honest dialectic.

1. What is the metric these folks are using to identify fraud, waste, and abuse?

2. Given that we have had independent OIGs for ages, why was fraud, waste, and abuse not previously reported?

3. Given that Congress folks are running every 2-6 years and shine like a shiny button (and get a lot of political cred) when championing substantive removal of fraud, waste, and abuse, why have no Congress people similarly exercised their Constitutional role of oversight for any of these agencies for decades?

4. Why do the agencies targeted tend to have overlap with investigations into or run-ins with Elon Musk's companies?

5. Why do forensic accountants take a long time to flag and identify fraud, waste, and abuse, even when working with compliant insiders, versus Musk's DOGE taking minutes to hours to identify fraud, waste, and abuse?

6. How is labeling groups with different ideas, such as Lutheran Family Services in the service of immigrants and refugees as terrorists, conducive to the identification of fraud, waste, and abuse? Which law enforcement office led the review of this group in particular to make this designation, which Mr. Musk and others decided to (potentially libelously) use to inflame public opinion against them?

I have no doubt that DOGE folks probably feel pretty proud of the work they are doing. That doesn't mean they are actually having the outcomes they are commissioned for -- improving efficiency. Having worked some within government support, process bottlenecks are regulatory or otherwise required by statute. People spend time really considering the decisions and improving them incrementally.