What are the most upvoted users of Hacker News commenting on? Powered by the /leaders top 50 and updated every thirty minutes. Made by @jamespotterdev.
You think data tied to individual users isn't any worse? That privacy has no value?
>LLMs are text model, not world models and that is the root cause of the problem.
Is it though? In the end, the information in the training texts is a distilled proxy for the world, and the weighted model ends up being a world model, just an once-removed one.
Text is not that different to visual information in that regard (and humans base their world model on both).
>Not having a world model is a massive disadvantage when dealing with facts, the facts are supposed to re-inforce each other, if you allow even a single fact that is nonsense then you can very confidently deviate into what at best would be misguided science fiction, and at worst is going to end up being used as a basis to build an edifice on that simply has no support.
Regular humans believe all kinds of facts that are nonsense, many others that are wrong, and quite a few that are even counter to logic too.
And short of omnipresense and omniscience, directly examining the whole world, any world model (human or AI), is built on sets of facts many of which might not be true or valid to begin with.
Seriously. I don't understand why this is even news or posted here.
If they were doubling prices or something then of course, raise the alarms. This is not that.
Let's call it "token representation not based on merit" and it doesn't sound that back walking them back
Paramount bids $30 all cash for all of Warner Brothers Discovery. Netflix bids $27.75 “for Warner’s studio and HBO Max streaming business” only [1]. (“$23.25 in cash and $4.50 in shares” [2].)
The latter leaves behind “sports and news television brands around the world including CNN, TNT Sports in the U.S., and Discovery, top free-to-air channels across Europe, and digital products such as the profitable Discovery+ streaming service and Bleacher Report (B/R)” [3]. (Paramount is effectively bidding $5.9bn for these assets.)
Note that Zaslav, Warner’s CEO, is a prominent donor to Democrats [4], as is Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder [5]. (Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-CEO with Greg Peters, is mixed, leaning Dem [6]. No clue on the latter.) Ellison is a staunch Trump ally. The partisan tinge will be difficult to ignore.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/business/media/paramount-makes-hostile-t...
[2] https://about.netflix.com/en/news/netflix-to-acquire-warner-...
[3] https://www.wbd.com/news/warner-bros-discovery-separate-two-...
[4] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=david+...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/03/us/politics/reed-hastings...
[6] https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Ted+Sa...
I don't think basic color accuracy matters for this, it's more macro. In other words, two professionally taken images of a painting aren't going to make it look bright and colorful in one, and dark and somber in another.
Whether there's a slight green tint, or a certain blue doesn't pop quite as much, doesn't seem like it would affect the findings.
If you're paying per token then there is a big business incentive for the counterparty to burn tokens as much as possible.
It's a drug that is often diverted by people who have a prescription in order to make money.
The monkey's paw curls. Wish granted... but in the form of Palantir, Flock, etc. tracking your every move so those cash transactions can be just as anonymous as a credit card transaction.
Escalation meetings when you are asked to prove where all the money went in those 40 hours each project week, with endless rows in Excel sheets.
IBM paid a ~30% premium on the current stock price, so all shareholders (I imagine employees own a bunch of shares) will get a decent chunk of cash.
Some redundant departments (HR, finance, accounting and the like) will be downsized after the acquisition.
Engineering and product will mostly be unaffected in the short term, but in a year or two the IBM culture will start to seep in, and that would be a good time for tenured employees to start planning their exits. That's also when lock-up agreements will expire and the existing leadership of Confluent will depart and be replaced by IBM execs.
By they looks of it they changed the word 'async' to 'actor' because they thought it was cool not because it actually uses the actor pattern. Which to me seems to be namespace pollution.
The tax level is about as high as it ever has been: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
(1) Multi-modal is where a lot of these things go to die. You will hear people talk about the occasional striking success but so often I show Copilot an easily identifiable flower image and it gets it wrong even though Google Lens will get it right
(2) The kind of dialog he's having with Claude is a kind of communication pattern I've found never works with LLMs. Sure there is the kind of conversation that goes
Do X
... that's pretty good except for Y
Great!
but if it is Do X
and it comes back with something entirely wrong I'd assume the state of the thing is corrupted and it is never coming back and no matter how you interrogate it, encourage it, advise it, threaten it, whatever, you will go in circles.
That's actually fascinating, because they surely weren't tracking the actual Office license keys, and getting their money back. The manager literally uninstalled Office just to spite you. That's super funny! Especially since it made zero difference to you in the end.
The only smart involvement in crypto was to spend a few minutes buying Bitcoin early on and holding on to it. Everything else — all the altcoins, stablecoins, NFTs, large ecosystem of startups, VC funds, DeFi, web3, payment networks, smart contracts, blockchains – has been an immense waste of time and resources.
But your assertion is merely semantic. It doesn't say anything substantive.
I could also say a motorcycle "moves forward" just like a person "moves forward". Whether we use the same or different words for same or different concepts doesn't say anything about the actual underlying similarity.
And please don't call stuff "dumb shit" here. Not appropriate for HN.
I hated it. It looks really pretty, but was terrible for reading. Half my phone screen was taken up by icons, and there was no scrollbar so I had no idea how long the article was. I really needed reader mode for it.
> there is no central bank that can print more Bitcoin
It turns out this doesn't matter: you can't hear the inflation argument over the volatility. The amount of goods you can buy per Bitcoin changes dramatically on a month by month basis. It's just that everyone loved it while it was going up, but that's not actually guaranteed!
Also, you can't print more Bitcoin, but that doesn't matter: you can fork it (people have, BCH), or you can just endlessly spawn new token chains, or you can have things which both sides regard as abominations but are somehow immensely popular: stablecoins. These give you the legal stability of crypto tied to the price stability of the dollar. It turns out that what people actually wanted was several hundred billion dollars of virtual poker chips.
The one technology that I thought might work really well here is flow batteries. You need a couple of sets of tanks, but then you can do charging by pumping out the old electrolyte and pumping in charged electrolyte. But these seem to have stagnated, possibly because they're dependent on expensive short lived membranes.
I wonder if there's significant scope for offsetting electricity consumption by adding deck renewables. Not for container ships, but maybe for tankers .. which are only needed because of fossil fuel consumption elsewhere. Hmm.
Other way round: the only way any company other than Intel was able to get a new instruction set launched into the PC space was because Intel face-planted so hard with Itanium, and AMD64 was the architecture developers actually wanted to use - just make the registers wider and have more of them, and make it slightly more orthogonal.
As someone that works on this space, with the kind of products that want this kind of contact pages, they forgot to mention that even behind login walls, in some products you only get to create a support ticket if there are enough developers with the right level of certifications and partnership.
DOGE was a Potemkin organization. They destroyed USAID, smashed up a bunch of other institutions, then went home. Very little of which complied with Federal funding law, either.
.. how do you hide the Taj Mahal? Was there significant bombing against India, and if so from where?
This is making me feel quietly vindicated in pushing back on migrating our Jenkins/Ansible setup to GHA simply because corporate wanted the new shiny thing. Fortunately the "this will be a lot of work, i.e. cost" argument won.
Mind you, CI does always involve a surprising amount of maintenance. Update churn is real. And Macs still are very much more fiddly to treat as "cattle" machines.
Kind of, but with C++ syntax to make it more appealing,
As someone coding since 1986, with experience in native and Web development, and despite earning most of my money in Web, I assert it is lazyness.
There is no Web without operating systems, or do you imagine browsers run on pixie dust?
Itanium only failed because AMD for various reasons was able to come up with AMD64 and rug pull Intel's efforts.
In an alternative universe without AMD64, Intel would have kept pushing Itanium while sorting out its issues, HP-UX was on it, and Windows XP as well.
Batteries are, as an approximation, charged at 1C, so for a 40 mWh battery you need 40 MW.
Yes, you convert them into bread and milk the same way you convert little pieces of paper into bread and milk: You find someone who's willing to give you bread and milk in return for them.
Did anyone ever seriously buy the whole "it's transporting" BS when it was wheelbarrows? What makes you believe today's trucks are meaningfully different?
I'm seeing it on more videos now, and it's awful. It's just making stuff up. Badly.
Picking out the most relevant frame in the video was better.
> Why is "no early returns" not a good rule?
It might be a good guideline.
Its not a good rule because slavishly following results in harder to follow code written to adhere to it.
if you know how to use a variable, then you know how to read and write a declaration for it.
In other words, the precedence of operators in a declaration have exactly the same precedence as in its use.
There is a really neat gem in the article:
> Similarly, I write because I want to become the kind of person who can think.
From the article -- But North Carolina law caps penalties at $5,000 per inspection, offering retailers little incentive to fix the problem. “Sometimes it is cheaper to pay the fines,” said Chad Parker, who runs the agency’s weights-and-measures program.
This is what I think of as the 'give us a story to tell the people because we're okay with business doing this' rule. Too often the local (or state, or even federal) government is aware of bad actors but fails to act in a way that would actually cure the problem. It is a remarkably persistent form of corruption in many liberal democracies (not just the USA).
I surely did vote for this kind of decision.
If X feel like leaving EU, great, I already left that extreme right wing propaganda long time ago.
In some ways it feels like the old 1990's Apple, except now they have enough money for all the misteps, and can survive being the iDevices company, which is where all that money is coming from.
The Computer Company, not sure.
Lies sold by Google.
Nokia and Sony Ericsson were using J2ME perfectly fine, as did Blackberry. I should know ad ex-Nokian.
Kotlin met nothing, it was pushed by Kotlin heads working on Android Studio, telling lies comparing Kotlin to Java 7, instead of Java was already offering at the time.
To this day they never do Kotlin vs Java samples, where modern Java is used, rather the version that bests fits their purpose to sell why Kotlin.
Fragmentation, what a joke, the fragmentation got so bad in Android, that JetPack libraries, previously Android X, exist to work around the fragmentation and lack of OEM updates.
Gosling said it better, regarding Google's "good" intentions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&feature=youtu.be...
Someone doing maintenance work on C# project might find code going all the way back to C# 1.0.
Also improvements to low level programming, being done since C# 7, a few semantic changes, aren't for removing boilerplate code.
Then since a language is useless without its standard library, there have beem plenty of changes on how to do P/Invoke, COM interop, development of Web applications, and naturally knowing in what release specific features were introduced.
> If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used
There's everyone else who uses the road, too.
Lots of railroads were built with private money for various purposes.
These days, even the government doesn't seem capable of building railroads. There's Caltrain, and in Seattle it's taking decades to build a few miles of light rail, at a cost that exceeds the GDP of Norway. Well, maybe not quite that much (!) but it sure seems like it.
I once thought Bitcoin was overpriced at $17.
Almost everything other than Bitcoin and Etherium, and some of the stablecoins, has crashed hard. A lot of issuers made money, but few others did.
I still believe that the actual cause was tin whiskers, but all the RoHS lobbying buried the evidence.
http://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/reference/tech_papers/2011-NASA...
> 400 milliwatts per square meter
About two orders of magnitude weaker than solar panels, even over 24 hours.
E = (T2-T1) / T2
What he's missing is that scaling started working around 1900, when railroads started consolidating. Railroads were the first businesses that had overwhelming economies of scale. No small co-op could possibly compete. Over the next century, more obstacles to scaling were overcome. Container shipping, freeways, cheap communications, mass market products and advertising, and computers removed the obstacles to scaling businesses up to planetary size.
Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble, Uneeda Uneeda, put the crackers in a package, in a package, the Uneeda buscuit in an airtight sanitary package, made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete!
Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail pouch, cut plug, chawin by the stove. Changed the approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard.
Gone, gone Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn, Gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan Gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce. - The Music Man
> the incoming CEO wants leadership change, and some of these departures are because its better that this purge happens before the CEO change than after
Or the more common all the ones who didn’t get the crown are leaving.
It's the consensus among g-theorists. "The scientific consensus" on cogntive function is Not A Thing.
It's the choice from manna[0] all over again.
It’s an industry worth tens of billions of dollars in the aggregate unfortunately.
Staying informed of current events being a vanity activity is an idea very heavily pushed by people who are radically opposed to broad democracy in favor of some variety of elite rule, a distressingly common position in general, and particularly in tech spaces.
There also seems to be a general vibe of cheerfulness among Apple fans about Dye's departure.
Thanks. From that page -
> NOTE: Dvelopment has stopped. The newer dev.clombardo.dnsnet continues development.
DNSNet
People use Martha Stewart as an example because she's (1) a household name and (2) a fairly large number of people both inside the USA and outside of it are familiar with the case. Mindlin is much less well known.
Well, the BBC had a whole program around getting schools into computing and it worked out fabulously well, so yes. It indirectly ended up giving us a novel processor that is used in just about everything as well.
If a human did 2a or 2b we would think that a larger infraction than (1) because it shows intent to obfuscate the origins.
As for your free software is dead argument: I think it is worse than that: it takes away the one payment that free software authors get: recognition. If a commercial entity can take the code, obfuscate it and pass it off as their own copyrighted work to then embrace and extend it then that is the worst possible outcome.
This is very American: it's illegal, but everyone accepts both that the law will be enforced very unevenly, and that this kind of thing doesn't get solved by the regular political process. There's no political consumer complaints culture, it's seen as an individual matter.
You couldn't get away with this for as long in the UK as a retailer. Either the CMA or Trading Standards would deal with it.
As is common in hard real time code, there is no dynamic allocation during operation:
allocation/deallocation from/to the free store (heap)
shall not occur after initialization.
This works fine when the problem is roughly constant, as it was in, say, 2005. But what do things look like in modern AI-guided drones?
> stores get away with it because even when ignoring the fact that tax is added after, few of the shoppers in these stores will remember the shelf price for a basket of 20+ items from the store
We don't bother remembering it because we're in a high-enough trust society where that burden shouldn't be necessary.
Proposed bills are off-topic on HN:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(Note all these comments are themselves about bills about things HN is interested in!)
Many people thought that giving kids computers would make the smarter and more generally educated, not just give them better skills with computers.
Related: " How the Disappearance of Flight 19 Fueled the Legend of the Bermuda Triangle": https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-disappearance...
Hacker news discussion of above: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46181237
The trouble with estimation is that few places record the estimates and the actuals for future reference.
As I've pointed out before, the business of film completion bonds has this worked out. For about 3% to 5% of the cost of making a movie, you can buy an insurance policy that guarantees to the investors that they get a movie out or their money back.
What makes this work is that completion bond companies have the data to do good estimations. They have detailed spending data from previous movie productions. So they look at a script, see "car chase in city, 2 minutes screen time", and go to their database for the last thousand car chase scenes and the bell curve of how much they cost. Their estimates are imperfect, but their error is centered around zero. So completion bond companies make money on average.
The software industry buries their actual costs. That's why estimation doesn't work.
I wonder if Gemini 3 Pro would do better at this particular test? They're very proud of its spatial awareness and vision abilities.
The kids went to school in the winter, where there wasn't so much to do on the farm. That's why we still have summer "vacation", a holdover from needing the kids to work on the farm in the summer.
Vendor risk management. It's the process of identifying, assessing, and mitigating the risks associated with engaging third-party vendors or suppliers.
It's a hard, and potentially inflammatory, conversation, about parents who likely shouldn't have been parents, and how Germany is going to handle migrant parents interested at parenting at level needed for their children to succeed.
> Ackermann said she wants to hold parents accountable as well. She decried what she said was the fact that a rising number of parents spend more time with their mobile phones than with their children.
> Tichys Einblick magazine reported today that columnist and former middle school teacher Josef Kraus wrote in response to the GEW letter: “There are parents who do not want to raise their children out of convenience or due to difficult circumstances.
> “They entrust the upbringing of their children to day care centres and schools. Or they simply do not care,” he wrote.
> “This is especially true for many parents with a migrant background who do not consider it important for their children to acquire a solid command of the German language.”
H.R.998 - Internal Revenue Service Math and Taxpayer Help Act - https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/998
Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees.
Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet.
What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?).
From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path. And a networking opportunity, where you meet someone face to face (and can meet them repeatedly) is a far better way to let someone know you exist than sending them your resume.
There are other ways to raise your profile that don't involve networking events and you can argue that they are better, but that's a cost-benefit analysis you should consider.
FPGA.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory
The way I would put it is that all those different neurons with different kind of receptors on that are so "colored" that there are a set from one place to another so there is an overall gross wiring diagram in that a green bundle of wires go from the limbic system to the frontal lobe but the detailed wiring plan is not encoded in the DNA the way a CPU or an old school television set has a plan -- there is not enough data in the DNA to do that. Instead the brain self-organizes the detailed wiring by learning.
>In our agrarian past, the cultural division of labor at the time said that men worked the field, women ran the home. And that later job was brutal, never-ending, and consumed all waking hours until the day she died.
On the plus side, they also didn't have to do the hard dangerous jobs like mining coal, building houses, and the like, nor did they have to go to the army, fight to defend their country (at least not as soldiers), and many other things.
Running the house was hardly "brutal", neither did it consume "all waking hours until the day she died".
>This wealth isn’t confined to only the top percent, today’s middle class and working class live lives that past nobility would be astounded by.
Only based on "access to various products and crap" criterium. Based on quality of life metrics, safety, job prospects, food quality, urban design, it often is worse than way lower in GDP countries - and let's not even get into non-tangible stuff...
Insofar as this article is about the 4 execs leaving Apple, this is a total non-story and the "What the heck is going on at Apple" is just click bait:
- Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, and general counsel Kate Adams, are set to retire. While these may be high level execs, they don't really have much to do with the overall direction and success of the company. And given the change in the political environment you've seen tons of changes in roles like these at many companies in the past 11 months.
- Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, is leaving to join Meta as its chief design officer. Sounds like he won't really be missed: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-.... Assuming he was responsible for Liquid Glass, I say good riddance.
- John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, is also retiring. He had basically already been demoted, taken off leading Siri due to Siri's competitive failures.
So yeah, it's pretty obvious that Apple is behind the AI wave, but honestly, they may end up having the last laugh given how much backlash there is from consumers about trying to shoehorn AI into all these places where it's just an annoyance.
I'm finding the GPTZero share links difficult to understand. Apparently this one shows a hallucinated citation but I couldn't understand what it was trying to tell me: https://app.gptzero.me/documents/9afb1d51-c5c8-48f2-9b75-250...
(I'm on mobile, haven't looked on desktop.)
They're a very specific kind of error, just like off-by-one errors, or I/O errors, or network errors. The name for this kind of error is a hallucination.
We need a word for this specific kind of error, and we have one, so we use it. Being less specific about a type of error isn't helping anyone. Whether it "anthropomorphizes", I couldn't care less. Heck, bugs come from actual insects. It's a word we've collectively started to use and it works.
The Pelosis use a call option strategy to do leveraged buys for their positions.
Yup.
Microsoft pledged not to intervene like that again, reclassifying its legal interpretation of its own services, and added language to its contracts to guarantee that it would fight future US attempts to do so:
https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
When the US manages to force Microsoft to do something, it responds by trying to protect itself from the same scenario in the future. Because it wants profits. The ICC leaving Microsoft is the last thing Microsoft wanted.
In decompilation "matching" means you found a function block in the machine code, wrote some C, then confirmed that the C produces the exact same binary machine code once it is compiled.
They had access to the same C compiler used by Nintendo in 1999? And the register allocation on a MIPS CPU is repeatable enough to get an exact match? That's impressive.
Definitely a place to visit if you can. I traveled there in 1983 just as it was starting to erupt and visited a lot of places that are now under lava rock! In a later visit we were walking out to see one of the "peep holes" where you can see the lava down below and the rocks started getting slippery, except they weren't slippery it was our shoe soles melting, oops.
That's fine frate, tell the AI to not use lists and em dashes so much.
We're also seeing a barrage of commercials featuring AI generated animals talking like people. It's getting old.
Í'm not sure we should be treating posts from Fun-Blueberry-2147 on r/LegalAdviceUK as actual news items.
This is the classic pastoral fantasy, about which much has been written. Probably too much.
Muckrock might be helpful with techniques to compel disclosure at a reasonable cost. Do you plan to file suit against the Richland County sheriff’s department due to their violation of SC’s FIOA statute?
I'm not sure you understand what "average" means.
Did you fully read my comment? Please point me to where HTML/CSS provide the features I listed.
It doesn't really matter if HTML/CSS is more powerful at a hundred other layout things, if it doesn't provide the absolute necessary features for papers.
To be clear, you don't need AI for this.
You can also just call the railroad and report the bridge as damaged.
Hoaxes and pranks and fake threats have been around forever.
Employees are not IT and Infosec teams. What an employee wants as it relates to a corp system is mostly irrelevant, as the company owns and governs access to the system. It is not the employee’s data, broadly speaking.