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No one seems sufficiently outraged that human drivers kill 40,000 people a year in the US.

It's approximately one 9/11 a month. And that's just the deaths.

Worldwide, 1.2m people die from vehicle accidents every year; car/motorcycle crashes are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 worldwide.

https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...


Road casualties are tied to geographical areas and America is an infamously dangerous place to live in when it comes to traffic. By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation. There's a human driver problem, but it's much smaller than the American driver problem.

Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These are two different, independent problems. More people die in care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.


>By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation.

1. [citation needed]

2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's an option that actually exists. I'm sure you can dream up of some plan for a futuristic utopia where everybody lives in a 15 minute city, no private cars are needed, and the whole transportation system is net zero, but that doesn't mean it's a realistic option that'll actually get implemented in the US, nor does it mean that we we should reject hybrid or EVs on the basis that they're worse than the utopian solution, even though they're better than the status quo of conventional ICE cars.


> 1. [citation needed]

Traffic-related death rate statistics for Denmark (being 7x lower than the US), Sweden, Norway, Japan. The US does remarkably bad on this statistic, even compared to Canada.

> 2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's an option that actually exists.

Denmark exists. I've been there. There were cars.

I think the west in general is lagging behind when it comes to EV adoption (and given the politico-corporate interests of many governments, I don't expect that to change). I don't think anybody wants to completely abolish cars in general and I think the drive to maintain ICE cars with all of their downsides just to support a fledgling industry is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money.


Denmark has a smaller population than Massachusetts, how is that a valid comparison to a massive country like the US?

Again using Massachusetts as an example, a place with a similar population to Denmark, if you instead look at fatalities per billion vkm, you would actually find MA to be about twice as safe (~1.74 vs 2.8).

The data is inherently misleading because drivers in countries in Europe don’t drive nearly as much, they travel at much lower speeds, plus cars are simply unattainable to the average person as a result of socioeconomic factors.


Exactly, I tell people every order of magnitude more we spend on infrastructure reduces the self driving complexity as much likewise.

The education bit can’t be fixed by the government though in the short term, as the outcomes correlate too strongly with stable home life conditions (which are in free fall over the past 50 years).


And also because America has an extremely strong anti-education demographic that is very well represented in congress and presidents.

"Parental authority" should not be an educational goal.


Because more than half the people that die just did it to themselves via speed, alcohol or tiredness, cell phones, and often car maintenance too.

We all know we can die when we drive poorly or ignore shocks and tires. But we don't like the idea of dying because of someone else.


So this makes it desirable for someone's robots to block roads during an emergency?

Progress does not require perfection; it requires net improvement.

Seriously. People are outraged about the theoretical potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western country.

I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.

Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.

They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.

People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.


Hey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that the right way is to:

build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and

train drivers to show respect for other people on the road

However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is better than those damn people" might be the one that actually works.


I've spend some time driving in both the US and the UK and while infrastructure in the US could be improved I don't think that's the main issue.

What's different is driver training and attitude. Passing a driving test in the US is too easy to encourage new drivers to learn to drive. And an average American driver shows less respect to pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, aggressive driving is relatively common. Bad drivers can be encountered in the UK of course but on average British drive better.

Huge SUV and pickup trucks are also part of the problem - they are more dangerous for everyone except people in such vehicle.


Yes, this is really it for me. Self-driving isn’t the best solution, but the real solution requires lots of politics and lots of time to build. Tech is the one thing we are pretty good at in this country, and feels like the one thing that makes it possible to have change quickly and without endless politicking.

Your "right way" is to try to fix human nature. A complete nonstarter.

If we could do anything like "train drivers to show respect for other people on the road" at scale, then we'd live in a different world by now.


I currently live in a place where, when walking on the street, I routinely almost get hit by vehicles while crossing crosswalks with the cross light on.

However, I used to live in a place where every local driver did an 'after you' that included pedestrians, regardless of road rules, and generally drove the speed limit (and usually less).

Both of these places in the United States!

The latter is not impossible, just rare.


San Francisco has done a ton of that recently. They've added protected bike lanes and even experimented with a center bike lane on Valencia Street which must have cost a shit ton of money. I give them credit for trying (and a lot of my tax dollars). There are a lot of no right on red situations and a lot of flights that are specific to bicycles and not cars. The city is trying and it has the will and the money to do it. We just have to hope that it doesn't all disappear into corruption and political nonsense.

As you said, people often continue to drive at full speed through unlit intersections let alone roads. Doesn't that then imply that a Waymo stopping on such a road is not "failing safe"? It's just asking for someone to hit it -- even if they'd be at fault, it's still not safe.

That’s nonsense logic. Is it not “safe” for pedestrians to use a crosswalk since a car might not stop? If that’s your definition of “safety” then all hope of a coordinated system is lost.

I want nothing to do with Waymo or any of the others, but they're all being forced on me. I think self-driving cars are one of the biggest and stupidest misallocations of resources and talent we've seen yet. And they're being developed using public resources that we all own (yet I never had a chance to vote on it) for the benefit of a private company that only those with enough disposable income can buy into. I don't happen to own any of their stock, so I'm not seeing any benefit. Why would I care how well they're doing? And they helped themselves to my roads as a testing ground; why would I afford them the slightest slack when they mess up? Meanwhile the people who can least afford to buy in, are actually living on the streets where these are being tested and are shouldering a disproportionate share of the risks. So it only takes mere inconvenience, or their mere existence, to bother and annoy me, not human harm. It's a machine designed to steal from the commons. And actually in tort law, theft IS harm. But physical harm to humans has also happened and will happen. Cars driven by humans: same, except also having a lengthy history that includes documented physical harm to humans. They too are machines for stealing from the public to advantage the owners. The things being stolen are clean air, climate, land/space, and safety/life. So my argument is fully consistent. There are exceptions in it for trucks, trains and buses, and even for some cars, in cases where the benefit offsets the harm, and the public has meaningfully approved it.

If your argument is to ban cars, fair enough. Waymo doesn’t need to be mentioned.

Why lie? If you have a valid point, make it. Don't pull made up stats out of your ass.

The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.

I count 14 countries higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...


When people say "western" they often don't mean "western hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be "western" by this definition but Australia might be.

Yeah, HN just loves the term "The West" / "Western", which weirdly includes Australia and New Zealand, but excludes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (What about South Africa? Unsure.) To me, it is better to say something like "G7-like" (or OECD) nations, because that includes all highly developed nations.

It’s referring to a specific culture of people.

No, what they really mean is "a subset of typically rich typically western europe that I can cherry pick to prove my point" though anywhere formerly colonized by a European power and any developed nation in Asia is fair game depending on context.

Notice eastern europe is nearly always left out of social issue discussions.

Some Mediterranean bordering nations are always left out of government efficacy discussions.

It's not about comparing like-ish for like-ish. It's about finding a plausibly deniable way to frame the issue so that the US gets kneecapped by the inclusion of West Virginia or 'bama New Mexico or Chicago or whatever else it is that is an outlier and tanks its numbers while the thing on the other side of the comparison exempts that analogue entirely and this makes whatever policy position the person doing the framing is advocating for look good.

You see this slight of hand up and down and left and right across every possible topic of discussion in communities composed of american demographics that generally look towards Europe for solutions for things.


No, they're generally referring to the set of countries depicted in these maps [1], for the reasons described in the article [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#/media/File:West...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world


I thought the UK ranked well, I didn't realise it ranked that well.

Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving, I see Japan ranks very highly too. ;)

The real reason is I guess we take road safety seriously, we have strict drink-driving laws, and our driving test is genuinely difficult to pass.

I seem to remember road safety also featuring prominently throughout the primary national curriculum.

And of course, our infamous safety adverts that you never quite forget, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE


    > Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving
Is this written in jest, or is there something more serious behind it? Off the top of my head, I cannot think of an obvious reason why "road handedness" (left vs right) would matter for road safety. Could it something about more people are right-handed so there is some 2nd order safety effect that I am overlooking?

Their comment was in jest, but I've wondered before if left vs right hand driving could affect safety. As you note right-handed people are more common. The countries with the highest percentages of left-handed people are around 12-13%.

In countries that drive on the right then drivers use their dominant hand for any controls that are on the inward side and their other hand for the control that are on the outward side of the driver.

Generally that means that the non-dominant hand handles exterior lighting, turn signals, windows, and locks. The dominant hand handles windshield wipers, transmission, and anything on the center console such as the climate and entertainment systems, and often also the navigation system.

In left drive counties that is mostly reversed for right-handed people, with the possible exception of the exterior lighting, turn signals, and windshield wipers. Those exceptions are the controls that are usually on stalks attached to the steering column. From what I've read sometimes manufactures use the same stalk positions in left and right drive models instead of reversing them like they do the rest of the controls.

Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference? If everyone obeyed safety recommendations I'd expect it to not make enough difference to be noticeable, but not everyone obeys safety recommendations 100% of the time.

If someone for example tried to type in a destination using the on-screen keyboard on the navigation system console while driving I'd expect that they would take longer to do so if they were using their non-dominant hand, so they would be distracted longer.


> Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference?

Large airplanes usually have a pilot on either side of the center console, and they AFAIK take turns operating the airplane, so if it made a difference, I'd expected it to be studied by the aerospace industry. Given that I've never seen it mentioned on any of the airplane incident reports I've read, it probably isn't a big factor, and I see no reason why it would be different for cars.


Yes, it was in jest.

  ;)

The US is just a big place. We drive a lot. Average annual mileage is about 13k vs 7k in the UK.

The USA don’t do very well on the deaths per km metric either.


> The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.

Is this a serious comment? Is that actually what you think they meant by "Western"? When people talk about Russia vs "the West", do you also think they mean Russia vs the Western hemisphere?



The difference is those human-driven cars all have a driver who can be held accountable.

If I kill someone with my car, I’m probably going to jail. If a Waymo or otherwise kills someone, who’s going to jail?


> If I kill someone with my car, I’m probably going to jail

This is rarely true in the US. A driver's license is a license to kill with near impunity.

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/man-gets-10-days-in-jai...


Presumably, like Cruise, if the safety rate is appalling then they get their permits revoked which is 99% the same as jail for a company that only does self driving cars.

Should Waymo hire an "accountable" human who would go to jail if a Waymo car kills someone?

"Accountability" is fucking worthless, and I am tired of pretending otherwise.


> If I kill someone with my car, I’m probably going to jail.

So this is very much not at all true.

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime/

My entire point is that we don’t care about human lives on our roads. So yelling about the safety concerns about Waymos makes no sense.


To adapt this to a tech-head mindset:

Imagine that when smartphones were first coming out they could only function with recent battery-tech breakthroughs. Mass-adoptions was pretty quick, but there was scattered reporting that a host of usage patterns could cause the battery to heat up and explode, injuring or killing the user and everyone in a 5-10ft radius.

Now, the smartphone is a pretty darn useful device and rapidly changes how lots of businesses, physical and digital, operate. Some are pushing for bans on public usage of this new battery technology until significant safety improvements can be made. Others argue that it's too late, we're too dependent on smartphones and banning their public use would cause more harm than good. Random explosions continue for decades. The batteries become safer, but also smartphone adoption reaches saturation. 40,000 people die in random smartphone explosions every year in the US.

The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least. The prevailing attitude is that more education about what settings on a phone shouldn't be turned on together is the only solution. If only people would remember, consistently, every time, to turn on airplane mode before putting the phone in a pocket. Every death is the fault of someone not paying sufficient attention and noticing that the way they were sitting was pressing the camera button through their pants. Every phone user knows that that sort of recklessness can cause the phone to explode!

You as an engineer know how people interact with the software you deploy, right? You know that regardless of education, a significant portion of your users are going to misunderstand how to do something, get themselves in a weird state, tap without thinking. What if every instance in your logs of a user doing something strange or thoughtless was correlated with the potential for injury? You'd pull your software from the market, right? Not auto-makers. They fundamentally cannot reckon with the fact that mass adoption of their product means mass death. Institutionally incapable.

The only responsible thing to do is to limit automobile use to those with extensive training and greatly reduce volume. The US needs blue collar jobs anyway, so why not start up some wide-scale mass-transit projects? It's all a matter of political will, of believing that positive change is possible, and that's sorely lacking.


> The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least

That’s an extraordinary claim.


This is a metaphor; do you think it’s an extraordinary claim to make for traffic accidents or even traffic deaths? To me it isn’t, at all.

I believe that is caused by having lots of cars driving around.

American roads are uniquely dangerous for passengers in cars and for pedestrians compared to other developed countries..

As a former LLVM developer and reviewer, I want to say:

1. Good for you.

2. Ignore the haters in the comments.

> my latest PR is my second-ever to LLVM and is an entire linter check.

That is so awesome.

> The code is of terrible quality and I am at 100+ comments on my latest PR.

The LLVM reviewers are big kids. They know how to ignore a PR if they don't want to review it. Don't feel bad about wasting people's time. They'll let you know.

You might be surprised how many PRs even pre-LLMs had 100+ comments. There's a lot to learn. You clearly want to learn, so you'll get there and will soon be offering a net-positive contribution to this community (or the next one you join), if you aren't already.

Best of luck on your journey.


> They know how to ignore a PR if they don't want to review it

How well does that scale as the number of such contributions increases and the triage process itself becomes a sizable effort?

LLMs can inadvertently create a sort of DDoS even with the best intentions, and mitigating it costs something.


Wait and see, then change the policy based on what actually happens.

I sort of doubt that all of a sudden there's going to be tons of people wanting to make complex AI contributions to LLVM, but if there are just ban them at that point.


It has happend to Curl.


Curl's case was related with its bug bounty, so when involving money the incentives are different.


Thanks. I graduated 3 months ago and this has been a huge help.


  > You might be surprised how many PRs even pre-LLMs had 100+ comments
What about percentages?


They introduced tap-to-pay with your credit card a few weeks ago.


I was going to say the same thing. I saw this and I don't even ride it regularly anymore.


fastmath is absolutely not the default on any GPU compiler I have worked with (including the one I wrote).

If you want fast sqrt (or more generally, if you care at all about not getting garbage), I would recommend using an explicit approx sqrt function in your programming language rather than turning on fastmath.


Just want to suggest: Ask an LLM about it! If you have access to a reasoning model like o3, I've found it to be very helpful.

I think this answer is as good as any of the human-generated ones in the thread so far, but the real power is that you can ask it follow-up questions. https://chatgpt.com/share/6894504f-4458-8008-a8c9-f371588259...


I often do. But if I ask here then often it can generate some positive discussion, which is nice.


> [Trawling around online for information] trained and sharpened invaluable skills involving critical thinking and grit.

Here's what Socrates had to say about the invention of writing.

> "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem [275b] to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3439

I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of us communicating on an online forum would probably prefer not to go back to a world without writing. :)

You could say similar things about the internet (getting your ass to the library taught the importance of learning), calculators (you'll be worse at doing arithmetic in your head), pencil erasers (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/28/pencil...), you name it.


>I mean, he wasn't wrong! But nonetheless I think most of us communicating on an online forum would probably prefer not to go back to a world without writing. :)

What social value is an AI chatbot giving to us here, though?

>You could say similar things about the internet (getting your ass to the library taught the importance of learning)

Yes, and as we speak countries are determining how to handle the advent of social media as this centralized means of propaganda, abuse vector, and general way to disconnect local communities. It clearly has a different magnitude of impact than etching on a stone tablet. The UK made a particularly controversial decision recently.

I see AI more in that camp than in the one of pencil erasers.


>Here's what Socrates had to say about the invention of writing.

I think you mean to say, "Here's what Plato wrote down that Socrates said"...


> Its too shallow. The deeper I go, the less it seems to be useful. This happens quick for me.

You must be using a free model like GPT-4o (or the equivalent from another provider)?

I find that o3 is consistently able to go deeper than me in anything I'm a nonexpert in, and usually can keep up with me in those areas where I am an expert.

If that's not the case for you I'd be very curious to see a full conversation transcript (in chatgpt you can share these directly from the UI).


I have access to the highest tier paid versions of ChatGPT and Google Gemini, I've tried different models, tuning things like size of context windows etc.

I know it has nothing to do with this. I simply hit a wall eventually.

I unfortunately am not at liberty to share the chats though. They're work related (I very recently ended up at a place where we do thorny research).

A simple one though, is researching Israel - Palestine relations since 1948. It starts off okay (usually) but it goes off the rails eventually with bad sourcing, fictitious sourcing, and/or hallucinations. Sometimes I actually hit a wall where it repeats itself over and over and I suspect its because the information is simply not captured by the model.

FWIW, if these models had live & historic access to Reuters and Bloomberg terminals I think they might be better at a range of tasks I find them inadequate for, maybe.


> I unfortunately am not at liberty to share the chats though.

I have bad news for you. If you shared it with ChatGPT (which you most likely did), then whatever it is that you are trying to keep hidden or private, is not actually hidden or private anymore, it is stored on their servers, and most likely will be trained on that chat. Use local models instead in such cases.


I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public.

I work at OAI, but I'm speaking for myself here. Sam talks to the company, sometimes via slack, more often in company-wide meetings, all the time. Way more than any other CEO I have worked for. This leaked message is one part of a long, continuing conversation within the company.

The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context.

What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident.

I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are. It certainly has humbled my own reactions to news. (In this particular instance I don't think there's so much right and wrong but more that I think if you had actually been in the room for more of the conversation you'd probably feel different.)

Btw Sam has tweeted about an open source model. Stay tuned... https://x.com/sama/status/1932573231199707168


The other side of it: some statements made internally can be really bad but employees brush over them because they inherently trust the speaker to some degree, they have additional material that better aligns with what they want to hear so they latch on the rest, and current leaders' actions look fine enough to them so they see the bad parts as just communication mishaps.

Until the tide turns.


Worse: employees are often actively deceived by management. Their “close relationship” is akin to that of a farmer and his herd. Convinced they’re “on the inside” they’re often blind to the truth that’s obvious from the outside.

Or simply they don’t see the whole picture because they’re not customers or business partners.

I’ve seen Oracle employees befuddled to hear negative opinions about their beloved workplace! “I never had to deal with the licensing department!”


Okay, but I've also heard insiders at companies I've worked completely overlook obvious problems and cultural/management shortcomings issues. "Oh, we don't have a low-trust environment, it's just growing pains. Don't worry about what the CEO just said..."

Like, seriously, I've seen first-hand how comments like this can be more revealing out of context than in context, because the context is all internal politics and spin.


> Btw Sam has tweeted about an open source model. Stay tuned... https://x.com/sama/status/1932573231199707168

Sneaky wording but seems like no, Sam only talked about "open weights" model so far, so most likely not "open source" by any existing definition of the word, but rather a custom "open-but-legal-dept-makes-us-call-it-proprietary" license. Slightly ironic given the whole "most HN posters are confidently wrong" part right before ;)

Although I do agree with you overall, many stories are sensationalized, parts-of-stories always lack a lot of context and large parts of HN users comments about stuff they maybe don't actually know so much about, but put in a way to make it seem so.


There are ten measures by which a model can/should be open:

1. The model code (pytorch, whatever)

2. The pre-training code

3. The fine-tuning code

4. The inference code

5. The raw training data (pre-training + fine-tuning)

6. The processed training data (which might vary across various stages of pre-training and fine-tuning)

7. The resultant weights blob

8. The inference inputs and outputs (which also need a license; see also usage limits like O-RAIL)

9. The research paper(s) (hopefully the model is also described in literature!)

10. The patents (or lack thereof)

A good open model will have nearly all of these made available. A fake "open" model might only give you two of ten.


Open weights is unobjectionable. You do get a lot.

It's nice to also know what the training data is, and it's even nicer to be aware of how it's fine-tuned etc., but at least you get the architecture and are able to run it as you like and fine tune it further as you like.


> Open weights is unobjectionable

Yeah? Try me :)

> but at least you get the architecture and are able to run it as you like and fine tune it further as you like.

Sure, that's cool and all, and I welcome that. But it's getting really tiresome of seeing huge companies who probably depend on actual FOSS to constantly get it wrong, which devalues all the other FOSS work going on, since they wanna ride that wave, instead of just being honest with what they're putting out.

If Facebook et al could release compiled binaries from closed source code but still call those binaries "open source", and call the entire Facebook "open source" because of that, they would. But obviously everyone would push back on that, because that's not what we know open source to be.

Btw, you don't get to "run it as you like", give the license + acceptable use a read through, and then compare to what you're "allowed" to do compared to actual FOSS licenses.


> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

This is so true. And not confined to HN.


I agree with the sentiment.

Having been behind the scenes of HN discussion about a security incident, with accusations flying about incompetent developers, the true story was the lead developers new of the issue, but it was not prioritised by management and pushed down the backlog in place of new (revenue generating) features.

There is plenty of nuance to any situation that can't be known.

No idea if the real story here is better or worse than the public speculation though.


> I think that leaks like this have negative information value to the public.

To most people I'd think this is mainly for entertainment purposes ie 'palace intrique' and the actual facts don't even matter.

> The vast majority of what he and others say doesn't get leaked. So you're eavesdropping on a tiny portion of a conversation. It's impossible not to take it out of context.

That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).

> What's worse, you think you learned something from reading this article, even though you probably didn't, making you more confident in your conclusions when you should be less confident.

What conclusions exactly? Again do most people really care about this (reading the story) and does it impact them? My guess is it doesn't at all.

> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in.

This is a well known trope and is discussed in other forms ie 'NY Times story is wrong move to the next story and you believe it' ie: https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/


> coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true

My profile is trivially connected to my real identity, I am not anonymous here.


How is it trivially connected to your real identity exactly?

I am not seeing how it is at all.


> That's a good spin but coming from someone who has an anonymous profile how do we know it's true (this is a general thing on HN people say things but you don't know how legit what they say is or if they are who they say they are).

Not only that, but how can we know if his interpretation or "feelings" about these discussions are accurate? How do we know he isn't looking through rose-tinted glasses like the Neumann believers at WeWork? OP isn't showing the missing discussion, only his interpretation/feelings about it. How can we know if his view of reality is accurate and unbiased? Without seeing the full discussion and judging for ourselves, we can't.


> How can we know if his view of reality is accurate and unbiased? Without seeing the full discussion and judging for ourselves, we can't.

I agree with that of course.


> I hope everyone here gets to have the experience of seeing HN discuss something that you're an expert in. It's eye-opening to see how confidently wrong most poasters are.

Some topics (and some areas where one could be an expert in) are much more prone to this phenomenon than others.

Just to give a specific example that suddenly comes to my mind: Grothendieck-style Algebraic Geometry is rather not prone to people confidently posting wrong stuff about on HN.

Generally (to abstract from this example [pun intended]): I guess topics that

- take an enormous amount of time to learn,

- where "confidently bullshitting" will not work because you have to learn some "language" of the topic very deeply

- where even a person with some intermediate knowledge of the topic can immediately detect whether you use the "'grammar' of the 'technical language'" very wrongly

are much more rarely prone to this phenomenon. It is no coincidence that in the last two points I make comparisons to (natural) languages: it is not easy to bullshit in a live interview that you know some natural language well if the counterpart has at least some basic knowledge of this natural language.


I think its more the site's architecture that promotes this behavior.

In the offline world there is a big social cost to this kind of behavior. Platforms haven't been able to replicate it. Instead they seem to promote and validate it. It feeds the self esteem of these people.


It's hard to have an informed opinion on Algebraic Geometry (requires expertise) and not many people are going to upvote and engage with you about it either. It's a lot easier to have an opinion on tech execs, current events, and tech gossip. Moreover you're much more likely to get replies, upvotes, and other engagement for posting about it.

There's a reason politics and tech gossip are where most HN comments go these days. This is a pretty mainstream site.


> There's a reason politics and tech gossip are where most HN comments go these days. This is a pretty mainstream site.

HN is the digital water cooler. Rumors are a kind of social currency, in the capital sense, in that it can be leveraged and has a time horizon for value of exchange, and in the timeliness/recency biased sense, as hot gossip is a form of information that wants to be free, which in this context means it has more value when shared, and that value is tapped into by doing so.


I too worked at a place where hot button issues were being leaked to international news.

Leaks were done for a reason. either because they agree with the leak, really disagree with the leak, or want to feel big because they are a broker of juicy information.

Most of the time the leaks were done in an attempt to stop something stupid from happening, or highlight where upper management were making the choice to ignore something for a gain elsewhere.

Other times it was there because the person was being a prick.

Sure its a tiny part of the conversation, but in the end, if you've got the point where your employees are pissed off enough to leak, that's the bigger problem.


I totally agree that most articles (pretty much all news/infotainment) is devoid of any information.

At the same time all I need to know about Sam is in the company/"non-profit's" name, which is in itself is now simply a lie.


This is a strangely defensive comment for a post that, at least on the surface, doesn't seem to say anything particularly damning. The fact that you're rushing to defend your CEO sort of proves the point being made, clearly you have to make people believe they're a part of something bigger, not just pay them a lot.

The only obvious critique is that clearly Sam Altman doesn't believe this himself. He is legendarily mercenary and self serving in his actions to the point where, at least for me, it's impressive. He also has, demonstrably here, created a culture where his employees do believe they are part of a more important mission and that clearly is different than just paying them a lot (which of course, he also does).

I do think some skepticism should be had around that view the employees have, but I also suspect that was the case for actual missionaries (who of course always served someone else's interests, even if they personally thought they were doing divine work).


The headline makes it sound like he's angry that Meta is poaching his talent. That's a bad look that makes it seem like you consider your employees to be your property. But he didn't actually say anything like that. I wouldn't consider any of what he said to be "slams," just pretty reasonable discussion of why he thinks they won't do well.

I'd say this is yet another example of bad headlines having negative information content, not leaks.


With no dogs in the fight, the very fact he's talking to his employees about a competitor's hiring practices is noteworthy.

The delivery of the message can be milder and better than how it sounds in the chosen bits, but the overall picture kinda stays the same.


To me, there’s an enormous difference between “they pay well but we’re going to win the race” and “my employees belong to me and they’re stealing my property.”

Notably, I don’t see him condemning Meta’s “poaching” here, just commenting on it. Compare this with, for example, Steve Jobs getting into a fight with Adobe’s CEO about whether they’d recruit each other’s employees or consider them to be off limits.


I've experienced that. Absolutely.

But I've also experienced that the outside perspective, wrong as it may be on nearly all details, can give a dose of realism that's easy to brush aside internally.


Sounds like someone is upset they didn't get poached.


Your comment comes across dangerously close to sounding like someone that has drunk the kool-aid and defends the indefensible.

Yes, you can get the wrong impression from hearing just a snippet of a conversation, but sometimes you can hear what was needed whether it was out of context or not. Sam is not a great human being to be placed on a pedestal that never needs anything he says questioned. He's just a SV CEO trying to keep people thinking his company is the coolest thing. Once you stop questioning everything, you're in danger of having the kool-aid take over. How many times have we seen other SV CEOs with a "stay tuned" tweet that they just hope nobody questions later?

>if you had actually been in the room for more of the conversation you'd probably feel different

If you haven't drunk the kool-aid, you might feel differently as well.

SAMA doesn't need your assistance white knighting him on the interwebs.


Technically, after being labelled a missionary you can't really blame people for spreading the word of the almighty.


Little Miyazaki knock offs posting on the Nazi Hellsite former known as Twitter isn't really helping how the "public" feels about OAI either.


Who gets to define what is anti-American?

Perhaps you think it's anti-American to believe that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza. Perhaps I think it's anti-American to believe that the Jan 6 rioters should have been pardoned.

Whose purity test should we apply?


We're talking about foreigners: if you are a guest in someone's country, home, wherever, you should be respectful and quiet.

I don't want any foreigners contributing to any political activism whatsoever, regardless of ideology.


I'd certainly expect visitors to be held to the same standards as the natives. This is the problem, as a US citizen I don't want to be respectful and quiet, especially when I disagree with my government.


> I'd certainly expect visitors to be held to the same standards as the natives.

Visitors are held to a higher standard than natives. Visitors do not have control, a vote, etc: they are temporarily permitted by the privilege of policy at the time.

> as a US citizen I don't want to be respectful and quiet, especially when I disagree with my government.

Good, don't be! You're not at risk of having a visa revoked or go unissued.


Telling the US government it's broken is a favor to the US government. Freedom of speech is a gift to both the people of this country and the institution itself, helping it be pure and accountable. It's the force that prevents us from becoming like China.

Those who seek to stop that regulating force are undermining what makes America great. Where those voices of dissent were born isn't pertinent.


This is naive, it's clear that someone without a stake in a country could just be an agent provocateur.


This is akin to the fallacy of saying that the accountability of "real name" policies on web forums make higher quality comments, and then you actually look at the contents of Faceboot. I mean, actual US citizens just voted this tiny-minded failure of a "president" in for the second time, because apparently he hadn't damaged the country enough the first time. Having a stake didn't help there, right? Either people are unaware they are harming themselves (stupidity/anti-intellectualism), don't care because others are getting harmed "more" (spite), or are in social media bubbles pushed by hostile actors (agent provocateurs don't actually need physical presence).


I feel like this is a ridiculous bad-faith argument. You know damned well that banning people from the country for having a JD vance meme on their phone is not stopping international agents. Arguing by presently demonstrably false hypotheticals as though they were reality makes me think it's a waste of everybody's breath talking to you.


It would be a stupid position. I was failing to explain that not all rights like the freedom of speech necessarily make sense to apply to foreigners who are given the privilege to enter the country. I am not necessarily firm in this position the other poster made an argument that they can speak because what does it matter which is a good point.


Okay but that's not what this is about. This is saying that a foreigner cannot express private thoughts online at any point before they enter the United States.

I assume someone who goes by "15155" would believe that having private conversations online can be useful. Or do you want to post your identifying information?


You do you, and we'll have the parties at my house then. Enjoy quietly playing Catan or whatever.

Your extrapolation to the national level is fallacious. Many of our academic institutions were deliberately hosting foreigners, with the explicit goal of being melting pots of ideas. That gave the US an exceptional cultural cachet around the globe. This whole thing is an exercise in attacking and destroying our traditional distributed institutions in favor of centralized autocratic control.


Why do you allow then foreign lobby groups?

Or why did you allow Elon to participate in elections, he was a foreigner at some point and he wasn't born in America?


The majority of the people's opinion.

Which elected a democratically-elected representative.

That is how democracies work.

If there's anything the executive has power over besides commander in chief, it would be leader in chief of defining what is actually, American.

The fact that prior presidents have actually abdicated this important role, doesn't mean it didn't exist. This is why traditions of the State of the Union, etc exist. The executive gets to call the plays towards unity for Americanism.

This is what foreign countries do as well.


And next time the Democrats get elected they will filter out all the right wing professors/students, and this will make you happy?


discriminating in employment due to one's affiliation is illegal in state and federal employment [1]. That does not mean one can break ToS and for example, publish on a massive public platform, your private opinion (which can be misconstrued as your employer's). Most employers have ToS against online activity during employment, for that reason.

It is also illegal to do the same for students. [2]

Faculty is already protected under tenure rules. And even for the nontenured, who really needs protecting ? Only 5.7% of all faculty are registered as conservative as of 2020 [3]

My point remains. "Filtering out" is illegal. Setting the stage on what is american, is not.

[1] https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/political-aff...

[2] https://www.nysasa.org/index.php/news/6558-schools-cannot-en...

[3] https://www.thecollegefix.com/democratic-professors-outnumbe...


> for the nontenured, who really needs protecting ? Only 5.7% of all faculty are registered as conservative

Plenty of right wingers are granted visas to spread nonsense in America. It would make sense to put them on visa bans.


> next time the Democrats get elected they will filter out all the right wing professors/students, and this will make you happy

Yes, actually. We have the precedent. Both for the action and for these people being dangerous to our safety and civil society.


When it comes to allowing foreighn students to come to US, which from my understanding is a likely path to citizenship, the executive branch gets to decide, which is basically elected by 51% of population every 4 years.

I prefer the exec branch over no purity test, or delegating to some other "expert" institution.


51% of the voting population. Not the majority of the population. Big difference in numbers there, only 65.3% participated. So, less than a third of Americans voted for the current president… why people don’t vote, I’ll never understand.


51% of the electorate is expected given we live in a 2 party political system

i dont care about the opinion of people who dont care to vote

absentee balots for those who cant get to a polling station is pretty reasonable nowadays


That’s not the point and I agree with you. The point was that no where near the majority voted for him since so many didn’t vote at all.


I think the author has misunderstood things here.

This technique is orthogonal to integer mod. Indeed the author multiplies by their magic constant and then does an integer mod to map into their hashtable's buckets.

This technique is actually just applying a fast integer hash on the input keys to the hashtable before mapping the keys to buckets. You can then map to buckets however you want.

The additional hash is useful if and only if the input hash function for your table's keys doesn't appear to be a random function, i.e. it doesn't mix its bits for whatever reason. If your input hash functions are indeed random then this is a (small but perhaps measurable) waste of time.

Using prime-numbered table sizes is another way to accomplish basically the same thing. Dividing the input hash key by a prime forces you to look at all the bits of the input. In practice these are written as division by a constant, so they use multiplies and shifts. It's basically a hash function. (Though I'd use multiply by a magic number over divide by a prime, mul alone should be faster.)

Relatedly see this post by Daniel Lemire about an alternative to integer mod, https://lemire.me/blog/2016/06/27/a-fast-alternative-to-the-... which is interesting if your number of buckets is not a power of 2 for some reason.


I think the post talks about exactly this? The method is combining hashing the keys and finding a position in the target range. There's a bit where he talks about how Knuth uses the term 'hash function' as the combination of these two operations, while modern texts look at the two operations in isolation.

So maybe one way of looking at this is as an efficient fusion operation, which doesn't look special when you look at the ops in isolation, but combine to something that is both fast and advised problems with input patterns.


The way I understood this article, the problem Fibonacci hashing seems to solve is that it turns a hashing strategy that would require a prime modulo into something that can use a power of two modulo.

I think there are some hashing functions around that are already designed to solve that problem at "step 1".

So the question just boils down to which is faster


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