> No one doing this for money intends to train models that will never be amortized.
Taken literally, this is just an agreement with the comment you're replying to.
Amortizing means that it is gradually written off over a period. That is completely consistent with the ability to average it over some usage. For example, if a printing company buys a big new printing machine every 5 years (because that's how long they last before they wear out), they would amortize it's cost over the 5 years (actually it's depreciation not amortization because it's a physical asset but the idea is the same). But it's 100% possible to look at the number of documents they print over that period and calculate the price of the print machine per document. And that's still perfectly consistent with the machine paying for itself.
> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
Besides which, this is totally a valid question based on the article. (The temptation to ask if you read it is almost overwhelming!) It talks about how to do arithmetic but not what the result of that will necessarily be, so I don't see that any part of it answers the question of "cash is king" + "female" - "male".
I suppose the subtlety is that people want to be angry if (and only if) reality demands it.
My uneducated feeling is that, in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed.
But that doesn't mean that people want to be angry in general, in the sense that if there's nothing in reality to be angry about then that's even better. But if someone is presented with something to be angry about, then that ship has sailed so the typical reaction is to feel the need to engage.
>in a small society, like a pre-civilisation tribal one where maybe human emotions evolved, this is useful because it helps enact change when and where it's needed
Yes, I think this is exactly it. A reaction that may be reasonable in a personal, real-world context can become extremely problematic in a highly connected context.
It's both that, as an individual, you can be inundated with things that feel like you have a moral obligation to react. On the other side of the equation, if you say something stupid online, you can suddenly have thousands of people attacking you for it.
Every single action seems reasonable, or even necessary, to each individual person, but because everything is scaled up by all the connections, things immediately escalate.
The issue right now is that the only things you can do to protect yourself from certain kinds of predators is literally what will get you blown up on social media when taken out of context.
"Breaking and entering" it's a criminal offence, and walking through an unlocked front door back door doesn't count. If you are on someone's land but didn't have to break in then that's trespass, which is just a civil offense.
Theft is a crime in any case (indeed even if you're not on their land e.g. snatching a phone off the street).
> "Breaking and entering" it's a criminal offence, and walking through an unlocked front door back door doesn't count.
No breaking and entering is known as burglary. Also if you walk through the front door with the intent to commit a crime it is still burglary. The important part is trespassing with the intent to commit a crime.
OK, I probably should specify closer, but while the other commenter has noted there is "burglary" in the UK, I was using burglary in the vernacular, meaning you entered someone's house without their knowledge and stole some shit. I was perhaps unclear with this and in fact in some places what entering someone's house that is not locked and stealing some shit may be a different crime than when it is locked both variations are still generally described, in common usage, as a burglary and are both illegal according to every legal code of every place I've lived, which I've lived in a lot of Western Civ type places.
I am English. It took me all of like 30 seconds to look up the relevant law using Google. Most of Anglosphere has a definition of Burglary that is essentially the same and I suspect it is the same in Europe.
True, but misleading. There are practical blocks to children drinking alcohol: they can't buy it from shops or bars. In the UK, you can buy it from 18, and you can consume it in a pub/restaurant from 16 but only with a meal and supervised by an adult. In France, you can buy it in bars from 16.
An analogy would be that social media consumed by children is surely less harmful when it's a parent holding their own phone towards a child to show them a few selected photos from their Instagram feed. I doubt most people would object to that, even those that want to ban social media from children.
> In the UK, you can buy it from 18, and you can consume it in a pub/restaurant from 16 but only with a meal and supervised by an adult. In France, you can buy it in bars from 16.
This sounds really strict because of how it's phrase but the legal limit for drinking alcohol in a private space in the UK is 5.
You are severely misreading why people flag posts about that discuss the administration (whether for or against): they are tiresome to read about, and it doesn't lead to productive interesting discussion (which is supposed to be what the vote buttons are for here). Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
There is also a conflict of interest for many in the tech space who browse this forum. Many of the technologies we work on are being abused by this administration.
IE Flock being a ycombinator startup, Ring cameras giving free access to police and others[1], AI systems being used for targeting dissent, ad-services and the data they vacuum up being bought by agencies to build up profiles for dissenting citizens[2]. We've watched this type of technology even be used to target the families of people in warzones to explicitly perform war crimes[3].
This is a forum of people who have effectively built the panopticon but don't enjoy hearing about how the panopticon is being used. Politics is now interwoven into our careers whether we like it or not. There is no pure technology, everything we work on effects the world for better or worse. Pulling the wool over our eyes to pretend there's a pure non-political form of talking about these topics is childish and naive.
> There is also a conflict of interest for many in the tech space who browse this forum. Many of the technologies we work on are being abused by this administration.
Possibly true. Just irrelevant.
I already have far too much exposure to Trump, and I'm not even American. I'd like it not to come up here. You may disagree, and that's fine, but the original question was - why are stories about him flagged. I maintain that the answer, for many people if not nearly all, is simple: ugh, not again.
I understand the instinct to remove "politics" from HN but it's fuzzier than that. There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve with automation, AI, replacing old code bases etc. There was a fascinating discussion about COBOL and what DOGE didn't understand and it immediately got flagged off the front page. Same thing recently with Grok and non-consensual adult content. Folks on HN are well placed to speak knowledgeably about it yet it is instantly voted off the front page.
Difficult not to see it as folks plugging their fingers in their ears. And there are folks on here that are flagging things because they paint the administration in a bad light. There are DOGE folks here, there are Palantir folks, etc. etc., I don't think you can dismiss those motivations even if they aren't true for you personally. I think the core problem is that flagging system is too powerful and too anonymous.
The no politics rule on HN is the equivalent of "the suspect smelled like marijuana so I had probable cause to search his car." -- it gives the moderators a plausible reason to remove content they don't want on here while maintaining an air of legitimacy around the removable because thems the rules.
Donald Trump has threatened to annex my country. Are posts about that political? Sure doesn't seem like it to me. From my persective this subject seems more like an existential threat then a discussion about policy. But I suppose to Americans it is just a matter of policy and politcs.
The incessent posts about Bay Area housing regulations -- political or not? Seems pretty political to me but apparently it isn't?
Sorry, your country potentially being annexed just doesn't spark curious discussion. We've seen this with the other 5 countries that were annexed: just a lot of tiresome complaints and people flagging each other in the comments.
When I'm hiding in my basement from the Patriot Press Gangs, I want to read about the difference between TCP Reno and TCP Tahoe, not about some boring politics.
> There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve
Were there? I just saw people blindly advocating and excusing their incompetence. The discussions were very polarized, not well thought out or supported with evidence, and not remotely productive. At least from what I saw.
> There were great HN-related conversations to be had around DOGE and what it was (purportedly) trying to achieve with automation, AI, replacing old code bases etc
I have a very different impression of those discussions, with more or less half of the comments being flagged and downvoted into oblivion, and the overall mood being very heavy in negativity and hostility.
I would like to see great HN-related conversations. Maybe if they disabled donwvotes and flagging, and did some heavy handed moderation against negativity and hostility. A great conversation depend on a safe environment where people feel free to express their genuine views and opinions.
> Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
I sympathize, relate, and I'm not about to lecture you like some corners of the internet about "the privilege" to try and ignore stuff like this, but it is important to keep stuff like this at the forefront. We continue to experience unprecedented life events.
On the contrary, there's no need whatsoever to even deal with this since it already happens everywhere else, it's not some niche, subtle matter, it's probably the most talked about subject in the last decade.
That doesn't really resonate with me because you could make that argument about anything, _especially since_ most of the items that are posted here are links to other websites. There's no need to talk about it here - you could just talk about it at the relevant site(s) comment section.
No. I'm not saying "There's is some other place", I'm saying "This is everywhere already", and for that reason there is no need for it to be explicitly here. There is by no means whatsoever any shortage of places in which those discussions could take place.
The argument is that it should be everywhere, and I staunchly disagree.
> The argument is that it should be everywhere, and I staunchly disagree.
The argument is that it should be here, and that is a very reasonable stance. There is no shortage of places where anything can be discussed; that's not the point. "Here", there is a certain expectation around how to comment which makes this place a more interesting discussion forum, no matter the topic. That some topics bring out the worst in some people is not a good reason to make the topic verboten, but instead a reason to be more critical of the commentary under those topics.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
That doesn't say "no divisive topics" for a reason. The topics are not what make this place interesting, but instead the rules of engagement are.
I find the political discussions on here interesting and generally of decent+ caliber. Plus so much of what’s happening is tech related / enabled.
There’s 30 posts on the front page. If someone doesn’t care about politics why can’t they just ignore that 1 post instead of flagging it into oblivion?
I agree that HN tends to have better discussion, but I'd argue it tends to have better discussion precisely because it's not the norm, so there's input from the type of people that loathe the current state of Reddit on the matter, and also the type of people that do like yapping about it 24/7 are absent from it.
Second, that justification doesn't make sense because you could just not read the post. There's even a feature to hide it for yourself.
Third, that's not what flagging is for. Per the HN guidelines, posts should be flagged if they're spam or off topic, not if you personally find them tiresome.
There are many topics discussed on HN that I find tiresome to read about. For example, diet and fitness topics. You could swap the comments from one article to another and not even notice.
That's why I stopped reading them.
It's never once occurred to me that I should rather open them up, dive into the comments section, and tell the participants that I'm trying to get away from boring discussions about diet and fitness.
Flagging off news about current events (whether you support the regime or not) is counterproductive to a forum nominally for the startup community. Startup founders need to be aware of the environment they are operating in, so if the current environment is a corrupt fascist authoritarian one then you need to be prepared to operate in that type of business environment. If you now need to bribe certain officials in the regime in order for your startup to succeed, for example, flagging posts about how that's necessary is counterproductive.
> Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
Whilst I sympathise, it's a bit hard to avoid politics on here, when the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley are actively supporting a corrupt administration to line their own pockets.
A statement of fact that will no doubt earn the ire of many tech-bro's.
> they are tiresome to read about, and it doesn't lead to productive interesting discussion (which is supposed to be what the vote buttons are for here). Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
I don't agree. Crypto scams get discussed at length here for days, but when it's a Trump crypto scam, it gets flagged and disappears.
Is this thread not about the administration? The FBI currently acts at the will of the White House / GOP / Trump. Stick your head in the sand all you want, but don't betray the people who are standing up against oppression.
Just in case not, consider whether the short function
Handles a wider range of input conditions than the higher LOC functionreply