MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-04-03 22:45:39+00:00
> "...so printouts of code would be thrown in trash. And that's where Bill Gates found the source code for Basic interpreter, which he ported and it became the first Microsoft product"

Both sources you link to say Allen and Gates pulled listings of the PDP-10 operating system out (probably DEC's TOPS-10?) of the trash. BASIC is not an operating system. So your claim is debunked by your own sources.

"...digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."

https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

"...He and Bill would go “dumpster diving” in C-Cubed’s garbage to find discarded printouts with source code for the machine’s operating system..."

https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx
by brightlancer | 2025-04-03 22:45:47+00:00
This is such a great contrast:

> But they vote a straight blue ticket because that's what they learned to do back in the 1960s.

and

> but still votes red because she was raised in a religious household and came of age during the peak of the right's lean toward peddling to christians.

There's no explanation for why the old man votes "blue" other than he learned it in the 60s. OTOH, the woman votes "red" because "she was raised in a religious household" and started voting when The Right was "peddling to christians".

"peddling" -- that's a pretty negative term.

I don't know if it's ironic or demonstrative that an article about how difficult it can be to have political conversations produces a comment thread with such biased viewpoints.
by stkai | 2025-04-03 22:45:48+00:00
The source code is such a fun read (for the comments). I found some source code for GW-BASIC, and here are two of my favorites:

;WE COULD NOT FIT THE NUMBER INTO THE BUFFER DESPITE OUR VALIENT ;EFFORTS WE MUST POP ALL THE CHARACTERS BACK OFF THE STACK AND ;POP OFF THE BEGINNING BUFFER PRINT LOCATION AND INPUT A "%" SIGN THERE ;CONSTANTS FOR THE RANDOM NUMBER GENERATOR FOLLOW ;DO NOT CHANGE THESE WITHOUT CONSULTING KNUTH VOL 2 ;CHAPTER 3 FIRST

Edit: GW-BASIC, not QBASIC (https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC)
by santiagobasulto | 2025-04-03 22:46:30+00:00
Microsoft (and maybe even Bill Gates personally) generated a strong "dislike" sentiment to the hacker community. But we can't deny that he and Paul Allen were pure breed hackers and helped a lot the development of technology. Of course, we all prefer OSS and we'd pick Linus (or insert OSS dev name here) 100 times over one of the "evil capitalists"/s, but nevertheless they have to be recognized.
by rpdillon | 2025-04-03 22:46:44+00:00
This position suggests that there was no progress before we had copyright. I think you're vastly overstating the power of the incentives we've set up to drive creative behavior, and even with your caveats I think you're overstating their efficacy. Copyright and patents have done more to consolidate wealth within middleman industries that aggregate these properties than they have to enrich the actual creatives doing the work, as it is with all systems. For every system we put in place to reward behavior that we enjoy, the system always benefits those that choose to game the system more than those that were originally intended to be rewarded.

And the results are observable empirically: very few people are told by anyone that's been out in the world that they should choose to become a writer or an inventor, because writers and inventors simply don't make that much money. The system you claim is so necessary seems to be completely failing in its core mission.

For example, take a look at writers making a decent living on a platform like Substack. Copyright is literally doing nothing for them. People can freely copy their substack and post it everywhere online. The value is that the platform provides a centralized location for people to follow the person's writing, and to build a community around it. In cases where artists and inventors have become rich, I look at the mechanism behind it, and often it's an accident that had nothing to do with intellectual property rights at all.
by jason_pomerleau | 2025-04-03 22:46:53+00:00
> If they could, Disney would scan your brain to charge you a nickel every time you thought of Mickey Mouse.

This reminds me of Tom Scott’s “Welcome to Life: The Singularity, Ruined by Lawyers” [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
by zabzonk | 2025-04-03 22:47:15+00:00
Yes, well Scott McNealy will never be my idea of a brilliant man. Or Sun of a particularly good company - where are they now?

I remember one investment bank I worked for, starting:

IT tech: Would you like a Sun workstation?

Me: Nope, I would like a top of range Windows PC, with two or more screens.

IT tech: Yeah, OK, all the traders say that too. We're throwing those Suns in the dumpster.
by m463 | 2025-04-03 22:47:40+00:00
> what Trump will say tomorrow

I'm trying to figure out what the real story is.

When I read this I wonder if everything is a negotiating tactic:

"Trading partners have repeatedly blocked multilateral and plurilateral solutions, including in the context of new rounds of tariff negotiations and efforts to discipline non-tariff barriers."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/regu... (wow, long url)
by aibot923 | 2025-04-03 22:48:11+00:00
The F-35 does work, and is deployed around the world right now including the middle east for the recent houthi operations.

National debt is absolutely a problem when interest payments crowd out the rest of your budget. Interest payments currently comprise about 17% of the budget, and this is set to grow. Those can only be paid with taxes or inflation, both of which hit joe taxpayer.
by jonnycoder | 2025-04-03 22:48:29+00:00
I think experiences vary. AI can work well with greenfield projects, small features, and helping solve annoying problems. I've tried using it on a large Python Django codebase and it works really well if I ask for help with a particular function AND I give it an example to model after for code consistency.

But I have also spent hours asking Claude and ChatGPT with help trying to solve several annoying Django problems and I have reached the point multiple times where they circle back and give me answers that did not previously work in the same context window. Eventually when I figure out the issue, I have fun and ask it "well does it not work as expected because the existing code chained multiple filter calls in django?" and all of a sudden the AI knows what is wrong! To be fair, there was only one sentence in the django documentation that mentions not chaining filter calls on many to many relationships.
by varenc | 2025-04-03 22:48:52+00:00
Nice! I still use Greasemonkey and love it.

Relatedly, I have a greasemonkey script[1] that makes Snapchat on web much more usable. I just updated it to include this video fixer logic so now it's easy to scrobble videos and download them.

It uses the MutationObserver API to immediately 'fix' any <video> element added to the page. Really I should just copy you and make a version of it that just does the video fixing but runs on every site. It's crazy how browsers have a nice built in pro-user video element, but that every site intentionally overrides and degrades it...

edit: I went ahead and turned this into a greasemonkey script as well: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/531780-universal-video-fix...

[1] https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/468156-unbreak-snapchat-we...
by smallmancontrov | 2025-04-03 22:49:42+00:00
He does talk about comparative advantage, though. Extensively. The bit about Ricardo's precondition is absolutely wild and I'm more than a little scandalized by the fact that it wasn't discussed when I took econ in school. Not to mention the history with Alexander Hamilton.

Are you sure you didn't just read the link? If you want a book-sized argument, you need to read the book, or at least listen to it.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-03 22:50:01+00:00
I don't believe this is correct. Homomorphic encryption enables computation on encrypted data without needing to decrypt it.

You can't use the result of that computation without first decrypting it though. And you can't decrypt it without the key. So what you describe regarding memory addresses is merely garden variety obfuscation.

Unmasking an obfuscated set of allowable address ranges for hashing given an arbitrary binary is certainly a difficult problem. However as you point out it is easily sidestepped.

You are also mistaken about anti-cheat measures. The ones that pose the most difficulty primarily rely on kernel mode drivers. Even then, without hardware attestation it's "just" an obfuscation effort that raises the bar to make breaking it more time consuming.

What you're actually witnessing there is that if a sufficient amount of effort is invested in obfuscation and those efforts carried out continuously in order to regularly change the obfuscation then you can outstrip the ability of the other party to keep up with you.
by Retric | 2025-04-03 22:50:25+00:00
You’re missing two important points.

Gold mining alone has basically zero impact on Caterpillar’s R&D into EV mining equipment. The mining industry mines vastly more copper, iron, tin, etc ore and gold is at such low concentrations it’s basically indistinguishable from other types of mining until chemical separation.

If nobody was holding gold as a store of value there’d be a glut of gold for industry and ~zero gold mining the next ~hundred years. Holding gold ultimately means mining sooner not later.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-03 22:51:57+00:00
> I feel like one could delete almost all comments from that project without losing any information

I far from a heavy LLM coder but I’ve noticed a massive excess of unnecessary comments in most output. I’m always deleting the obvious ones.

But then I started noticing that the comments seem to help the LLM navigate additional code changes. It’s like a big trail of breadcrumbs for the LLM to parse.

I wouldn’t be surprised if vibe coders get trained to leave the excess comments in place.
by EGreg | 2025-04-03 22:53:22+00:00
You mean half of all AI products?

The ones trained to clone anyone’s voice for example. Oh sure, those vibrators and wand massagers were marketed for medical purposes too. But we all know how 99% will be used…

It’s just that we are all powerless to stop it because our entire society is based around competition, especially at the nation-state level.
by egypturnash | 2025-04-03 22:53:31+00:00
Getting the megacorporations to sit up and take notice of this is about the only way the average independent artist has any hope of stopping this crap from destroying half our jobs. What'm I gonna do, sue OpenAI? Sam Altman makes more money sitting on the toilet taking a dump than I do in an entire year.

I have no love for the Mouse but if I can get them and the image slop-mongers to fight then that's absoutely fine. It would be nice to have a functioning, vibrant public domain but it is also nice to not have some rich asshole insisting that all copyright laws must be ignored because if they properly licensed even a fraction of what they've consumed then it would be entirely too expensive to train their glorified autocomplete databases on the entire fucking internet for the purpose of generating even more garbage "content" designed to keep your attention when you're mindlessly scrolling their attention farms, regardless of how it makes you feel, and if I can choose one or the other then I am totally behind the Mouse.
by fragmede | 2025-04-03 22:54:04+00:00
yeah we should abolish copyright and make it so that creators get paid for every eyeball that's looking at your content. first, we establish a total panopticon. and then you get paid when people engage with your content, like, the system records that a person watches your movie, doesn't matter how they got a copy of your movie, but this person watches your movie, and that watch gets sent into the system and you get paid out from it. no more copyright, just horribly invasive tracking of everything everywhere. Call it copythrough.

That would never work, but like writing sci-fi.
by nine_k | 2025-04-03 22:54:10+00:00
So, you would like an AI that can reasonably answer questions about various aspects of human culture, or at least to take said culture into account? At the same time, you want it to not use the most obvious, most relevant examples from the culture, because they are somehow verboten, and a less relevant, completely made-up character should be presented instead? Come on, computes have logic. If you ask the machine to produce a picture of a man who was sent to humans to save them, then was executed, and after that came back alive, who do you think the machine should show you, for Christ's sake?

Picture-based industries had a mild shock when "Photoshop" kind of software became widely available. Remixing visuals in ways that the copyright holders won't approve of became equally widespread. Maybe that added some grey hairs to the heads of some industry execs, the sky has not fallen. I suppose the same is going to happen this time around.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-03 22:54:15+00:00
That seems… like, fine, right? Who cares? Most games do skill-based matchmaking anyway, so if players are using cheats to play at higher but still human skill levels, they’ll just get boosted up to higher ranks.

The main issue, I guess, is they’ll have lopsided aiming proficiency (due to the boost) vs game knowledge. But that’s basically a crapshoot anyway in mass-market “competitive” gaming.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-03 22:54:31+00:00
What do you think that 10% of budget is paying for that the university is spending on? It's more or less paying for the building and all that goes into it for the research that the NIH called for grant proposals to happen in. This is the entire idiocy about indirect benefits. Yes, paying for the building is not spending money directly on research. But you can't exactly do lab work without a lab building you know.
by evanelias | 2025-04-03 22:54:39+00:00
There are a few stand-alone declarative Postgres tools available, including Stripe's pg-schema-diff [1], Tusker [2] which wraps Migra [3], and sqldef [4] which supports multiple DBMS.

For sake of completeness for users of other databases: for SQLite check out stb-tester's migrator [5], and last but not least for MySQL/MariaDB there's my tool Skeema [6].

[1] https://github.com/stripe/pg-schema-diff

[2] https://github.com/bikeshedder/tusker

[3] https://github.com/djrobstep/migra

[4] https://github.com/sqldef/sqldef/

[5] https://david.rothlis.net/declarative-schema-migration-for-s...

[6] https://github.com/skeema/skeema
by Tade0 | 2025-04-03 22:55:04+00:00
> for an electric guitar, a triangle wave

That is only true when the string is plucked exactly at the middle - not a regular occurrence. Usually it's more of a sawtooth wave, just without the upper harmonics.

My experience with distortion in guitars is that a huge component here is how different it can sound depending on articulation. Some pieces for example require the player to not alternate their picking, but pluck only in one direction, as the difference is audible.

This is not always the case of course as some amplifiers like those made by Mesa Boogie get their signature tone by exploiting the limited gain-bandwidth product(GBP) of amplifiers, creating an even sound that at the high end of the gain setting is largely without dynamics.

In some cases(like the BOSS DS-1) the manufacturer killed the sound by introducing a technically better amplifier chip - the original had somewhat poor GBP and poor settling time, which in combination produced a nice lowpass filter with a resonance peak at the cutoff frequency, which in turn emphasized articulation.

It's all a surprisingly huge topic.
by gosub100 | 2025-04-03 22:55:21+00:00
I said it because it's a dirty trick used by one side to make people think there's a crisis. When are you going to declare the problem solved? When every single living breathing human being conforms to your world view? Your argument is that someone, somewhere, said something terrible. Why even say it then? If course some people out of 8bn will have extremist views or utterances. Is that really a surprise?
by eurleif | 2025-04-03 22:56:09+00:00
I'm curious what would happen if Wikipedia tried to sign up for a $200/month Cloudflare plan and use it for all their content. In theory, that would be consistent with Cloudflare's ToS; and while there have been examples of Cloudflare sales reps trying to pressure customers with larger bandwidth needs to spend more, executives have said (including in comments here on Hacker News) that those sales reps were acting against policy, and that unlimited bandwidth really does mean unlimited.
by IgorPartola | 2025-04-03 22:56:50+00:00
This would be more like if you reimplemented Windows from scratch if you have violated copyright law.

Let’s put it another way: if you decide you want to recreate Indiana Jones shot for shot, and you hire actors and a director etc. which individuals are actually responsible for the copyright collation? Do caterers count too? Or is it the person who actually is producing the movie?
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-03 22:57:06+00:00
Lower economic strata doesn't take on debt, they get aid and free rides, cherry work study jobs to put some money in the pocket too. It is the middle class or upper middle class that insists in eschewing their state school benefit for a more or less comparable school in another state (or without favorable scholarship and aid package) that take the brunt of the loans.
by II2II | 2025-04-03 22:57:58+00:00
> That Disney Corp can prevent you from viewing some collection of pixels, because THEY own it

A world without copyright is just as problematic as a world with copyright. With copyright, you run into the problem of excessive control. This wasn't too much of a problem in the past. If you bought a book, record, or video recording, you owned that particular copy. You could run into disagreeable situations because you didn't own the rights, but it was difficult to prevent anyone from from viewing a work once it had been published. (Of course, modern copyright laws and digitial distribution has changed that.)

On the flip side, without copyright, it would be far easier for others to exploit (or even take credit) for the work of another person without compensation or recourse. Just look at those AI "generated" images, or any website that blatently rips off the content created by another person. There is no compensation. Heck, there isn't even credit. Worse yet, the parties misrepresenting the content are doing their best to monetize it. Even authors who are more than willing to give their work away have every right to feel exploited under those circumstances. And all of that is happening with copyright laws, where there is the opportunity for recourse if you have the means and the will.
by dekhn | 2025-04-03 22:58:02+00:00
I think it comes from a misread of the text in the gates interview linked in the comment:

"r. We were moving ahead very rapidly: BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP, PDP-10 machine language, digging out the operating system listings from the trash and studying those. Really not just banging away to find bugs like monkeys[laughs], but actually studying the code to see what was wrong."

My understanding is that they saw the source implementation for other BASICs (on mainframes or whatever they were called at the time) but their code is mostly their own. Few if any programmers spring fully-formed from the head of zeus (although paul allen was close) and plenty of valuable intellectual property was originally created elsewhere.
by kypro | 2025-04-03 22:58:55+00:00
> and probably revolution

I theorise that revolution would be near-impossible in post-AGI world. If people consider where power comes from it's relatively obvious that people will likely suffer and die on mass if we ever create AGI.

Historically the general public have held the vast majority of power in society. 100+ years ago this would have been physical power – the state has to keep you happy or the public will come for them with pitchforks. But in an age of modern weaponry the public today would be pose little physical threat to the state.

Instead in todays democracy power comes from the publics collective labour and purchasing power. A government can't risk upsetting people too much because a government's power today is not a product of its standing army, but the product of its economic strength. A government needs workers to create businesses and produce goods and therefore the goals of government generally align with the goals of the public.

But in an post-AGI world neither businesses or the state need workers or consumers. In this world if you want something you wouldn't pay anyone for it or workers to produce it for you, instead you would just ask your fleet of AGIs to get you the resource.

In this world people become more like pests. They offer no economic value yet demand that AGI owners (wherever publicly or privately owned) share resources with them. If people revolted any AGI owner would be far better off just deploying a bioweapon to humanely kill the protestors rather than sharing resources with them.

Of course, this is assuming the AGI doesn't have it's own goals and just sees the whole of humanely as nuance to be stepped over in the same way humans will happy step over animals if they interfere with our goals.

Imo humanity has 10-20 years left max if we continue on this path. There can be no good outcome of AGI because it would even make sense for the AGI or those who control the AGI to be aligned with goals of humanity.
by salgernon | 2025-04-03 22:58:57+00:00
OSINT (not a term I was particularly familiar with, personally) actually goes back quite a ways[1]. Software certainly makes aggregating the information easier to accumulate and finding signal in the noise, but bad security practices do far more to make that information accessible.

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16161262.2023.2...
by dahauns | 2025-04-03 22:59:02+00:00
>Every hardware vendor has problems.

Yeah, and I explicitly stated that this isn't what I was criticizing.

>The difference is that Apple, after enough pressure, actually fixes things. They create repair programs, offer recalls, and have the infrastructure to make things right. Most vendors don’t.

Which simply is bullshit.

I don't know why you feel the need for a play-by-play - I know, I was affected by several of them. And every single one of them was Apple reacting only after prolonged active denial and deflection culminating in lawsuits. There's nothing to defend here. That's shitty service.

Kinda sad that that you feel the need to bring random other issues into the mix (Coil Whine, really? LOL, remember the MBP "Moo"?) coupled with outright lies (of course HP issued recall programs - for both the NVidia GPUs and the batteries).

>The service experience isn’t perfect, but it exists. With most other vendors, you’re stuck mailing your device to a third-party contractor who might show up late and leave you worse off.

No, with serious vendors, you're not. It seems you've never experienced real business on-site service. (And yes, it was still cheaper than AppleCare.) Compare that to wondering with every visit at the service center whether your problem will even be acknowledged as such or you're gonna be gaslit. (And I'm speaking from experience.)

> But pretending they’re worse than companies who ghost their customers when things go wrong doesn’t line up with reality.

Neither does pretending that's all that exists (or even being close to the norm with high-end gear).