MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rendaw | 2025-04-12 09:08:20+00:00
The implication here is appeal to a wider audience _at the expense_ of the existing customer base, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be a tyranny at all.

What I don't get is at some point the marginal user increase for a change has got to be smaller than the number of customers you tick off and lose by changing things.

Is the idea that all services converge on the same N billion people target audience who wants something almost entirely unlike the initial product? I feel like "marginal" doesn't really capture this nuance if so.
by ww520 | 2025-04-12 09:08:35+00:00
May be it's my luck but I found a glaring issue with Gemini 2.5 Pro in AI Studio.

I asked it whether a language feature in Zig was available. It answered yes and proceeded to generate a whole working sample code. I compiled it and got an error. Reported the error and it said the error showed I typed it wrong and asked me to make sure it's typed correctly. Eh?! It's a copy-and-paste. I confirmed again it's wrong. It then said it must be my compiler version was too old. Nope, using the latest. It then said very convincingly that based on its extensively research into the language official documentation, official examples, and release notes, the feature must exist. I asked it to show me the reference materials it used to draw the conclusion. None of links it gave were valid. I told it they were wrong. It gave back another set of links and claimed it had checked the links to make sure they are alive. The links were alive but didn't contain any mention of the feature. I let it know again. It admitted couldn't find the mentioned feature. But it insisted the feature had been merged in a PR. The PR link it gave was unrelated. I let it know. It gave me another 3 PR's and said one mentioned something related so the feature must be in. At the point I gave up.

The issue was that it sounded very convincing and stated "facts" very confidently, with backings to documents and other resources even if they were wrong or irrelevant. Even when told it gave the wrong info, it would double down and made up some BS reference material to back up its claim.
by bawolff | 2025-04-12 09:08:49+00:00
That is not how copyright works. "Inspired" works can still be derrivative. In the US, entirely deterministic works are not considered derrivative works as they aren't considered new creative works (if anything they are considered the same as the original). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...
by jononor | 2025-04-12 09:09:02+00:00
Google is also in a great position wrt distribution - to get users at scale, and attach to pre-existing revenue streams. Via Android, Gmail, Docs, Search - they have a lot of reach. YouTube as well, though fit there is maybe less obvious. Combined with the two factors you mention, and the size of their warchest - they are really excellently positioned.
by fabian2k | 2025-04-12 09:09:21+00:00
They're not saving money so far, they have been spending more money than the government spent in 2024. And in those cases where they will spend less they also did enormous damage, e.g. cancelling clinical trials midway through. This is pure destruction, not efficiency.

And your woke argument is a pure strawman. What were those extreme positions by Kamala Harris?
by consumer451 | 2025-04-12 09:09:28+00:00
There is no need to get left/right political here. There are two political parties in the USA, and they both hit the feedback loop of $crack. One might have led to low-trust faster than the other, but they are both $crack addicts in the end.

Just to be clear as to what this means in politics on the ground... left or right, if you have a political position which disagrees with the biggest money, they will primary you. So, left or right, generally speaking, you only see politicians finally standing up for their morals when they are no longer up for election. The most obvious recent example of this is Mitch McConnell.
by Arn_Thor | 2025-04-12 09:10:35+00:00
Yep! I’m digitally literate but can’t do anything more advanced than “hello world”. Never had the time or really interest in learning programming.

In the last year I’ve built scripts and even full fledged apps with GUIs to solve a number of problems and automate a bunch of routine tasks at work and in my hobbies. It feels like I woke up with a superpower.

And I’ve learned a ton too, about how the plumbing works, but I still can’t write code on my own. That makes me useful but dependent on the AI.
by DmitryGrankin | 2025-04-12 09:12:03+00:00
Building tools that analyze meetings (sales coaching, AI agents, user research, compliance recording, etc.)? Real-time transcription infrastructure is complex to build & scale (meeting bots, streaming, multi-platform support...). We offer Vexa: an open-source (Apache 2.0) API designed to be the transcription infrastructure layer. Our v0.2 release provides a simple API to send bots to Google Meet and get live transcripts. Focus on your product's core value, not the transcription plumbing. Let Vexa handle the infra. Build faster, own the stack (eventually, self-hostable). Try the Cloud API Beta: https://api.dev.vexa.ai/pricing Explore the Open Source Code: https://github.com/Vexa-ai/vexa Could this simplify your build? Happy to discuss integration ideas.
by b112 | 2025-04-12 09:12:15+00:00
I don't think all artists are treating this tool as such an existential threat.

You cannot find any group, where "all" is true in such context. There's always an element of outlier.

That said, you're not really an artist if you direct someone else to paint. Imagine a scenario where you sit back, and ask someone to paint an oil painting for you. During the event, you sit in an easy chair, watch them with easel and brush, and provide direction "I want clouds", "I want a dark background". The person does so.

You're not the artist.

All this AI blather is the same. At best, you're a fashion designer. Arranging things in a pleasant way.
by mthiim | 2025-04-12 09:12:18+00:00
I imagine G.H. Hardy might be like: e is the unique base of a logarithm function, ln(n), so so that the average distance between prime numbers less than n, converges proportionally towards ln(n) - the ratio between ln(n) and the actual average distance between primes < n converges to 1 as n goes to infinity.
by bravetraveler | 2025-04-12 09:12:22+00:00
Throwaways/virtual cards are my default state. If it's worth subscribing, it's worth the seconds it takes to generate and copy.

Think about it: you're in control. Not being at the mercy of... whoever is great. You said it yourself: attempt.

Why play with your money? The toys/experiences it can afford are way more fun.

Chargebacks are more effort, and IIRC, weigh negatively on you as well. Can only do so many. I expect your bank would take issue if you really relied on this strategy.

Painful to unsub? How terrible for them. I can be painful to bill. PLONK says the pause button.

Learned everything I needed to know from gyms. If they don't take a virtual card, but want bank details/etc... they're on some bullshit. Pass.
by dsq | 2025-04-12 09:12:33+00:00
The question is what you mean by highly valuable. The sad truth is that in most workplaces many just coast along doing only what's necessary to not get fired. In which case doing your job more efficiently might draw negative attention (tall poppy syndrome).

Having said that, I think that having a good (both broad and deep) knowledge of the database schemas is invaluable for almost any information related role. Also, being able to manipulate large text very quickly (with vi/sed/awk, let's say), is useful for production emergency debugging on servers.
by somesortofthing | 2025-04-12 09:12:45+00:00
Layoffs in particular are like this because they're planned very quickly by very small groups of people. Rumors of impending layoffs obliterate morale, so the people in charge do everything they can to maintain secrecy and minimize the time between people hearing about layoffs and the layoffs taking effect. This basically always translates to random-seeming decisions - priority 1 is to cut costs by X amount, choosing the right people to cut is secondary. This means that, for example, engineers that have received performance-based raises are punished since, on paper, they do the same job as lower-performing but lower-paid engineers.

Not defending the process(the right way to break this equilibrium is statutory requirements for layoffs a la the WARN act) but that's why you see the outcomes you do.
by rvz | 2025-04-12 09:13:25+00:00
The replies to your comment are hilarious.

Here we have people defending politicians from benefiting from insider information and attempting to split hairs in what is the difference between Pelosi and Trump.

There isn't any.

There is no difference in them knowing something ahead of you and they may have already traded that ahead of the event. (and you copying it very late when the move has already happened).

They benefit, you do not.
by throw1223323 | 2025-04-12 09:13:27+00:00
Based on his interview with Joe Rogan, he has absolutely no imagination about what it means if humans actually manage to build general AI. Rogan basically ends up introducting him to some basic ideas about transhumanism.

To me, he is a finance bro grifter who lucked into his current position. Without Ilya he would still be peddling WorldCoin.
by I_complete_me | 2025-04-12 09:13:45+00:00
FYI

yack n 1: noisy talk [syn: {yak}, {yack}, {yakety-yak}, {chatter}, {cackle}]

v 1: talk incessantly and tiresomely [syn: {yack}, {jaw}, {yack away}, {rattle on}, {yap away}]
by ff4 | 2025-04-12 09:13:50+00:00
Google offering Gemini 2.5 Pro for free, enough to ditch OpenAI, reminds me of an old tactic.

Microsoft gained control in the '90s by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows for free, undercutting Netscape’s browser. This leveraged Windows’ dominance to make Explorer the default choice, sidelining competitors and capturing the browser market. By 1998, Netscape’s share plummeted, and Microsoft controlled access to the web.

Free isn’t generous—it’s strategic. Google’s hooking you into their ecosystem, betting you’ll build on their tools and stay. It feels like a deal, but it’s a moat. They’re not selling the model; they’re buying your loyalty.
by ArinaS | 2025-04-12 09:14:12+00:00
> this article confuses an absence of "heated arguments" with a lack of constructive, critical discussions.

Doesn't the article refute exactly this point of view? In "The hidden cost of “nice” teams" section:

"Those teams weren’t actually harmonious—they were conflict-avoidant. The disagreements still existed; they just went underground."
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-12 09:15:39+00:00
> Sitcoms would be perfect for streaming companies but non of them seem to get that for some reason.

The second longest (by episode count) non-animated, scripted original series at Netflix is a sitcom, The Upshaws. I’m not aware of any streaming service that doesn't do original sitcoms.

I’m not convinced, though, that sitcoms are all that great a fit for streaming—I don't think any genre other than maybe talk shows has been more dependent for initial launch on pre-streaming broadcast/cable viewership habits and viewing block placement to catch people already watching already-successful similarly targeted shows.
by MortyWaves | 2025-04-12 09:16:04+00:00
I’ve been trying to make friends, it’s hard as an introvert. Tried a few times online to meet a wider group of people but as per other comments here people often “ghost” or don’t return the effort I’ve tried to put in.

I absolutely feel moving around as a child a dozen times meant I never formed any lasting friendships from schools, which then had knock on effects in college, and then university.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-04-12 09:16:51+00:00
What's missing as information here, is how often this kind of big bets happen. It's only showing some anecdotical data on 2 days from 2008 and 2009.

I believe he's right, but would just like some more proof that it's really extraordinarily rare to place such a big bets, especially on 0DTEs (which I believe did not exist in 2008).
by throwanem | 2025-04-12 09:17:07+00:00
You ask what I find unconvincing. I'm happy to further oblige you:

> His male characters typically fall into one of two cartoonish camps: either supremely confident, talented, intelligent and independent (e.g. Jubal, Bernardo, Mannie, Bonforte...) or vaguely pathetic and stupid (e.g. moon men). His female characters are submissive, clumsily sexualised objects who contribute very little to the plot. There are a few partial exceptions - e.g. Lorenzo in Double Star and female pilots in Starship Troopers - but the general atmosphere is one of teenage boy wish fulfilment.

"Cartoonish." "Pathetic." "Stupid." "Submissive." "Clumsily sexualized." "Teenage boy." 'Moon men' - you mean Loonies? And this all was you yesterday [1]. How far do you really expect to get with this farcical pantomime of sweet reason now? I ask again: What's changed?

This all began when I said you obviously hadn't read what you claimed to have [2], and it got so far up your nose you couldn't help going and proving me right. You've made a lot more bad decisions since then, but don't worry: I'll keep reminding you as long as you show you need me to that you can amend your behavior at any time.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43651479

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43649293
by _7acn | 2025-04-12 09:17:39+00:00
In my country, what Adobe is doing is punishable by imprisonment for a period of 6 months to 8 years. Yet, for some reason, they operate in this market without the slightest problem.

“Whoever, with the intention of obtaining financial gain, causes another person to enter into a financially disadvantageous arrangement, or otherwise dispose of their own or someone else’s assets, by means of deception, or by exploiting a mistake or their inability to understand the nature of the action undertaken, shall be liable to imprisonment for a period of 6 months to 8 years”
by netcan | 2025-04-12 09:17:49+00:00
> there's a limit on how much you can charge people for subscription fees. I think soon people expect this service to be provided for free and ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.

So... I don't think this is certain. A surprising number of people pay for the ChatGPT app and/or competitors. It's be a >$10bn business already. Could maybe be a >$100bn business long term.

Meanwhile... making money from online ads isn't trivial. When the advertising model works well (eg search/adwords), it is a money faucet. But... it can be very hard to get that money faucet going. No guarantees that Google discover a meaningful business model here... and the innovators' dilema is strong.

Also, Google don't have a great history of getting new businesses up and running regardless of tech chops and timing. Google were pioneers to cloud computing... but amazon and MSFT built better businesses.

At this point, everyone is assuming AI will resolve to a "winner-take-most" game that is all about network effect, scale, barriers to entry and such. Maybe it isn't. Or... maybe LLMs themselves are commodities like ISPs.

The actual business models, at this point, aren't even known.
by gabesullice | 2025-04-12 09:18:04+00:00
This feels ill advised and I don't believe that HTTP streaming was designed with this pattern in mind

Perhaps I'm wrong, but I believe HTTP streaming is for chunking large blobs. I worry that if you use this pattern and treat streaming like a pub/sub mechanism, you'll regret it. HTTP intermediaries don't expect this traffic pattern (e.g., NGINX, CloudFlare, etc.). And I suspect every time your WiFi connection drops while the stream is open, the fetch API will raise an error as if the request failed.

However, I agree you probably don't need WebSockets for many of the ways they're used—server-sent events are a simpler solution for many situations where people reach for WebSockets... It's a shame SSEs never received the same fanfare.
by pabs3 | 2025-04-12 09:19:36+00:00
The Bootstrappable Builds folks created a way to go from only an MBR of (commented) machine code (plus a ton of source) all the way up to a Linux distro. The stagex folks built on top of that towards OCI containers.

https://stagex.tools/ https://bootstrappable.org/ https://lwn.net/Articles/983340/
by curiousObject | 2025-04-12 09:19:51+00:00
I assume because they knew they’d literally get only one shot. So imaging more of the nearby surface was the best use of that opportunity, for doing science.

The Soviets had already landed a probe on Mars, which sent back the top few lines of a picture of the sky and then stopped scanning down, and died. So they must have not wanted a repeat of that disappointment!

Probably, on Venus, the bandwidth and sensor tech just weren’t enough for it to be possible to get more pixels in the time available? So they concentrated the effort on the nearest rocks

Sadly that does make the photos visually sort of unimpressive, unlike all the splendid panoramic views America’s Viking probes took of Mars. (Where the lander wasn’t being pressure cooked and acid-etched in 20 minutes)
by labster | 2025-04-12 09:20:33+00:00
I agree, but I would also like to add that the Republican Party is not a conservative party, either. Trump brags about raising taxes on so many imports. And the current administration never saw a Chesterton’s fence they didn’t want to tear down. The party as a whole seems to be pretty happy with it.

So that’s America, no options if you want to vote for a liberal party or a conservative party.
by sethammons | 2025-04-12 09:20:44+00:00
> (regulated) external valuation

Is that not the SEC and Generally Accepted Accounting Principals (GAAP)?

> Have a limit on how frequently a company can get revalued (months).

Is that not quarterly reports and earnings filings?

> Do everything possible to make it a long term investment tool and not something that can be easily gamed

Your suggestion was to delete it. One suggestion I've heard is to increase the transaction price, and marginally increase it with trading volume by the given actor. Micro-transactions become too expensive to be profitable.
by bonestamp2 | 2025-04-12 09:21:01+00:00
Not to mention, some major parts of the websocket API have been broken in Google Chrome for over two years now.

Chrome no longer fires Close or Error events when a websocket disconnects (well, at least not when they happen, they get fired about 10 minutes later!). So, your application won't know for 10 minutes that the connection has been severed (unless the internet connection is also lost, but that isn't always the case when a websocket is disconnected).

Here's the chrome bug:

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/362210027?pli=1

From that bug report it looks like the Chrome bug is less than a year old, but the Chrome bug is originally mentioned here in April 2023 for a similar bug in iOS (the iOS bug has been resolved):

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75869629/ios-websocket-c...

I kind of suspect Chrome is actually doing this intentionally. I believe they do this so a tab can recover from background sleep without firing a websocket close event. That's helpful in some cases, but it's a disaster in other cases, and it doesn't matter either way... it breaks the specification for how websockets are expected to work. WebSockets should always fire Close and Error events immediately when they occur.
Ask HN: Why do so many devs struggle with launching their own product?
by zigcBenx | 2025-04-12 09:21:02+00:00
I’ve talked to dozens of developers who can build incredible things, but few know how to market, sell, or validate an idea.

Why is that? And what are the most helpful resources or habits that helped you make the jump from code to business?

I recently put together a site on this topic: https://fromcodetobusiness.benxlabs.com – it’s a lead magnet + waitlist for a deeper guide. But first, I want to learn more from the community.

What advice would you give your past self before launching your first product?
by Userrr | 2025-04-12 09:21:23+00:00
That’s a fair point, and I get where you're coming from. By “highly valuable,” I meant consistently making a meaningful impact—whether that’s through solving key problems, improving processes, or just being someone others can rely on. But yeah, you're right—sometimes doing more than the norm can backfire in certain environments. I guess the goal is to be valuable and strategic—knowing when to push and when to hold back depending on the culture.
by eastbound | 2025-04-12 09:21:36+00:00
I’ll candidly assume that this is not a rhetorical question aimed at making me pass as a spoiled child, as is frequent with leftism:

- AOC, known as “the squad” (!), has claimed the Congress has too many white males. President Macron said the same about the US tech sector, and he’s not even part of the extremists, so this issue permeates society. Basically everyone says white men should be fewer of them. This is a direct threat.

- Feminism was supposed to give women more place at work and give family a better representation of both genders at home. What happened: Men can’t apply for some jobs anymore; while men are assumed to not merit to see the children by default at home. This has been going on since the 1980 in every developed country, moreso in France and US, a little less in Sweden. Judges and lawyer family courts are often 100%-women (80.2% in the profession).

- We helped women when they were 38% of the university students. But they crossed the 50% in 1990. Men now represent 39% of university students. Do we help them? No, we drop help programs. And Sweden also dropped equality programs the moment men were in need.

This is what various groups have been militanting for years, but they were harassed into submission by the left (from Facebook’s pro-left censorship at the time, to directly burning their cars or killing their dogs, and of course cancelling conference centers for men support groups which they presented as extremists - which is true, men are angry).

How is Trump helping?

- His program basis is based on a meritocratic econonic theory (that does not favour women, which is all the left complains about), but, granted, elected presidents generally implement another program, and Trump isn’t helping much,

- Men thrive in both meritocracies and in the wilderness/lawlessness, because they work more. To this, Trump has choosen the latter. The more economic crisis there is is, the weaker the government, and the more women will need men. Given the left’s program is “let’s take men’s/white’s people money”, the scorched earth is the best situation.

Granted, it would be nicer if leftists didn’t hate white men’s guts so much that they could listen to them when they make reasonable demands such as equity in family courts or meritocracy at the workplace. Barring being sensible…
by dtquad | 2025-04-12 09:22:13+00:00
Google is the primary target for current US anti-big-tech sentiments that are getting political traction with Lina Khan and Steve Bannon teaming up at a recent conference against US Big Tech companies. J.D. Vance has also expressed that he agrees with Lina Khan and Steve Bannon and would like to see US Big Tech companies like Google be forcibly split up.

What will happen with Google's AI wing when Google inevitably gets split up in the next 4-8 years?