MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jl6 | 2025-04-04 11:23:48+00:00
Actually I think long tail revenue is quite well correlated with a property being a hit. Netflix paid $500m for the rights to Seinfeld 20 years after the show ended. Star Wars is still huge, nearly 50 years after the release of the original. Disney in general has ruthlessly mined its back catalog; they just printed another $700m from a Lion King prequel, whose value lay largely in the good will still hanging over from the original, which they still own, and which is still absolutely a valuable asset despite being 30 years old. Back catalogs are huge deals. Amazon paid $8bn for MGM to boost its Prime Video content library. Streaming has opened up long tail revenue opportunities beyond the box office that never existed before.
by kelnos | 2025-04-04 11:23:58+00:00
Xennial here, too, and I muse about this often. I don't think I'd ever framed it quite like you have, that I'm a part of the last group of people who don't have our youthful misdeeds immortalized on the internet. That's a big one, to be sure.

But I do think of other aspects. People born from the late '90s onward don't really know a world without the WWW, and don't (or barely) remember a world without smartphones and tablets. They don't remember a time before texting. A time when you had to plan ahead if you wanted to meet your friends somewhere, and if something went wrong, it was difficult to communicate to figure out what was going on.

They don't remember when getting computers to do things was hard. When it was common to build your own machine from parts, and when you'd almost always upgrade parts in your existing computer instead of buying a new one. They don't remember when laptops were a luxury, and when people instead brought pencil and paper to class so they could take notes. They don't remember floppy disks, and many don't remember CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, or their burnable counterparts.

They don't remember printing out directions, and not having GPS navigation in their pockets. They don't remember having to use paper maps, and actually plan out routes ahead of time for any non-trivial car trip.

They don't remember CRT TVs in classrooms, or "portable" film projectors. They don't remember slides or overhead projectors or microfilm. They don't remember bulky camcorders that recorded to VHS tapes. Everything is high definition for them. Many younger folks have never seen a music CD or cassette tape; ironically many have seen vinyl since it's become retro-popular again.

Certainly there are things that we don't (or barely) remember, like "party line" phones and black-and-white-only TVs. But man, it seems like there was an unusually huge burst of technological progress while we were growing up.
by bgro | 2025-04-04 11:24:18+00:00
Chrome developers keep adding unhinged complicated “features” that nobody wants or asked for and immediately are abused and broken.

Numerous autoplaying video methods for example especially when they follow the mouse, play in the background, or use lazy loading to be unkillable.

Speaking of lazy loading or whatever hundreds of variations probably exist around it now, the terrible front end devs of the world have decided to use that for everything. Everything is a sliding panel full of sliding panels and there’s no way to use browser back features coherently.

Scrolling down a site now loads a new site and destroys your history. Even if you scrolled to move content up because an autoplaying video anchored to the bottom of the screen is blocking the view. Scroll down too far causes a jump and the site decides you’re done and loads the next thing with no way to navigate back.

How do these developers have a job? How are features like this even invented with no critical thought or understanding of real world use cases questioned. It’s again and again and again that we see this.

And the Google team is so proud every time with their demo videos that is painfully obvious they put no thought into it outside of their bubble of them deciding some random thing was technically possible to do as a proof of concept and should therefore be immediately released as a fully supported feature.
by briandear | 2025-04-04 11:24:38+00:00
Style can’t be copyrighted. It can’t be patented either.

When Wes Anderson makes films that use techniques from the French New Wave that he didn’t invent is that wrong? When there is a DaVinci color profile that resembles what they did in Spider-Man, is that wrong?

The unique techniques of French New Wave filmmaking became cliche. Then Oliver Stone and Tarantino came along and evolved it into their unique styles. That the Studio Ghibli style is being imitated en mass is just natural evolution. Should that guy be the only one that can do that style? If that’s the case, then literally every creative work should be considered forgeries.

The AI aspect of this is a red herring. If I make a Ghibli style film “by hand” is that any different than AI? Of course not, I didn’t invent the style.

Another perspective, darkroom burning and dodging is a very old technique yet photoshop makes it trivial — should that tool be criticized because someone else did it the old and slow way first?
by eemil | 2025-04-04 11:24:42+00:00
By the time licensing becomes relevant, your business is built around the platform and this gives Gumroad an unreasonable advantage in any negotiations. Imagine what they could say:

- You're now a competitor. Stop using our software (you can still sell on gumroad.com, hint hint)

- Give us 20% for 1 year (next year, who knows...)

- We won't give you a license, but we'll buy you out for next to nothing.
by api | 2025-04-04 11:25:31+00:00
You don’t just beat around the bush here. You actually beat the bush a few times.

Large corporations, governments, institutionalized churches, political parties, and other “corporate” institutions are very much like a hypothetical AGI in many ways: they are immortal, sleepless, distributed, omnipresent, and possess beyond human levels of combined intelligence, wealth, and power. They are mechanical Turk AGIs more or less. Look at how humans cycle in, out, and through them, often without changing them much, because they have an existence and a weird kind of will independent of their members.

A whole lot, perhaps all, of what we need to do to prepare for a hypothetical AGI that may or may not be aligned consists of things we should be doing to restrain and ensure alignment of the mechanical Turk variety. If we can’t do that we have no chance against something faster and smarter.

What we have done over the past 50 years is the opposite: not just unchain them but drop any notion that they should be aligned.

Are we sure the AI alignment discourse isn’t just “occulted” progressive political discourse? Back when they burned witches philosophers would encrypt possibly heretical ideas in the form of impenetrable nonsense, which is where what we call occultism comes from. You don’t get burned for suggesting steps to align corporate power, but a huge effort has been made to marginalize such discourse.

Consider a potential future AGI. Imagine it has a cult of followers around it, which it probably would, and champions that act like present day politicians or CEOs for it, which it probably would. If it did not get humans to do these things for it, it would have analogous functions or parts of itself.

Now consider a corporation or other corporate entity that has all those things but replace the AGI digital brain with a committee or shareholders.

What, really, is the difference? Both can be dangerously unaligned.

Other than perhaps in magnitude? The real digital AGI might be smarter and faster but that’s the only difference I see.
by tdullien | 2025-04-04 11:26:04+00:00
This. There is a joke that Germany delivered Porsches in the 1990s and hot .com stocks in return, and then until 2008 they got CDOs in return. And t-bills -- the US has been a major exporter of TBills.

Fwiw, the US has a big surplus in services,so it'll be interesting to see if other countries retaliate against that.
by smeej | 2025-04-04 11:27:30+00:00
I can't work under more than three layers of management, largely because I've found that to be the practical maximum of managers who will care more about my results than whether I'm following the inefficient set of rules laid down when the target results were different.

I don't think this is a problem, exactly. It just means I'm the kind of person who works much better in startups than mega corps. I can't not notice all the ways poorly made rules get in the way of getting things done, but once we hit the fourth layer of management, at least one of them WILL be the kind of manager who has gotten ahead in their career by writing and enforcing rules.

All that means is that the company has grown to the point that it's time for me to move on to the next project.

(And before anybody asks, of course there are some rules that are incredibly important. Many of them are codified as laws. Most of the rest would bring down the company. If I'm not willing to work within those rules, the company is the wrong fit for me from the start, regardless of size.)
by kelnos | 2025-04-04 11:28:12+00:00
Yeah, I am disgusted by what this guy and his fellow DOGErs are doing today, but I really hope I -- currently in my mid-40s -- wouldn't be judged by how I acted in high school.

Though the kind of hacking he did sounds like it was worse than anything I did online in the 90s with my 28.8 modem. I mean, he committed actual computer crimes, and not for any sort of noble purpose.
by blacklion | 2025-04-04 11:28:15+00:00
Do we speak about "black" ("red" in Chinese classification) tea?

To be honest, I've tried many red teas from China and all of them... Very Chinese.

It is not bad at all (some of them are very interesting!, but it is other style compared to Ceylon, Darjeeling and Assam teas (which are not the same too, but close to each other than to Chinese red tea).

Different styles of green ad white teas I like too, but as specialty, not on as day-to-day many-time-a-day go-to drink.
by soco | 2025-04-04 11:29:01+00:00
I have the impression that the entire concept of "store" as seen in Windows is going downhill. No enterprise is able to use it, and that's the stronghold of Microsoft. Also generally less and less applications there, so giving up on this particular one is not even so surprising. After all you still have the "normal" Remote Desktop, and yes the 365 app which is the enterprisey one - expect it to grow all those missing limbs.
by StefanBatory | 2025-04-04 11:29:01+00:00
American system of admissions to me seems so weird. Is it only there that unis accept mostly on extra things and not grades/test scores itself?

I'm Polish, here the only thing that matters is your final test scores, and nothing else. And I think it's same in the most of Europe and Asia too, right?

My impression is that American unis care way more about social aspect and so on, which I don't understand (but I guess it's a fine way of looking at things, too.)
by worldsayshi | 2025-04-04 11:30:06+00:00
Or doom-scroll algorithms?

Back when cryptocurrencies and especially ethereum was new I had similar feelings for it like I have for Gen AI now. I feel that it has this enormous potential if we use it in reasonable and down-to-earth ways. With cryptocurrencies the uses turned out to be all but reasonable.

I still have a feeling that ethereum could be quite useful but I wouldn't touch that industry with a ten foot pole.
by snvzz | 2025-04-04 11:30:06+00:00
>What does this mean?

"to go mask off" means to drop a façade, and show the true nature.

Here, it means they are not even trying to hide what they are doing anymore: Digging into every DOGE employee they can identify, and slandering them for political gain.

Why else would they care what a random administration employee did in this free time when he was 15 years old?

It is disgusting articles like this are what passes as "journalism" these days.
by pydry | 2025-04-04 11:30:14+00:00
lol i remember those days. most XML documents were missing DTDs and schemas (or that third type of schema whose name escapes me) and because the data structure of an XML document didnt map cleanly to lists and hashmaps you needed an ugly hacky xpath to grab whatever data you needed.

Dont even get me started on the mess that was serialisation and deserialization.

It was awful, overengineered design-by-committee mess.

This was only obvious to me in retrospect after I realized that these things didnt have to be complicated.
by TOMDM | 2025-04-04 11:30:28+00:00
> The government threatening legislation unless a company censors in line with the government's wishes is wrong and a violation of the 1st am.

What is the evidence of that? There was proposed legislation, but where was the evidence of "do this or else". Are you saying that the FBI was conspiring with the legislative branch? What evidence is there of that?

I've conceded the potential for a chilling effect three times now, there is a speech issue, but no evidence of a severity even nearly on par.

Look at the lengths you have to go to to get this point, you go and find sources that allege all the same things I've already described but very angrily and then tell me I'm the one too emotionally invested to see this clearly.
Ask HN: How important is API integration for SaaS
by dgcrawley | 2025-04-04 11:31:17+00:00
Hi, I recently launched https://rezon8ai.com but didn't include API access in this initial release.

I think it would be useful for more tech-savvy businesses to be able to connect it with tools like IFTTT, Zapier or PowerAutomate etc, but if folks aren't likely to do that then there's no point in me putting the coding effort in.

I was considering the option to add/import/export customer records or request feedback so subscribers could auto-add customers to the system when they add one to their existing tools like CRM, bookings, or similar. Then when they make a sale trigger a completely automated feedback request via whatever the customer's preferred communications channel is.

Would love to hear some thoughts on this.

Thanks, Grant.
by kelnos | 2025-04-04 11:31:58+00:00
I agree that we should be skeptical of the idea that we should judge people in their 30s based on things they did in their teens... but I'm a "high talent adult developer" who had a modem in the '90s and didn't do anything anywhere near as shitty when I was that age.

I dunno. People change a lot as they grow up. But it says something that he was committing computer crimes as a teenager. And now he's participating in the dismantling of a democracy. So I feel like his current actions do actually reflect the crap he pulled as a teen.
by latexr | 2025-04-04 11:32:38+00:00
> The best minds of my generation

I’m tired of that line. I remember first seeing it on “the best minds of our generation being employed to sell you ads”. Making a computer go brrr doesn’t qualify anyone for a “best mind”.

I’d hope a “best mind” would be, above all, empathetic. Concerned about the well being of their fellow humans. Philosophical about the state of the world. Patient. Curious. Wise and not just smart.

That we keep putting greedy assholes on a “best minds” pedestal due to their ability to exploit others for personal profit is part of the problem.
by gizmo | 2025-04-04 11:32:54+00:00
The world is changing. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Personally, I'm pretty optimistic. Other people might mostly see risks and harm. I get that. But what I don't get is how people think this is boring. Today's kids will grow up in a strangely alien world that used to be science fiction. That's why people can't stop talking about.
by blacklion | 2025-04-04 11:33:18+00:00
It is THE problem for me: tea become "posh" in Europe. You have tea dust from Lipton in bags on one end of the spectrum, posh tea which costs about 100x to its origin (26€/$ per 50g! 520€ for a kilo! It is insane, it is lifestyle price, not food/grocery price!) on the other end of the spectrum and nothing in-between.

Ok, Germany or Netherlands never were known for tea tradition, but UK was THE Tea country. UK created Assam, Darjeeling, Ceylon teas in the first place! How did this happen?
by jocaal | 2025-04-04 11:33:53+00:00
That is the case for western economies. China controls nearly all levels of its supply chain. In the past, they didn't have the skills for design, but over time has gained that skill set (china now creates nearly a third of the worlds new engineers per year) and is now capable of designing and manufacturing world class products all in-house.

I guess the only exception is semi-conductors, but we all know they are desperately trying to remedy that.
by teekert | 2025-04-04 11:34:15+00:00
I'm finally learning how to do unit tests in my Python code, this was long overdue (hey I'm a bioinformatician, we make some of the worst code out there!!) but Claude's taking me by the hand and I make sure I understand every character that I type. So far so good!

Still a nice to read piece though, made me smile, can be applied to many things, from crypto (the coin kind) to politics to Rust to Nix to ads [best minds of our generation?] to ... .

(I assume it's about AI btw, because of the nuclear power station. Anyway, I'm not bored at all of any of the topics I mentioned :) .)
by chuckadams | 2025-04-04 11:34:18+00:00
I've a few opinions on the content, but I'm most interested in which unicode analyzer tool generated that nifty text tree diagram.

I can deal with JS's warts because the tooling is so much better. The other language I make my living with is PHP, and while it's much improved from before, the global function namespace is still a garbage fire, and you need extra linters like phpstan-safe-rule to force you to use sane wrappers.
by RGamma | 2025-04-04 11:34:49+00:00
Luckily not having this problem, but Modern Standby is such a fucking shit show.

I always quietly snickered at the people posting about hot laptops in their bags given that ACPI S3 has been working well for me these past years (finally!).

Turns out my current machine has modern standby (S0 Low Power Idle Network Connected) and doesn't let me disable it! Apparently not even the network connection part. There's a group policy setting, but it says it only applies to WiFi and that "may change in the future" (probably not for the better).

So now I too have a laptop that spins up its fan whenever it likes to and doesn't reliably sleep (sometimes it manages to, sometimes not). Back to hibernate? What the fuck is going on?
by ta1243 | 2025-04-04 11:35:07+00:00
Looks like he was a script-kiddie, at most he dismantled some game-cheating sites. Maybe he used back-orifice to open someone's cd drive for the lolz.

(This assumes he wasn't just making it up)

Sounds a very familiar background.

His support of a horrendous reigime today is unrelated to his actions in his youth.
by feraloink | 2025-04-04 11:35:08+00:00
>Factoring the entire global supply chain into your product, it makes much more sense to do the work in a country where work costs less. If the additional cost to import is less than the delta on labor, you've won capitalism or something.

Yes, you've won capitalism, but sometimes, profit is a lower priority. Resiliency and the ability to avoid critical supply chain dependencies are important too. We learned that during COVID, when we only had one facility to make baby formula in the U.S., and we had a dire shortage of masks, gloves, etc. because we imported it all from China.

Another aspect of resilience is avoiding long attenuated supply chains, even if it is cheaper...for now. Why? Because there is a finite amount of fossil fuels (necessary in greater amounts for non-domestic maritime and air transit). Also, lower fossil fuel usage due to in-country sourcing would be better for the climate. I realize that the Trump administration isn't concerned about that! But it is true regardless.
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-04 11:35:09+00:00
> Dedicated memory isn't the issue.

To run large MoE models it is.

> Increase DRAM on your card and your bandwidth goes down

Why would it?

> You'll note that Apple didn't just immediately resume shipping systems with 1.5TB of RAM when they revised their own system architecture. It's taken them half a decade to recoup a third of that capacity at the VRAM-level speeds they require to unify the GPU and CPU's memory

I fail to see how a unified architecture on a general purpose CPU is a good illustration when we're discussing PCIe accelerator cards. The problems they face have little in common.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-04-04 11:35:21+00:00
> Why do so many journos keep making these politically motivated articles.

Because a bunch of journalists were being paid by the government to be politically-motivated propagandists, and that gravy train went away because of DOGE.

There's a ton of threads on HN about Doge, but if you search with "site:news.ycombinator.com Internews Network".....only 1 result, in the comments.

from: https://x.com/wikileaks/status/1888072129327083979

USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives.

The operation claims “offices” in over 30 countries, including main offices in US, London, Paris and regional HQs in Kiev, Bangkok and Nairobi. It is headed up by Jeanne Bourgault, who pays herself $451k a year. Bourgault worked out of the US embassy in Moscow during the early 1990s, where she was in charge of a $250m budget, and in other revolts or conflicts at critical times, before formally rotating out of six years at USAID to IN.

Bourgault’s IN bio and those of its other key people and board members have been recently scrubbed from its website but remain accessible at http://archive.org. Records show the board being co-chaired by Democrat securocrat Richard J. Kessler and Simone Otus Coxe, wife of NVIDIA billionaire Trench Coxe, both major Democratic donors. In 2023, supported by Hillary Clinton, Bourgault launched a $10m IN fund at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The IN page showing a picture of Bourgault at the CGI has also been deleted.