MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whall6 | 2025-04-04 11:58:43+00:00
I get the sentiment, but using ship building is an unfortunate example with respect to substantiating your point. The US shipbuilders are alive and well (not to the extent they were in WWII era). Military ships, Jones Act compliant commercial vessels, ferries, tugboats, etc. All US made.

Separately, your first paragraph also seems problematic. Let’s take Vietnam and Cambodia as examples: neither has a US military base, port, nor sells natural resources to “Wall St”.

Finally, I’m not sure I follow how that would cause the US to accumulate 50% of the world’s market cap—especially because the vast majority of the companies in the S&P 500 have nothing to do with defense, shipping or natural resources. I haven’t done the math, but I would venture to guess that >50% of the S&P 500 market cap is tech or tech-adjacent.

I decry this misplaced pessimism.
by rustc | 2025-04-04 11:59:26+00:00
It's risky if you have any chance of ever crossing $1M in company revenue because the license will terminate as soon as you reach that and you'll have to rewrite everything.

> The licensor grants you a copyright license for the software to do everything you might do with the software that would otherwise infringe the licensor's copyright, but only as long as you meet all the conditions below.

> You may use the software under this license only if (1) your company has less than 1 million USD (2024) total revenue in the prior tax year, and less than 10 million USD (2024) GMV (Gross Merchandise Value), or (2) you are a non-profit organization or government entity.
by decide1000 | 2025-04-04 11:59:51+00:00
That's quite opinionated.

The privacy shield was 'shot down' because it would allow the US unprecedented access to personal data of EU civilians (including unlimited surveillance).

GDPR is not that bad. It has downsides but it is not overly complex.

Companies (including cloud services) have to comply if they want to have business in Europe.

Fines by EU: Meta: 1.5 billion Amazon: 750 million TikTok: 350 million Clearview: 30 million Apple: 1.5 billion
by TimorousBestie | 2025-04-04 12:00:39+00:00
My software working group has spent much of the quarter discussing whether or not it’s made us more productive. They still can’t decide, but I bet we’ve racked up 1000 coder-hours debating it.

I don’t use it because our products have the potential to harm other people and I’m not personally comfortable assuming that risk. Nobody else seems particularly moved by that argument, however.
by scop | 2025-04-04 12:01:08+00:00
That’s a fascinating take. Music until very recently was indeed an incredibly social activity bound with layers of talent, leisure (purpose/meaning/security), belonging, etc.

As people have been chatting about the Metaverse or AR I often quip that we’ve already had AR for awhile: headphones.

The ubiquitous of AirPods, even amongst employees on the clock in recent years, has only reinforced my belief that we are already deep down the AR rabbit hole and seeing both the positive and negative effects. Augmented reality is great, but we still need to be grounded and able to act within reality. It’s the reality that must be our base, not the augmented part. The augmented should serve to improve reality, not replace.
by fmap | 2025-04-04 12:01:19+00:00
> even if this doesn’t lead to AGI, at the very least it’s likely the final “warning shot” we’ll get before it’s suddenly and irreversibly here.

I agree that it's good science fiction, but this is still taking it too seriously. All of these "projections" are generalizing from fictional evidence - to borrow a term that's popular in communities that push these ideas.

Long before we had deep learning there were people like Nick Bostrom who were pushing this intelligence explosion narrative. The arguments back then went something like this: "Machines will be able to simulate brains at higher and higher fidelity. Someday we will have a machine simulate a cat, then the village idiot, but then the difference between the village idiot and Einstein is much less than the difference between a cat and the village idiot. Therefore accelerating growth[...]" The fictional part here is the whole brain simulation part, or, for that matter, any sort of biological analogue. This isn't how LLMs work.

We never got a machine as smart as a cat. We got multi-paragraph autocomplete as "smart" as the average person on the internet. Now, after some more years of work, we have multi-paragraph autocomplete that's as "smart" as a smart person on the internet. This is an imperfect analogy, but the point is that there is no indication that this process is self-improving. In fact, it's the opposite. All the scaling laws we have show that progress slows down as you add more resources. There is no evidence or argument for exponential growth. Whenever a new technology is first put into production (and receives massive investments) there is an initial period of rapid gains. That's not surprising. There are always low-hanging fruit.

We got some new, genuinely useful tools over the last few years, but this narrative that AGI is just around the corner needs to die. It is science fiction and leads people to make bad decisions based on fictional evidence. I'm personally frustrated whenever this comes up, because there are exciting applications which will end up underfunded after the current AI bubble bursts...
by freetime2 | 2025-04-04 12:01:20+00:00
> I agree that it’s good and not going anywhere, but I also think it’s overhyped at the same time. Both can be true.

I think that to say it is overhyped says more about what you read and the company that you keep than it does about the actual technology. I don’t mean that as an insult or anything - clearly there is a lot of hype about AI on HN, which I also read.

But I would say that most people in my life actually don’t have enough experience with AI. Outside of work, I’m the only person I know using it every day. And it’s something that very rarely comes up in discussion.
by astrobe_ | 2025-04-04 12:01:42+00:00
> There's a social element, the opportunity to feel competent through combat or exploration-based play, engineering, creativity and finally survival-based gameplay

It may be simplistic or outdated, but one can start with Bartle's taxonomy of player types to understand the broad categories of players [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
by tonytamps | 2025-04-04 12:01:46+00:00
Not sure if your response was deliberately obtuse or not, but in case it was accidental I wanted to point out that you may have missed a key word - "social" well-being.

It's one thing if listening to music makes you feel good, but another completely if listening makes you more capable of socialising. This may be more important for others than it is for you.
by mapt | 2025-04-04 12:01:55+00:00
On that specific quote -

I feel like this is offensive on more than one level. The waste of our best minds... sure. Fine. But - "to sell you ads."

Marketting has the dubious distinction of being one area of human endeavor where technological advances serve mostly to make your life worse, make your mind less focused, make your wallet more empty.

The spherical-cow "ideal" 100% efficient perfect marketing campaign/tactic literally hypnotizes you into dropping all your money on an arbitrary good or service. It is isomorphic to somebody mugging you. What does it look like if we achieve 10% efficiency? 1%? How is this infringement on your agency and financial well-being a positive social good? What if we could achieve profitable returns even by flooding the zone at 0.001%? How many ads do you want to be subjected to per thing that somebody in your neighborhood buys?
by TrackerFF | 2025-04-04 12:01:55+00:00
Trump learned from his last presidency, that there can be nothing but 100% unwavering loyalty to him and his vision. So Loomer and the likes of her are going through everyone, to sniff out those that aren't complete lackeys.

When they find someone, they go to Trump with a list and tell him that those are bad people that will only hinder him. Deep state operatives, undercover democrats, RINOs, etc.

Basically his own little group of Stasi-hobbyists.
by ludston | 2025-04-04 12:02:23+00:00
I'm talking about the virtues that you've just tried to paint on people that practice breaking into other peoples computers for fun.

It seems like what you are looking for is a discussion about whether or not it it is ethical for bureaucrats and elected officials ought to circumvent or ignore their countries democratic processes and laws.

I'm sure there are some ethical justifications for doing this in some hypothetical situations, but really I'm not sure it's as useful to be discussing hypotheticals rather than specifics in this space.
by brookst | 2025-04-04 12:02:41+00:00
I agree but see it as less dire. All of western culture is not ending; it will be absorbed into a more Asia-dominated culture in much he was Asian culture was subsumed into western for the past couple of hundred years.

And if Asian culture is better educated and more capable of progress, that’s a good thing. Certainly the US has announced loud and clear that this is the end of the line for us.
by tzs | 2025-04-04 12:02:51+00:00
If a country decides that it is important to not be a net importer the method to achieve that proposed by Buffett in the article is infinitely better than the way Trump is going about it.

Essentially what Buffett suggests in the article is a cap and trade system on imports.

To import $X worth of goods the importer must have $X worth of ICs (import certificates), which consumes those ICs. ICs are created when exporters export, with each dollar of exports creating a dollars worth of ICs.

ICs are tradable so an exporter does not have to use the ICs created by their own exports. They can sell them to importers.

Note that under this system it is perfectly fine to have a trade deficit with any given country, as long as their are trade surpluses with other countries that balance it.

Trump wants trade with each country to be balanced (or a surplus).

Consider this hypothetical.

• Country A needs to import some natural resource. They import it from country B and use it to manufacture something.

• Country B doesn't need anything that A makes, but does need something from country C.

• Country C doesn't need anything from B, but imports the thing A is manufacturing.

If Trump were running country A he would view this as A getting ripped off by B. Under Trump logic B would be getting ripped off by C, and C would be getting ripped off by A, but he wouldn't care about the former and would probably by bragging about the later but not calling it a rip off.

One of the big reasons money was developed in the first place was so goods did not need to be balanced between each pair of traders.

Before money if a farmer had chickens and wanted a goat he had to find someone who wanted chickens and would trade a goat for it. If the only guy with goats he could find didn't want chickens but wanted a pig the farmer was out of luck, unless he could find someone who had a pig and wanted chickens. It can keep going...maybe pig guy wants a cow so now the guy with chickens also needs to find someone who will trade a cow for pigs.

Money made it so trades become money for goods instead of goods for goods. Chicken guy just needed to find someone with a goat for sale for money instead of finding someone with a goat who specifically needed chickens.

Same thing applies to trade between countries, and for some inexplicable reason Trump wants it to work like the old chickens for goat days.
by weatherlite | 2025-04-04 12:03:04+00:00
> You would struggle to buy a house if you worked at VW assembling cars.

Any source for that? What's the average VW salary , I'm assuming life long VW workers are actually pretty well compensated.

> Nothing close to what Americans are able to afford.

Americans are rich in small part due to true innovation (Google, Microsoft, biotech etc) and large part running endless deficits by having the world's reserve currency. Also America is the complete opposite of the government planned economy / state socialism you're proposing the Germans should do.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-04-04 12:03:21+00:00
I think you do have the brain, but maybe you're framing it wrong! When you come across art that seems unapproachable or strange to you, the last question you should ask is "What did the artist mean by this?" Instead, first think "What does this make me feel?" The answer may often be nothing, but then in the spirit of curiosity follow it up with "What might others who love this art be responding to?"

Sometimes for me, I need to take myself out of trying to "solve" the art piece and be intentional about viewing it with a different, less literal mindset. It's still me doing the thinking, but it kind of short-circuits my normal interaction with the world.

Or maybe that's just a bunch of blowhard bullshit, I don't know, but it is what I do.
by tiffanyh | 2025-04-04 12:05:12+00:00
> While the majority of revenue of Microsoft is not Windows anymore

It’s hasn’t been for 25+ years (more than 50% of Microsoft existence).

1998 Revenue Breakdown —————————————————————- $7.04B Productivity Apps $6.28B Windows $4.72B OEM $1.94B Consumer

https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar00/mdna.htm
by canucker2016 | 2025-04-04 12:06:07+00:00
Bill Gates's mom and the chairman of IBM were on the executive committee of the same charity, the United Way.

from https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...

She was later appointed to the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she became the first woman to lead it. Right Time, Right Place Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John R. Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation, the business that I.B.M. was doing with Microsoft. Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer.
by that_guy_iain | 2025-04-04 12:06:09+00:00
>People here know the difference or are easily able to understand it if they haven't been confronted with it.

No. They're trying to force a definition of open-source that does not exist to make it FOSS because FOSS people want everything to be FOSS so try to pressure people into it.

The definition is defined by dictionaries and it's different from what is said on here. Quite simply, they're wrong. They want it to mean one thing however the definition of the word by Oxford and Webster applies to what is done in that repo. It is open-source by the definition of the word by people who define and clarify words and not by FOSS devs who want everything to be FOSS. It is open-source! And the fact, people on here don't know that shows people on here don't know the difference.
by Cyphase | 2025-04-04 12:06:13+00:00
> it seems to me that with only 600 accounts losing an average of ~$800 each

From the article:

> AustralianSuper, the country's largest fund managing A$365 billion for 3.5 million members, said that up to 600 member passwords had been stolen to access accounts and attempt fraud.

> Four AustralianSuper members had a combined A$500,000 drained from their balances and transferred to other accounts that did not belong to them, according to the source, who was not authorised to speak publicly about the matter.

It's not completely clear if 600 passwords were "stolen" but only four accounts had any money transferred, or if there are more accounts at that fund that had money transferred.

And that's just one fund.

> Rest Super, the default industry pension fund for retail workers, with A$93 billion of assets under management, said it suffered an attack that impacted around 20,000 accounts, or around 1% of its 2 million members.
by zwnow | 2025-04-04 12:06:58+00:00
Why is being empathetic a trait of a "great mind"? Wouldn't it also be possible that "great minds" don't consider things like empathy as useful? Looking back at human history, its usually people that aren't empathetic who end up being successful. At least in a way that people consider "successful". Humanity has long outlived the usefulness of empathy.
by shermantanktop | 2025-04-04 12:07:02+00:00
I admit, that was hyperbole based on a hazy recollection of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Michael_Fay.

FWIW I’ve been to Singapore and had a great time, but I was careful to follow the many rules and signs. I especially liked the sign on the bus forbidding the opening of a durian fruit.
by brookst | 2025-04-04 12:07:30+00:00
Risk can never be zero, just like certainty can never be 100%.

There is a non-zero chance that the ineffable quantum foam will cause a mature hippopotamus to materialize above your bed tonight, and you’ll be crushed. It is incredibly, amazingly, limits-of-math unlikely. Still a non-zero risk.

Better to think of “no risk” as meaning “negligible risk”. But I’m with you that climate change is not a negligible risk; maybe way up in the 20% range IMO. And I wouldn’t be sleeping in my bed tonight if sudden hippos over beds were 20% risks.
by armchairhacker | 2025-04-04 12:07:48+00:00
Maybe when they introduce their version of Claude’s Computer Use [1] they’ll call it “Microsoft Windows Copilot”

Not to be confused with Microsoft Copilot, which is not to be confused with Microsoft 365 Copilot, which is not to be confused with Github Copilot…

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/3-5-models-and-computer-use

[2] https://copilot.microsoft.com

[3] https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-micr...

[4] https://github.com/features/copilot
by piva00 | 2025-04-04 12:07:49+00:00
It's hard to take refuge from it when you are working in the tech industry, I hear something about "let's try to use AI for this" at least twice a week for the past year at my work.

I do use LLMs for some specific tasks, they can be quite good at some stuff but the general hype of it by non-technical folks trying to fit it into every single use-case under the sun is absolutely tiring... Having to explain for the n-th time why what we are trying to do is not a good fit for AI™ is exhausting, not because I have to explain it again but because I know I will have to do it again next week, at least another couple of times.

AI is being viewed in this hype as almost literal magic, it can do anything, we just have to wish for AI to do it (whatever the fuck AI means by now, it's just an umbrella for magical thinking).

I'm tired, and definitely bored.
by mxuribe | 2025-04-04 12:08:01+00:00
> ...right now it's centrally managed. it's just easier to build this way and use existing services. i use own apis, firebase and livekit.

Yeah, totally makes sense, centralized is easier. no hamr, no foul. :-)

> ...i'd LOVE to work on this full-time and live off of it, that's my end-goal.

Well, if/when you launch this, I'd be interested in paying you to manage the hosting of it. so, you jhave at least 1 willing potential customer!

> ... i wouldn't mind creating a self-hosted version...

Remember, how i want a self-hosted option? That still is true...but i likely would prefer to pay YOU to manage the hosting. In other words, I gladly pay devs/teams/orgs to manage hosted apps for me...but I always LIKE that they offer me a choicee to self-host something if/whenever I choose. Basically, if a company gives me the opportunity to leave them at any time...that in a way earns my trust, and that helps me want to pay them for their service...assuming their service is reliable, well-managed of course. So, yeah, self-hosted is the gold standard to live up to...but, don;t get it twisted: if you build in self-hosting AS WELL AS offer paid plans, i will def. pay you! Remember that, because there are TONS of people like me, who on principle want open source, self-hosted options, but who will gladly PAY for someone to manage said open source apps/services.

Again, cheers and kudos!
by inetknght | 2025-04-04 12:08:09+00:00
> My main gripe with this is how do you charge users? They can just put the browser in offline mode and continue to use the app forever.

Charge users to buy the product. Don't charge users to use the product. I know it's a revolutionary way to think.

> Also it's very hard to follow up bugs or other errors if users are often offline.

Yes, so?

> I giess you can queue up errors being sent and so on but still.

Have you asked the user if they want those errors, which often contain private information, to be sent?

> Syncing means that you probably have to have a complicated logic, especially if the data you are seeing can be modified by others. How do you solve merge conflicts?

There's tens, if not hundreds, of solutions to sync. Why don't you take a look at one of the existing solutions?

> I really like offline first web apps

Really? It sounded like you wanted to charge users and didn't like the idea of users going offline. Kind've hypocritical to then say you like offline-first.

> more expensive to build I think.

Not at all. You should be building and deploying in containers. Containers can and should be 100% local first. You download the dependencies (`FROM` statements) and then disconnect from wifi. If you can't build after that then you're doing it wrong.

> For a startup it means more time before you can deploy your app

Not if you're doing it right.

> where I live there is pretty much fast internet everywhere

I'm happy for you! Unfortunately you seem to be the type of person who wants to reduce cost. That means remote workers. Remote workers often live where their internet is very sub-par and/or metered. Local-first (and especially offline-first) will help reduce cost even more.

> it kinda is solving an issue that very few customers will face

I assume you're in the USA. You shouldn't take the FCC's connectivity reports at face value especially after certain people have gutted the FCC's ability to provide reliable connectivity data. You also shouldn't assume that every customer around you has access to fast internet because, unfortunately, last-mile internet service providers have a tendency of monopolistically abusing their customers.

If you're not in the USA... well I'd still be willing to bet that you're wrong unless your customers are exclusively in an urban environment.
by djtango | 2025-04-04 12:08:43+00:00
Most restaurants smuggle obscene amounts of butter and sugar into dishes to make them more delicious so you'll come back. It's not unreasonable to assume that every subcomponent of a recipe might have sugar added individually.

In packaged foods, there is a whole science of masking the sugar and fat content to make it more addictive without triggering your inbuilt satiety mechanisms [1]. This is what today's engagement optimisers did for money in the 50/60s.

You could argue that these "innovations" were precisely to subvert the intuition that visual appearance of food (and other natural sensors) can be relied on to assess their nutritional properties.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)#:~:text=T...
by pfdietz | 2025-04-04 12:09:52+00:00
> The ribosome is an attractive antibiotic target because bacteria don’t easily develop resistance to drugs targeting the structure, adds Lewis.

Sure they do, by the general mechanism of preventing the drug from entering the bacterium and/or pumping it back out. Bacteria have general mechanisms for removing molecules they don't need.

This molecule is a peptide, so one mechanism for developing resistance would be evolution of a specific protease. Bacteria already have enzymes for breaking peptide bonds.