MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robocat | 2025-05-12 02:17:46+00:00
Although expensive, it wouldn't surprise me if the F-35 was financially profitable for the US.

The F-35 jet program accounts for about 27% of Lockheed's revenue Lockheed financials: 2024 net sales $71.0 billion. Recorded pre-tax losses of $2.0 billion associated with classified programs Returned $6.8 billion of cash to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases in 2024 Total Assets @Q1 54.96B $110.94 B Marketcap Nearly 80% of the $46 billion in revenue in 2014 was generated from purchases by the US government Total foreign ownership of US companies is about 40% (I wonder if total US ownership of foreign companies exceeds foreign ownership of US companies?)

Sourced above by variety of sources - likely inaccurate.

Total costs (e.g. externalities, political) and benefits (e.g. security, influence) are harder to guess at.

The US political system puts a huge amount of pressure on allies to buy US armaments. The US military industrial capitalism is complex, and has massive political backing. Christmas lights sell missiles. I also wonder how much of the F-35 profitability comes from a Gillette/SaaS/HP financial model? Wars destroy capital goods, which is great if you're selling them.
by renewiltord | 2025-05-12 02:18:12+00:00
I believe it's for the total value as on Dec 1, 2022. The document does not specify that it is for land value alone. The government is paying for the whole property not just the land.

It's $42m and homes in that region are $1.5m+ so that's under 50 people.

Actual details are here: https://www.rpvca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/22752/Voluntary-Pr...

Why do you think it's a decent solution? I think these things should be a home insurance concern so that we don't provide de-facto home insurance only for beachside property.
by sheepscreek | 2025-05-12 02:18:20+00:00
For what it’s worth, in my personal experience, ChatGPT 4o, DeepSeek R1, and Grok 3, to an extent, are “smarter” about human behaviour than they are at producing code. There’s likely a lot going on behind the scenes to maintain continuity (so it produces content that’s pretty consistent, at least for me on behavioural discussions), especially with ChatGPT.

It’s been incredibly helpful for my personal use: brainstorming ideas, such as exploring how different scenarios might unfold. For instance, I can ask, “What are the pros and cons of choosing x over y, considering these factors?” or even, “I’m in a tough spot. X and I often argue about Z (provide some background context), and I’m struggling to express my perspective. I’m afraid…” You get the idea.

GPT-4o is remarkably good at putting things in an independent and unbiased third person perspective. It’s definitely not an echo chamber for me. More often, the insights are what I might have come up with if I were observing my own life from a distance.

Now some people have said “sure it’s like journaling”. I think it’s even better, like talking to your journal (ala Harry Potter, like Tom Riddle’s diary) with some level of fact checking (I’ve gotten called out) and human behavioural understanding available at your disposable.
by shark_laser | 2025-05-12 02:19:25+00:00
I cannot speak for Africa, but this is not true of South East Asia.

Whilst cheap 'dumb' phones do still exist and are used, even low income earners in South East Asia tend to have a smart phone, and most of the business done as landgenoot says is conducted via Telegram, Facebook, or occasionally WhatsApp or Line.

There are also ways of paying using nothing but a phone number, but usually business is done on a smart phone where photos of products are are shared, delivery is arranged, and since COVID, most payments are done via QR codes that require a smart phone.

In my experience this is not only true of the cities, but also even out in the provinces.
by bcoates | 2025-05-12 02:20:03+00:00
There's two obvious "legitimate" reasons to use credit: to smooth out expenditure volatility (a big purchase like a house, an emergency) and to smooth out income volatility (a temporary lack of a job). If you are suddenly sans job and living on savings/unemployment/charity etc., but have a perfectly reasonable expectation of long-term average income much above your short-term situation, financing a burrito makes sense--you’re being cash-flow efficient (extending your runway, if you will)

Also, in my personal experience, a new job often brings various costs (food, clothes, transportation, relocation, etc) long before the paychecks show up. There was a time in the early 2000s where being able to klarna a tank or two of gas until my paycheck landed would have been extremely useful to me
by Retric | 2025-05-12 02:20:52+00:00
That’s the advantage to UBI.

A revenue neutral UBI check at some subsistence level and killing all other government assistance including lower tax brackets would in the short term significantly lower the standard of living for many low income Americans and boost others. However people would try and maximize their lifestyle and for most people that would be through working. Others would opt out and try and make being really poor work for them.

Essentially you remove central planning around poverty and as the government stops requiring rent stabilized apartments etc. Which in the short term pushes a lot of poor people out of major cities but simultaneously puts upward pressure on wages to retain those workers and pushes down rents via those suddenly available apartments. It doesn’t actually create or destroy wealth directly, you just get a more efficient allocation of resources.
by retrochameleon | 2025-05-12 02:20:57+00:00
I think this is near-future thinking and limited to the current presiding paradigm of "AI" being based on LLMs.

Without some drastic breakthrough in LLMs, I believe "AI is not going to do well in full autopilot" will remain true for the next 5-10 years. Reaching full autonomy is a definite. The question is how long it takes and what innovations have yet to be made needed to achieve the first effective implementation that is able to spread widely.

Unfortunately, I think military applications will push AI the fastest towards truly effective autonomy.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-05-12 02:21:07+00:00
> I've discovered that when you start getting really cynical about the actual need for a web application - especially in B2B SaaS - you may become surprised at how far you can take the business without touching a browser.

Enabling customer self administration/configuration of a "B2B SaaS" system mandates some form of interaction. I would be surprised at how many would not expect "touching a browser" to do so.

> A vast majority of the hours I've spent building web sites & applications has been devoted to administrative-style UI/UX wherein we are ultimately giving the admin a way to mutate fields in a database somewhere such that the application behaves to the customer's expectations.

If there is no validation of information given nor system rules enforcement, then I would question the correctness of said sites/applications.

> In many situations, it is clearly 100x faster/easier/less bullshit to send the business a template of the configuration (Excel files) and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables.

This approach obviates the value added by a system enforcing core software engineering concepts such as fitness of purpose, error detection/reporting, business workflows, and/or role-based access control.

In short, while letting customers send Excel files "and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables" might sound nice, this does not scale and will certainly result in a failure state at some point.
by Leftium | 2025-05-12 02:23:26+00:00
I'm planning a beat-aware YouTube player. Unfortunately, it is not possible to access the audio stream data across the YouTube embed. (For beat-detection analysis.)

I considered using the microphone like this. It's nice to see it works. Although there seems to be a time limit to how long the microphone can record?

My plan was to download video (youtube-dlp), then make a CLI tool that analyzes and uploads the beat-detection data. An advantage of the CLI tool is it can complete the analysis faster than playing the video at 1X.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-12 02:23:59+00:00
I mostly use it to aggregate event calendars for all the concert/sport/etc venues, meetups, and clubs in my area and do some other scraping tasks. I host a little wrapper around llm-scraper on a DigitalOcean droplet that I call from Val.town scripts

I only check most places once a week so I use the LLM to do the scraping but there are a few cases where I have to scrape thousands of pages very frequently so I use the more deterministic script it generates instead.
by gruez | 2025-05-12 02:24:16+00:00
As per the OP, there's no advantage of doing this if you're in a region that Tesla officially supports, because Tesla already has free connectivity with the free built-in SIM. The only use of this is if you're in a region where Tesla isn't supported, and thus Tesla won't have the necessary roaming agreements for its built-in SIM to work. The Calyx sim only supports US and Puerto Rico, so it's of no use. There's no privacy benefit either, because the phone can still upload your location/telemetry regardless of what SIM you're using.
by Stratoscope | 2025-05-12 02:24:35+00:00
Oh my gosh! This means a lot to me.

I should mention that wasn't just me. Alan Cooper came up with the initial idea and a prototype called Tripod and showed it to Bill Gates. After Microsoft funded the project, Alan hired me, and Gary Kratkin, Frank Raab, and Mark Merker to build out the actual Ruby product. And then a team at Microsoft melded it with Basic to become Visual Basic.

I am really grateful that you and so many people put our work to good use!
by gopiandcode | 2025-05-12 02:24:39+00:00
Ahh, that is a valid point; so it's not quite as clear as using something like quick check, but it does feel like there is increasing interest and activity in people trying out doing exploratory maths in Lean itself.

I mention it in the blog post, but one project in that direction is Terence Tao's equational_theories project (https://teorth.github.io/equational_theories/), where it seems like a bunch of hobbyists and mathematicians are working together using Lean to prove new mathematics enabled by Lean.
by mortos | 2025-05-12 02:26:09+00:00
I appreciate you having an open ear and reaching out. As I said, it's hard to drum up examples but I do throw in the !g bang a fair bit. With the privacy requirements maybe you can't, but it could be interesting to see if you can find searches where people try a couple times then throw in the !g to try and find examples. I can't be the only one with this workflow.

I've just found another, "G Jones collab album" hardly has any results about his collaborations. In the first page of results there's only one relevant link and it's for Acid Disk 2 with EPROM. Spelling out "collaboration" doesn't make much difference. The results in Google are much more relevant to the key word here being "collab".

As an aside, I love duck.ai and use it frequently especially with work as I trust the privacy.
by pests | 2025-05-12 02:28:53+00:00
> as part of the radar effort

Something I've been curious about and thought I'd ask the room here since it was mentioned.

It seems to me that "the radar effort" was very significant, almost Manhattan Project levels itself. In every book about scientists in WW2 or the atomic bomb that I've read, it seemed everyone had a friend "working on radar" or various scientist weren't available to work on the bomb because they were, again, "working on radar."

Was this true or just something I'm overanalyzing?
by salmonellaeater | 2025-05-12 02:29:05+00:00
It's unclear to me why the "god object" pattern described in the article isn't a good solution. The pattern in the article is different from the "god object" pattern as commonly known[1], in that the god object in the article doesn't need to be referenced after initialization. It's basically used once during initialization then forgotten.

It's normal for an application to be built from many independent modules that accept their dependencies as inputs via dependency inversion[2]. The modules are initialized at program start by code that composes everything together. Using the "god object" pattern from the article is basically the same thing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_object [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_inversion_principle
by pseudo0 | 2025-05-12 02:29:11+00:00
I seriously doubt the long-term viability of BNPL for merchants. Sure, in the short-term it boosts sales because people who don't have money are able to purchase stuff, but eventually those marginal consumers will end up exhausting their BNPL credit as well. Meanwhile the merchant ends up paying 5% on a bunch of transactions for people who could easily afford to pay now, but don't because it's "free". The only way this model works long-term is if they get enough leverage to force merchants to offer BNPL at the same price as cash, the same anti-competitive model used by credit cards.
by simplify | 2025-05-12 02:30:19+00:00
> If they did, what's stopping everyone else from doing it? I am expressing doubt.

This is a pretty interesting topic on human nature. Chain of reasoning doesn't always result in proper action. For example, my cousin has been having a lot of health problems lately. Logically he knows that alcohol is contributing to them. Yet, when he's out with his friends, he can't help but drink anyway, despite knowing (and likely ignoring for the moment) the consequences of doing so.

Similarly, things like junk food and overpriced status-symbol vehicles have objective costs that prey on the weaknesses of human nature. Whether to restrict such things, and by how much, is where the subjective aspect comes in.

This also all presumes we share the same values of "let's try to reduce human suffering somewhat". A libertarian, for example, would just say "live and let live".
by riku_iki | 2025-05-12 02:30:19+00:00
> Think of it this way: you can either manage 5 people that solve a problem

there are levels of problem you will struggle to find 5 people to solve it on avg senior dev salary

> Not in "big tech".

especially in big tech, where there is constant arm race in building systems handling millions QPS over petabytes of data and with all recent advanced AI.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-05-12 02:32:17+00:00
I think I will never understand, how people write their code in such a messy unorganized way, that it becomes unclear, whether touching some piece of code changes the behavior on 50 other pages. To me that reeks of badly structured code, with bad abstraction layers, perhaps stuffing too much stuff into a single module or, if the language is still backward and doesn't have modules, a file. Especially for websites, the path to rendering a page should be pretty clear. Have some weird JS requiring menu functionality? Well ... put it in "menu.js". Will it affect 50 other pages? No, it will affect the menu. Or yes, if you count the menu as part of those pages. Have some video player stuff? Well it is going to affect all pages where there is the video player. Something for forms? All pages where you have such forms. Then there are things like maybe animations or checkbox states. But I fail to come up with examples, where the scope of the change is so unclear, that one can't relatively quickly figure out what will be affected and what not. It must be some WordPress mess or something. Then I can imagine it. But with a site built from ground up? Nope, must be bad design or structure.

Of course you could just have made up that example as a straw man as well.
by motohagiography | 2025-05-12 02:32:59+00:00
really interested in 1517 now. if i could build a new bell labs i would use a hedge fund structure instead of vc. the lab would attract talent and some of it might get invovled in the fund, but the lab would stay afloat on fund profits. the idea is to just let smart people cook for a tryout year, with great incentives. (not too unlike 1517's program as it turns out)

the difference with this lab idea and a vc like YC is that vc portfolio companies need products and roadmaps to raise investment and for driving revenue. whereas an asset manager is just investing the money and using the profits to fund engineering research and spinoff product development.

firms like this must already exist, maybe i just never hear about their spinoffs or inventions? if not, maybe a small fund could be acquired to build a research division onto it
by AlotOfReading | 2025-05-12 02:33:12+00:00
Yes, different platforms have different architectures. Within a platform, the system level architecture will be relatively fixed. OEMs will part subsystems out to different tier 1s for different vehicles on that platform, but that's (ideally) just plugging different boxes together on the OEM side.

There's a lot of very expensive development tools (e.g. dSpace simulators) that rely on this model of automotive development.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-12 02:34:11+00:00
> How much of their salary went straight in to their landlord's pockets? Towards student loan interest?

I don’t think comments like these really understand the incredible value of FAANG comp over the past 20 years. People who got and kept these jobs had a true golden ticket.

Paying rent and student loan interest are a rounding error.

These were not normal jobs in normal circumstances.
by bob1029 | 2025-05-12 02:35:03+00:00
> In short, while letting customers send Excel files "and then load+merge their results directly into the same SQL tables" might sound nice, this does not scale and will certainly result in a failure state at some point.

Much of US banking operates almost entirely on this premise and has done so forever.

> error detection/reporting, business workflows, and/or role-based access control.

I'd take a look at the Nacha (ACH) operating rules if you have any doubt that sophisticated business workflows can be built on top of flat files and asynchronous transmission.

https://www.nacha.org/newrules
by creato | 2025-05-12 02:35:10+00:00
You're not denying freedom to just those ~1000 companies, you're also denying freedoms from everyone they might "acquire". And if your definition of "acquisition" is 4 dudes with a source control repo and no market/sales, then you've denied a lot of freedom to a lot of people, not just some big corporates we all love to hate.

I personally know of probably a dozen cases of a small team of <10 people getting hired into various companies that all would be scrutinized under this reasoning, and yeah, I think that's totally insane.
by phyzix5761 | 2025-05-12 02:35:13+00:00
Because its driven by something that transcends generations: human desire. Its a very powerful emotion that drives us to act (as is aversion). But, we can train ourselves not to react to this emotion and over time it does become weaker and, eventually, completely subsides. It does take time and practice though which most people are not willing to put in because they don't see desire as a problem.
by babyent | 2025-05-12 02:35:44+00:00
What was your rent though?

I was not at FAANG, but a unicorn startup back in mid to late 2010s, and I was making 150-180k in that time, but not in SF.

Rent back then for a 2br was like $2400.. Today, that same apartment goes for $4900.

I am pretty sure the base for the same level today is probably more like 170-200k, but literally everything has also become doubly expensive.

Also if you're in SF you either need to allocate another 300-400 a month for parking, or sell your car. I was paying 130 per month for my garage parking spot (again, not in SF), and when I moved to SF some time ago I sold my car because it was going to cost me a lot to use my car.

And unlike FANG, where you can either hold and double every 3-4 years if lucky, or sell immediately with taxes, I walked away with 10x or more..
by Julesman | 2025-05-12 02:36:38+00:00
GPT agrees with me.

The site positions itself as advocating for simplicity and minimalism in web development—stressing plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript—but then pivots into building the entire project using React. That’s a contradiction.

If the goal is truly "plain vanilla web," introducing React (with its build tools, dependencies, and abstraction layers) runs counter to that ethos. A truly minimalist approach would skip frameworks entirely or at most use small, native JS modules.

So yes, it's philosophically inconsistent. Want to dig into a better alternative stack that sticks to that principle?
by hedora | 2025-05-12 02:37:07+00:00
I haven’t had that experience when the same mechanisms were used to prevent screen sharing streaming video.

I just fired up a linux vm, and hit play.

If this thing actually breaks machines that don’t have a properly configured hdcp chain, it’ll create insane “this meeting is broken” debugging scenarios.

Also, hdcp is trivially bypassed these days (if, for some reason a camera phone recording of the damning meeting isn’t enough, and a perfect digital copy is needed…)
by bitmasher9 | 2025-05-12 02:38:05+00:00
When I was doing my car shopping two years ago, I was initially considering another Mazda, specifically looking at the Mazda 3 AWD Hatchback. Their high tech features were significantly behind the other Japanese auto manufacturers. Some features like the ability for the car to automatically stay in a lane were not present.

When looking at who is doing it right, I wouldn’t put Mazda on a pedestal. They simply are behind the competition.
by teleforce | 2025-05-12 02:40:45+00:00
It's very true.

Guess who pioneered the venerable Silicon Valley, it's HP (then Agilent, now Keysight). Their first killer product was the function (signal/waveform) generator. HP basically the Levi's of the radar era, making tools for the radar/transistor/circuit technology gold rush.

One of the best academic engineering research labs in the world for many decades now is MIT Lincoln Lab, and guess what it's a radar research lab [1].

I can go on but you probably get the idea now.

[1] MIT Lincoln Laboratory:

https://www.ll.mit.edu/
by toast0 | 2025-05-12 02:41:57+00:00
The aarp link seems to basically say that a lot of seniors are having loans rejected because of low reported income, so be sure to report retirement income.

The philadelphia fed link notes that older people who apply for loans are being denied more often, but there's lots of potential reasons for that. Aggregate economic stats, other than credit score, in the table at the end look worse to my eye near the top age brackets (but maybe not at the same levels that rejection started climbing).

It's not clear to me when it says age discrimination is prohibited, but mortality expectations are allowed. Seems like the same thing to me.

The paper suggests there may be an element of selection, which resonates with me. Looking at my parents and their siblings, most all of them would have had a mortgage 30 years ago and likely be in these statistics; now, those with higher retirment incomes also seem to be the ones that paid off their mortgages and aren't interested in a new one.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-12 02:42:55+00:00
I don’t understand why this aphorism appeals to people.

I’ve most definitely left bad companies where I’ve had good managers and I know my experience is not unique.

When it gets to the point where people are pointing at executives as the “managers” that they’re leaving, do people just not realize that companies are run by high-level managers?

It’s a vacuous statement that holds some strange appeal for some people, but it’s not particularly insightful nor accurate.
by archagon | 2025-05-12 02:44:38+00:00
Rent was (and is) around $4000 for 3br, shared between 2 people. (And this was not an unusual price to see during our apartment hunt a few years ago.) If you're paying $4900 for 2br in the city, my impression is that it's either a brand new development or in a posh area like Pac Heights.

I don't have a car, but I feel like that's one of the biggest privileges of living in the city. Maybe the calculus changes if you have kids, though.