MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robocat | 2025-05-19 18:39:14+00:00
> Startups having the sole purpose of skimming funds by being the technology partner to some academic.

Is cynicism about motives necessary?

I believe most people have enough self-deception and denial, that we don't need to assume fraud or theft. Similarly charities often end up being self-serving leeches - but the people seem to believe they are helping. Maybe I'm just naive? It is possible that most people in New Zealand are not so focused on intentional theft and fraud?

In New Zealand I've watched our government burn fucktons of money trying to invest in university "innovation". Academics convince politicians that they have valuable ideas, and politicians want to believe universities produce value. However the government funding is horrifically managed (no business sense) and the startups lack the right genetics and fail (even if matched funding from private investors). New Zealanders lack an entrepreneurial learning environment (maybe EU is the same): founding is difficult and really difficult if you've never watched someone close succeed.

I believe the root cause is that academics are not business/financially oriented, so the startups fail because they are not businesses. Plus the organisations picking investments are academic heavy and are not run by good capitalists. Academics often have good valuable ideas. But academics tend not to be hyper-focused just on business outcomes or they are not money focused. Business founders need to focus on profit (not status hunting, and definitely not looking for academic recognition).

I wondered for a while whether the cause was my own selection bias (startups mostly fail so I saw them fail) but I don't think that was the cause.

Also the government investing organisations love heavy handed shitty governance (and legal overcontrol bullshit). The principals believe their advice and overview is valuable. The investors put in bad CEOs and also force the businesses to make poor decisions. I've seen private VC funding make the same mistakes.

It is really sad to see good ideas get murdered by people with government money: I'm sure they believe they are helping and that they are trying to help (I'm not that cynical about motivations).

Our current government has just announced another 100 million to go towards academic startups. I just fucking wish our government would spend the budget instead by removing unnecessary red tape and to improve tax incentives (in New Zealand the incentives to grow businesses or create export income are fucked in my personal experience).
by g9yuayon | 2025-05-19 18:39:18+00:00
I often read that EU is incredibly bureaucratic and risk averse. On the other hand, I also read stories how startups can successfully bootstrap themselves via generous support of the government, like tax deduction for small companies, unemployment benefits for founders, low-interest loans, venture investment, free mentorship by very experienced and connected executives, and etc. The stories about French and Denmark companies are especially impressive. So, I was wondering if there's a difference between the governments of individual countries in EU and the EU government.
by sillywalk | 2025-05-19 18:39:30+00:00
Nitpick:

Almost 20 years ago IBM had the eclipz project to share technology between its POWER (System i and System P) and Mainframe (System Z) servers. I'm not sure if counts as "based on", but

"the z10 processor was co-developed with and shares many design traits with the POWER6 processor, such as fabrication technology, logic design, execution unit, floating-point units, bus technology (GX bus) and pipeline design style."[0]

The chips were otherwise quite different, and obviously don't share the same ISA. I also don't know if IBM has kept this kind of sharing between POWER & Z.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_z10
by ymir_e | 2025-05-19 18:39:38+00:00
Congratulations on the launch!

Heavily evaluated better-auth when implementing auth at my current company. Ended up with keycloak because of SAML SSO.

One thing I remember having some issues with was customising schemas with the drizzle adapter. Looks like you've cleared up the documentation more now. I think at the time I was confused as to wether custom schemas were specified in the drizzle adapter options, or inside the the organization plugin.

Basically mixing up these two: https://www.better-auth.com/docs/plugins/organization#custom... https://www.better-auth.com/docs/adapters/drizzle#additional...

Thanks for all your work, it is a really cool library!
by bobbylarrybobby | 2025-05-19 18:40:10+00:00
I am not a gopher, so this may be a dumb question: when an io.Reader produces a buffer of its contents, does it not have the option of just returning the buffer it wraps if it does in fact wrap a buffer? Something like (pseudocode) `if self isa BufferedReader { self.takeBuffer() } else { let buffer = newBuffer(); self.fill(buffer); buffer }`.
by trollbridge | 2025-05-19 18:40:18+00:00
It is very likely C1 will move away from MC/Visa. There's a massive amount of money on the table for them in the form of interchange fees. They're effectively becoming the next American Express.

From a competitive landscape, this is probably a good thing - Discover never really did much issuance of cards by other banks, and this means competition against Amex.
by whartung | 2025-05-19 18:40:21+00:00
Just curious if the folks at CVS chart particularly high on these horrible effects, considering the no doubt thousands of feet of receipts they handle each day there.

For those unaware, at the CVS Pharmacy if you walk in and buy so much as a pack of gum, you're likely to walk out with at least 3 feet of receipt. They use them to tack on ads and coupons.
by aaroninsf | 2025-05-19 18:40:31+00:00
The broad answer is well known: governmental capture allowed via multiple mechanisms for the near-total capture of real productivity gains to be collected by the wealthy.

This as most here can imagine allowed via recurrent acceleration for the profound wealth inequality we experience today, and directly produced our current collapse of democracy into literal kelpto-oligarchy backed by overwhelmingly powerful surveillance.

The 1% perceived and perceive no self-interest in a rising tide.

Now that hunter-killer machines both online and soon off shall reliably keep what people are still needed at bay, why would they?

I wish this were hyperbolic.

Neither diagnosis nor prediction is.
by ayushrodrigues | 2025-05-19 18:41:15+00:00
I was happy to read this as a founder who was raised in the UK. I wish I didn't have to move to the US to start a company but it's starting to feel like a joke here.

> The bank aims to process startup financing applications within six months

No good founder is waiting for 6 months. It makes absolutely no sense when VCs can make decisions in days, hours even.
by randunel | 2025-05-19 18:42:09+00:00
Thanks for your reply, but as a Linux user for over 20 years, all I take away from your post is that you haven't really tried, probably because the variety of distros vastly exceeds the two classic options of mac vs windows.

I understand the "roll your own" argument very well. In my time, I've experienced quite the variety of configs and dotfiles, but I'm not young anymore so I've settled with using Regolith which is an opinionated set of tools, including my favourite i3wm, on top of Ubuntu, and I simply use defaults for the most things.

Anyway, it's much easier to use Linux as a daily driver than it's ever been. The choice of distro is simply which package manager to use, and everything else just works, as long as it's in the package manager's inventory.

I haven't compiled my own computer's kernel in 6 years (but I still cross compile for rpi and other IoT), and I haven't used my dotfiles in 3 years, just defaults.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-05-19 18:42:15+00:00
Both is true: a lot of money is lost to bureaucracy and startups get funding, although it's not that easy imho. And the amounts are laughable in my experience, that's the biggest problem. Yes, it's nice that I get a kickback on research costs or whatever, but the process takes weeks and the returns are dismal. YMMV tho
by cvburgess | 2025-05-19 18:42:20+00:00
Thank you!

The website uses the default themes for the app which I picked specifically to be easy to look at (I have it open all day).

According to WebAIM[0] it passes so feel free to rip the theme [1] and use it for your next project!

[0] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

[1] https://github.com/cvburgess/dexter-www/blob/main/src/index....
by johnea | 2025-05-19 18:42:23+00:00
Tesla is not elon, elon is not tesla 8-/

Just seems like someone needs to say this.

I'm not a fan of elon or the cheato, but there are corps in the US that deserve people's ire much more than tesla. You could just start with a list of the "incinerating the poor" industry. Or any of the other murder for hire corporations.

I would never own a tesla myself, simply because of the level of surveillance. But they do have the most well developed charging network, and the integration of that network with the vehicle's nav system is the most stand out feature of the brand. No other EV maker comes close in this regard.

I agree with the sentiment that elon is scum, but I would also say that if you want to protest against a company, there are many that do much more damage to society than tesla...
by drdaeman | 2025-05-19 18:42:29+00:00
Does it mean that no company honestly offers a "we sequence your generic material, send you data back, and completely forget the whole affair afterwards, all genetic data wiped on our side with the only copy left being yours - no strings attached" type of service? In a jurisdiction that doesn't require labs to retain anything (so non-US, as US has CLIA). I assume it would cost significantly more than usual subscription/research-subsidized services, of course.

I'm not interested in services of finding relatives or health coach gimmicks, I just want an one-time purchase of a raw data blob with solid personal privacy guarantees. Am I asking for too much?
by rrauenza | 2025-05-19 18:42:42+00:00
I had this argument presented to me and I wasn't sure what to do with it.

> Humans are allowed to "absorb" art around them into their brains and generate derivative art. People may copy Miyazaki's style... why shouldn't an AI farm be allowed to?

Let's put aside for a moment that AI may have "consumed" some art without a license (e.g., "google books" - did google purchase every book?).
by phendrenad2 | 2025-05-19 18:43:10+00:00
Where are you experiencing filesystem slowness? I've been using WSL in some advanced configurations (building Win32 apps by cross-compiling from Linux CLANG and dropping the .exe into a Windows folder, copying large files from Linux->Windows and vice versa, automating Linux with .BAT files, etc.) and I haven't seen this slowness at all.
by d_watt | 2025-05-19 18:43:35+00:00
The way Claude Code is going is exactly what I want out of a agentic coding tool with this "unix toolish" philosophy. I've been using Claude code since the initial public preview release, and have seen the direction over time.

The "golden" end state of coding agents is that you give it a Feature Request (EG Jira ticket), and it gives you a PR to review and give feedback on. Cursor, windsurf, etc, are dead ends in that sense as they are local editors, and can not be in CI.

If you are tooling your codebase for optimal AI usage (Rules, MCP, etc), you should target a technology that can bridge the gap to headless usage. The fact Claude Code can trivially be used as part of automation through the tools means it's now the default way I thinking about coding agents (Codex, the npm package, is the same).

Disclaimer, I focus on helping companies tool their codebases for optimal agent usage, so I might have a bias here to easily configurable tools.
by rich_sasha | 2025-05-19 18:43:46+00:00
Forced to work on Windows for ++nth job, I was looking forward to WSL. Indeed, while it worked, it was magic. Sadly, I have had no end of bizarre bugs. The latest one almost crashed my whole desktop - as far as I can piece together, something crashed, leading to a core dump the size of my desktops entire memory - half the machine's RAM. This in turn put WSL in a weird state - it would neither run, not be uninstallable. Googling found bug reports with similar experiences, no responses from Microsoft and magic incantation that maybe worked for some people - but not for me.

It might be due to my corpo's particular setup etc. but for me 95% of the value of WSL would be the ability to run it on "corporate" Windows boxes. Alas.
by palmotea | 2025-05-19 18:43:51+00:00
> Just goes to show how short-sighted these political decisions have been. Politics shouldn't be wrapping itself around tech, the US is shrugging off a huge market and ally.

Which political decision? The one to prosecute a US ally, or the one to sanction the ICC?

When someone decries something as "politics," there's often a problem where the analysis conveniently stops when the blame can be placed on the speaker's disfavored group.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-19 18:43:58+00:00
> I was happy to read this as a founder who was raised in the UK

The UK isn't a member of the EIB.

> No good founder is waiting for 6 months. It makes absolutely no sense when VCs can make decisions in days, hours even.

Speculation, but based on similar initiatives done in the EU in the past, it will target industrial and manufacturing vendors and suppliers (especially as this proposal is linked to KfW).

That said, no point discussing this until the final proposal actually gets presented and voted on by the Board of Governors. Most of what exists publicly is just vague press releases.
by gleenn | 2025-05-19 18:43:58+00:00
If I have a complicated set of business-logic functions that all return booleans, the type-checker can tell me I got a boolean back but not that in xyz scenario my result should be true and abc scenario it should be false. You must write a test for that, the types are only the most marginal at helping check correctness. There are many more examples like this. If I have to write the tests, why do I want to spend time writing all the types too if my tests cover the things I care about the the types only cover details like "you returned a number from a function marked boolean", that type of error is super easy to catch with a test, so I didn't need the types.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-19 18:44:13+00:00
i think everyone tried that. gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point.

i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again.

then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again.

then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again.

now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file because we run a psql container in a different way under wsl... let's see how long we endure until saying never again.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-19 18:44:54+00:00
I think the difference is that burnout can even be for things you're excited about and want to do, but subconsciously don't want to do for other reasons, e.g. the task/project goes against your ethics but you're pushing past that anyway, so your mind tries to stop you through stopping your body, e.g. fatigue or pain.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-19 18:45:01+00:00
Underappreciated reason, when system observations are made:

- Discover was founded in 1985 (credit card only, by Sears) and began banking in 2006(?)

- Capital One was founded in 1994 (credit card only) and began banking in 2005

Legacy systems suck, especially if the parent company has underinvested in IT modernization for decades. Delta? Southwest? And younger companies don't have to deal with the pre-digital legacy pain of < ~1990 founded companies.
by os2warpman | 2025-05-19 18:45:07+00:00
It's very simple.

Many people are incapable of leaving others alone. They think they are right and people who disagree are wrong and must be corrected. Both rich and poor people can be like this. Even if someone else has absolutely no impact on their lives whatsoever, if they are "wrong" they must be demonized.

Rich people have the resources to shout over poorer people and buy influence.

The richest man I know sold his business in an all-cash transaction for $114 million in 2011 when he was in his late 50s. He divided the after-tax sum in half and used one half to write checks based on weeks of service to all of his employees and kept the other half. (I was one of those employees.)

He stuck around for six months making sure the transition was smooth then he fucked off to a beach house in Key West and has spent the last decade fishing and working on vintage Corvettes.

He would look at a trans person, go "well ain't that something" and move on with his life.

He would not wage an international media campaign to demonize them.

I can hear him in my head muttering "what in the hell do they gotta do with me?" just thinking about him being asked about a cultural issue.

Some people (both rich and poor, but you only hear about the poor ones) seethe with hatred and it's sad.
by thundergolfer | 2025-05-19 18:45:12+00:00
> Speaking of the effects of technology on individuals and society as a whole, Marshall McLuhan wrote that every augmentation is also an amputation.

Nice to see this because I drafted something about LLM and humans riffing on exactly the same McLuhan argument. Here it is:

A large language model (LLM) is a new medium. Just like its predecessors—hypertext, television, film, radio, newspapers, books, speech—it is of obvious importance to the initiated. Just like its predecessors, the content of this new medium is its predecessors.

> “The content of writing is speech, just as the content of the written word is the content of print.” — McLuhan

The LLMs have swallowed webpages, books, newspapers, and journals—some X exabytes were combined into GPT-4 over a few months of training. The results are startling. Each new medium has a period of embarrassment, like a kid that’s gotten into his mother’s closet and is wearing her finest drawers as a hat. Nascent television borrowed from film and newspapers in an initially clumsy way, struggling to digest its parents and find its own language. It took television about 50 years to hit stride and go beyond film, but it got there. Shows like The Wire, The Sopranos, and Mad Men achieved something not replaceable by the movie or the novel. It’s yet hard to say what exactly the medium of LLMs exactly is, but after five years I think it’s clear that they are not books, they are not print, or speech, but something new, something unto themselves.

We must understand them. McLuhan subtitled his seminal work of media literacy “the extensions of man”, and probably the second most important idea in the book—besides the classic “medium is the message”—is that mediums are not additive to human society, but replacing, antipruritic, atrophying, prosthetic. With my Airpods in my ears I can hear the voices of those thousands of miles away, those asleep, those dead. But I do not hear the birds on my street. Only two years or so into my daily relationship with the medium of LLMs I still don’t understand what I’m dealing with, how I’m being extended, how I’m being alienated, and changed. But we’ve been here before, McLuhan and others have certainly given us the tools to work this out.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-19 18:45:30+00:00
Perhaps "more powerful" is also a factor of who is the computer user. For example, Linux is not as "powerful" if the computer user is someone who knows little about how to use it.

For a person who will not invest the time to learn, e.g., how to avoid or minimise dependencies, indeed something like Windows with WSL may appear "more powerful".

The point of this comment is that "power" comes from learning and know-how as much as if not more than simply from choice of operating system. That said, some choices may ultimately spell the difference between limitations or possibilities.
by abirch | 2025-05-19 18:45:47+00:00
If you've ever read Thinking Fast and Slow, Trump is great at appealing to System 1. He's spent his entire lifetime focusing on his branding and what people think of him. I dislike almost all of Trump's policies and his tactics; however, he's great at oversimplifying things and getting the visceral reactions he wants.

Chapelle's SNL monolog about Trump is pretty spot on too.
by Sajarin | 2025-05-19 18:46:18+00:00
I wonder if anyone has done an analysis on the HN user sentiment on the varying AI models over time. I'd be curious to see what that looks like. Increasingly, I'm seeing more and more people talk positively about Gemini and Google (and having used Gemini recently, I align with that sentiment)

I think Bard (lol) and Gemini got a late start and so lots of folks dismissed it but I feel like they've fully caught up. Definitely excited to see what Gemini 3 vs GPT-5 vs Claude 4 looks like!
by teddyh | 2025-05-19 18:46:45+00:00
> Catbert on work life balance: "Give us some balance, you selfish hag"

Better link: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1998-05-05>

> The other, I can never seem to find.

Here you are: <https://dilbert-viewer.herokuapp.com/1993-08-30>
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-19 18:46:58+00:00
How would you compete with other businesses’s that either choose to lower prices or increase investment funding due to the equity’s higher ROI?

The market works because all actors are buyers and sellers, and when buying, you are seeking the lowest price, and when selling, you are seeking the highest price.

If you stop doing that, someone will outcompete you by allocating resources better (absent corruption). It even applies on a household level, where if you spend extra on charity or groceries or whatever, you will have a smaller downpayment to compete for the house you want.

Also, generally, employee pay is highly correlate with the employer’s profit margin (outside of healthcare due to heavy government involvement).
by godelski | 2025-05-19 18:47:06+00:00
Sure sampling bias is probably a factor. But I'm sure it's also a factor in nearly every one of these discussions that isn't a serious and meticulous study.

For wondering, I believe this might help. If we parametrize sigmoid to be 1/(1+e^{-ax}) then our a factor is at play. We're interested in x<=0. When a < 1 then the function becomes flat and much more linear like. The larger a becomes the more quadratic it looks at near the origin (but still x<=0)

I still think the model is naive. Even just a sigmoid is. You need the composition of them and further parameterization. They are good for approximating as you originally suggested but this is similar to using fourier series. It's the fact that you have the three classes of second derivatives allowing you to strongly control the composite function through minimal parameterization and complexity. But that's also why I immediately understood this to be being using in an illustrative way rather than a serious one. I mean realistically so are you.
by lolinder | 2025-05-19 18:47:09+00:00
In the same spirit if "it depends", there are other options that may work for people with different Linux/Windows balance points:

* Wine is surprisingly good these days for a lot of software. If you only have an app or two that need Windows it is probably worth trying Wine to see if it meets your needs.

* Similarly, if gaming is your thing Valve has made enormous strides in getting the majority of games to work flawlessly on Linux.

* If neither of the above are good enough, dual booting is nearly painless these days, with easy setup and fast boot times across both OSes. I have grub set to boot Linux by default but give me a few seconds to pick Windows instead if I need to do one of the few things that I actually use Windows for.

Which you go for really depends on your ratio of Linux to Windows usage and whether you regularly need to mix the two.