MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by YesBox | 2025-05-03 15:28:51+00:00
>Angel investors also face the longest time horizon for liquidity of any investor. Private equity aims for 3-5 year returns, and VCs typically run 7-10 year fund cycles, but angels usually wait 10+ years for exits. This means angels aren’t just taking company-specific risk, but also the risk of facing more macroeconomic cycles.

>Think about all that's happened since 2009 when I started: multiple presidential administrations, a global pandemic, zero interest rates, and now high inflation and higher interest rates. My investments have had to withstand all of these shifts, and many didn't make it through.

Really interesting stuff (for me, as an outsider).

Can anyone comment if VCs are looking for shorter fund cycles or are the macro economic shifts what's capping it at 10 years?

I once read one reason why startups take so long to IPO is so private investments can benefit longer from the growth
by hellcow | 2025-05-03 15:29:02+00:00
A general rule of thumb is that you have 3 board members at the seed (1 non-CEO founder, the CEO which is typically another founder, and the lead investor). So you have 1 seat available for investors, whereas you may take 5-20 checks. Not everyone is getting a seat.

At the A you usually expand to 5, adding the lead of the A round and an independent board member. Beyond that, it’s common for the earlier investors to get replaced on the board in future rounds and maintain observer rights.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-03 15:29:14+00:00
> AI automating software production could hugely increase demand for software

Let's think this through

1: AI automates software production

2: Demand for software goes through the roof

3: AI has lowered the skill ceiling required to make software, so many more can do it with a 'good-enough' degree of success

4: People are making software for cheap because the supply of 'good enough' AI prompters still dwarfs the rising demand for software

5: The value of being a skilled software engineer plummets

6: The rich get richer, the middle class shrinks even further, and the poor continue to get poorer

This isn't just some kind of wild speculation. Look at any industry over the history of mankind. Look at Textiles

People used to make a good living crafting clothing, because it was a skill that took time to learn and master. Automation makes it so anyone can do it. Nowadays, automation has made it so people who make clothes are really just operating machines. Throughout my life, clothes have always been made by the cheapest overseas labour that capital could find. Sometimes it has even turned out that companies were using literal slaves or child labour.

Meanwhile the rich who own the factories have gotten insanely wealthy, the middle class has shrunk substantially, and the poor have gotten poorer

Do people really not see that this will probably be the outcome of "AI automates literally everything"?

Yes, there will be "more work" for people. Yes, overall society will produce more software than ever

McDonalds also produces more hamburgers than ever. The company makes tons of money from that. The people making the burgers usually earn the least they can legally be paid
by yusina | 2025-05-03 15:29:23+00:00
People who are good at playing a technically hard piece essentially know it by heart. They couldn't play it on sight, they have invested significant time to be able to play it. It's just the few remaining percent of reminders and the comfort of having the sheet "just in" case as well as the being-used-to-it factor that makes them stare at the sheet. But if they can play it really well then they don't _actually_ need it. Any pro musician will tell you this.

The orchestra setting has the extra requitement that the sheet is a tool for communication. "The figure in bar 83" is not a term you have gained an intuitive understanding for, but is needed to communicate in an orchestra setting. The soloist though often times plays by heart, at least during performances, so as not to get distracted / get tunnel vision.
by oezi | 2025-05-03 15:29:32+00:00
Sure, but gross labor share of GDP is 60% in the US (salaried employees earn 60% of GDP in total) so it doesn't change the consideration that much.

The US is spending roughly 15% of the GDP on health. If 1% of GDP is due to obesity then this is 'just' 1/15th of the overall health spending. If 3% of GDP is due to obesity then this is 20% (3/15th) of the overall health cost in the US.
by Tallain | 2025-05-03 15:29:38+00:00
I'm reminded of the chart from this blog post: https://molodtsov.me/2023/02/how-to-start-your-blog-in-2023/

As I fell into the SSG pit I found I mostly wrote about and fooled around with the SSG itself, instead of all the things I originally planned on writing about and doing. So I threw away the SSG and installed Wordpress and stopped caring. It's been liberating.

If the goal is to tinker and write about the tinkering, that is fine. If you're not like me and the tinkering never gets in the way of the writing, that's also fine. But that wasn't me. I had to learn yet again that the best tool was the one that got out of my way and let me do what I came to do.

The last thing I need when I'm aiming to write is a chance to procrastinate.
by esprehn | 2025-05-03 15:30:03+00:00
We discussed this back when creating web components, but the focus quickly became about SPA applications instead of MPAs and the demand for features like this was low in that space.

I wish I would have advocated more for it though. I think it would be pretty easy to add using a new attribute on <script> since the parser already pauses there, so making something like <script transclude={url}> would likely not be too difficult.
by jajko | 2025-05-03 15:30:19+00:00
Mine doesn't, and I am fine with that, never needed such validation. I derive fulfillment from my personal life and achievements and passions there, more than enough. With that optics, office politics and promotion rat race and what people do in them just makes me smile. Seeing how otherwise smart folks ruin (or miss out) their actual lives and families in pursuit of excellence in a very narrow direction, often hard underappreciated by employers and not rewarded adequately. I mean, at certain point you either grok the game and optimize, or you don't.

The work brings over time modest wealth, allows me and my family to live in long term safe place (Switzerland) and builds a small reserve for bad times (or inheritance, early retirement etc. this is Europe, no need to save up for kids education or potentially massive healthcare bills). Don't need more from life.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-03 15:31:12+00:00
The acute guilt levied wasn't about following orders and exterminating the ground squirrels...

... but using an industrial shredder to do it. (on 440 of them)

For reference, this is an industrial shredder: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/I15kCJyl6po

Anyone who did that to a live animal deserves to be in prison, orders or no. There are innumerable compassionate, humane ways to kill animals, if it's necessary.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-03 15:31:16+00:00
Yeah, it's a pretty fun livestream. (It's just a 24/7 live video feed on YouTube.)

It's in the tradition of ChilledCow/LoFi Girl. It's a minimally-animated Commander-in-Chief, sitting in the Oval Office signing EOs. Meanwhile, on the right hand side, there's a crawl of promises and how he's kept them so far in the administration.

LoFi music as promised. It's not a bad channel. Just another lightning rod for the haters.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-03 15:32:04+00:00
> So I thought that the problem could be solved by just arriving there by any other flight, which I booked almost immediately.

Why did you do that? Especially when that cost you extra money?

You should have talked to the airline directly, explained you'd missed your flight because they gave you the wrong airport, and the airline would have rebooked you and everything would have been fine. People miss flights all the time and this is an entirely normal process.

It's been standard practice for a long time if you miss a first leg, that you forfeit the rest. They're going to reuse those seats for e.g. other people who missed their original flights. It's a type of flexibility built into the whole system.

Connecting flights are super useful because you can work with the airline to reschedule the whole thing, and the airline is responsible if you can't make a connection because an earlier leg is delayed.

I truly don't understand why you would have taken it into your own hands to buy a separate replacement ticket on your own, instead of talking to the airline. Even in your second example, why didn't you work with the airline to reschedule your missed flight? Even if they for some reason can't reschedule, they will often keep your return flight valid if you have an obviously good reason (e.g. a visa issue during COVID). But you do have to contact them immediately.

I'm sorry you didn't know how all this worked, but when in doubt, contact customer service ASAP to see if they can help. Don't just go buy separate tickets on your own, and then assume later legs will still be valid. That's not how it works.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-05-03 15:32:25+00:00
Also... there was this discussion several months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877301

Both that item and this item add the unique perspectives of the authors, but both are about issues raised by Dan Davies' Unaccountability Machine. So if you like this thread, you might like that thread.
by kordlessagain | 2025-05-03 15:32:41+00:00
Nuance is hard. Binary choices are fast, comforting, and require less thought. Certainty feels safer than ambiguity — especially in conflict, where complexity threatens identity. And in most arenas (tech, media, politics), decisive hot takes get applause. Fence-sitters get ignored.

I worked at a startup where the CEO swore up and down that real-time fine-tuning was the future — that models would continuously update with company data. It sounded cool until you remember: That’s not how LLMs work. It’s not efficient. It’s not flexible. And it’s not even necessary — we already have RAG.

Pipedreams make good pitch decks. But they break when you hit production.

It's a fucking pipedream, this. That's not how LLMs work, it's not efficient, it's not useful (we have RAG for reference augmentation), and it’s not even desirable unless you want your model overfitting on stale, internal narratives every night.
by simple10 | 2025-05-03 15:32:52+00:00
I can highly recommend n8n. I prefer it over Make.com, Pipedream, Zapier, etc. for automations and AI agent tasks. Basically, anything you want to automate but don't want to spin up a custom code server each time.

The main reasons I switched to n8n are it's open source, meaning I can run it locally without limits, and it supports code nodes in javascript and python. Make.com used to drive me bonkers when it took 10+ minutes to create all the nodes in the UI to handle loops, errors, etc. when I could normally just write a few lines of code to handle it.

Only downside to n8n vs other platforms is it's polling based vs instant trigger unlike Zapier's and Make.com's connectors. So if you're processing email, Google Sheets data, etc. you'll have more latency with n8n unless you add some custom middleware to handle instant triggers. But polling is actually a benefit in my case since I mostly run n8n locally through docker. Whenever I spin it up, it auto catches up on new data it hasn't yet processed.

n8n's AI nodes are first rate and more intuitive IMO than others. You can easily extend it with custom LangChain nodes as well if you're self hosting.

If you want to play around with n8n locally, this tool makes it easy: https://github.com/LLemonStack/llemonstack/ I created it to make it easier for me to spin up and down project stacks on the same machine.

Or see n8n's official repo for instructions on running locally: https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n
by cantSpellSober | 2025-05-03 15:33:12+00:00
That's why I joked about flamebait, it's hypertext though, aren't anchors essentially a goToURL() click handler in some ways? Template partials seem like a basic part of this system.

> considered to be server-side

Good point! Wouldn't fetching a template partial happen the same way (like fetching an image?)
by kfogel | 2025-05-03 15:33:25+00:00
Wow. This project was the cause of a very long and intense discussion about mis-use of the term "open source". See https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n/issues/40#issuecomment-5397146... for details (lands mid-thread -- you might want to scroll back to see the start, and if you read the whole thing to the end then you deserve some sort of award!).

TL;DR: The author originally tried to call n8n "open source" but while using a non-open-source license. After much discussion, he kept the license but stopped using the label "open source", to the relief of many people.

That half-decade-old thread is still what I point to when I want to explain to someone why preserving the specificity of the term "open source" matters.
by Mbwagava | 2025-05-03 15:33:38+00:00
Ok, but very few people contest that consciousness is computable. It's basically just Penrose (and other folks without the domain knowledge to engage). This doesn't imply that at any point during all human existence will computing consciousness be economically feasible or worthwhile.

Actual AGI presumably implies a not-brain involved.

And this isn't even broaching the subject of "superintelligence", which I would describe as "superunbelievable".
by doright | 2025-05-03 15:33:46+00:00
This is a good point, you can't be dependent on a chatbot in the same way you're dependent on someone you share a lease with. If people take up chatbots en masse, maybe it says more about how they perceive the risk of virtual or physical human interactions vs AI. The people I have met in the past make the most sycophant AIs seem like a drop in the bucket by comparison. When you come back from that in real life, you remark that this is all just a bunch of text in comparison.

I treat AIs dispassionately like a secretary I can give infinite amounts of work to without needing to care about them throwing their hands up. That sort of mindset is non-conducive to developing any feelings. With humans you need empathy to not burden them with excessive demands. If it solely comes down to getting work done (and not building friendships or professional relationships etc.) then that need to restrain your demands is a limitation of human biology that AIs kind of circumvent for specific workloads.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-03 15:33:57+00:00
Most work is redundant and unnecessary. Take for example the classic gas station on every corner situation that often emerges. This turf war between gas providers (or their franchisees by proxy they granted a license to this location for) is not because three or four gas stations are operating at maximum capacity. No, this is 3 or 4 fisherman with a line in the river, made possible solely because inputs (real estate, gas, labor, merchandise) are cheap enough where the gas station need not ever run even close to capacity and still return a profit for the fisherman.

Who benefits from the situation? You or I who don’t have to make a u turn to get gas at this intersection, perhaps, but that is not much benefit in comparison for the opportunity cost of not having 3 prime corner lots squandered on the same single use. The clerk at the gas station for having a job available? Perhaps although maybe their labor in aggregate would have been employed in other less redundant uses that could benefit out society otherwise than selling smokes and putting $20 on 4 at 3am. The real beneficiary of this entire arrangement is the fisherman, the owner or shareholder who ultimately skims from all the pots thanks to having what is effectively a modern version of a plantation sharecropper, spending all their money in the company store and on company housing with a fig leaf of being able to choose from any number of minimum wage jobs, spend their wages in any number of national chain stores, and rent any number of increasingly investor owned property. Quite literally all owned by the same shareholders when you consider how people diversify their investments into these multiple sectors.
by jadamson | 2025-05-03 15:34:00+00:00
What do you mean what does it mean?

An iframe is a window into another webpage, and is bounded as such both visually and in terms of DOM interfaces. A simple example would be that an iframe header can't have drop-down menus that overlap content from the page hosting it.

They are categorically not the same DX/UX as SSI et al. and it's absolutely bizarre to me that there's so many comments making this complaint.
by yusina | 2025-05-03 15:34:48+00:00
It is. It's just that we now live in an age where everything has to be solved with "AI" to get attention and justify the billions of investments. So we forget established tech and enter the era of AI enshittification where this kind of thing is considered an amazing achievement.

Had this been some high school kids I'd be impressed. But Google? C'mon.
by kordlessagain | 2025-05-03 15:34:53+00:00
That summary's not wrong, it's just reductionist.

Fine-tuning makes sense when you need behavioral shifts (style, tone, bias) or are training on data unavailable at runtime.

RAG excels when you want factual augmentation without retraining the whole damn brain.

It's not either/or — it's about cost, latency, use case, and update cycles. But hey, binaries are easier to pitch on a slide.
by Balgair | 2025-05-03 15:35:02+00:00
Dwarkesh had a good interview with Zuck the other week. And in it, Zuck had an interesting example (that I'm going to butcher):

FB has long wanted to have a call center for its ~3.5B users. But that call center would automatically be the largest in history and cost ~15B/yr to run. Something that is cost ineffective in the extreme. But, with FB's internal AIs, they're starting to think that a call center may be feasible. Most of the calls are going to be 'I forgot my password' and 'it's broken' anyways. So having a robot guide people along the FAQs in the 50+ languages is perfectly fine for ~90% (Zuck's number here) of the calls. Then, with the harder calls, you can actually route it to a human.

So, to me, this is a great example of how the interaction of new tech and labor is a fractal not a hierarchy. In that, with each new tech that your specific labor sector finds, you get this fractalization of the labor in the end. Zuck would have never thought of a call center, denying the labor of many people. But this new tech allows for a call center that looks a lot like the old one, just with only the hard problems. It's smaller, yes, but it looks the same and yet is slightly different (hence a fractal).

Look, I'm not going to argue that tech is disruptive. But what I am arguing is that tech makes new jobs (most of the time), it's just that these new jobs tend to be dealing with much harder problems. Like, we''re pushing the boundaries here, and that boundary gets more fractal-y, and it's a more niche and harder working environment for your brain. The issue, of course, is that, like a grad student, you have to trust in the person working at the boundary is actually doing work and not just blowing smoke. That issue, the one of trust, I think is the key issue to 'solve'. Cal Newport talks a lot about this now and how these knowledge worker tasks really don't do much for a long time, and then they have these spats of genius. It's a tough one, and not an intellectual enterprise, but an emotional one.
by bix6 | 2025-05-03 15:35:35+00:00
My LPs want liquidity now, always. 2021 was hot and it’s been relatively quiet since. Mega funds are keeping companies private longer. Capital is tied up which hurts emerging managers trying to raise. My LPs want returns in 6 years which only works if everything goes perfectly which almost never happens; that’s how long $100M+ rev takes if you triple yearly. IPO requires more rev than before, everything’s larger.
by PopAlongKid | 2025-05-03 15:35:39+00:00
>how many paintings of Mary and ugly baby Jesus do you need?

I had a laugh at that comment. I visited London six months ago and spent an evening at the National Gallery, including the self-guided audio tour. As I wrote in an email at the time,

"I'd guess at least a third of the paintings I saw, often from Italian artists, were about Jesus being born, being circumcised, or being crucified and resurrected, along with lots of stuff about Mary, Joseph, John the Baptist (Jesus' cousin, I guess), etc"
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-03 15:36:31+00:00
Yeah, similarly with insulation / good building practices, my house can lose power in coldest of days and i do not have to put on hoodie for 2 days. (not heating by other means like wood, which i do not have) it is not big house tho. it is insane to me that in country where there are tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires hundreds of times per year, we do not do this / build like this by default.

In europe, there is possibility to be on "energy spot prices", essentially utility will charge you energy market prices. today price at noon was almost zero. last Sunday, prices were negative - they literally pay you to draw from grid. but at evening, price can be quite high.

so having simple time relay / or more complex minicomputer directly reading energy market prices and switching loads can even earn you some money. it is not money making business but overall price can drop significantly. it is also an economic incentive to buy battery storage and actually got to paid it off.

Enabling citizens to do good thing is underrated.

people with "standard" contract are essentially subsidizing industry, corporations which have cheaper electricity because of bundling with residential customers. which makes weird and complicated incentive structures. essentially anti-market behavior in country which boasts itself in "capitalistic" structures... and slowing adoption of renewables, because it looks like they are more expensive than they actually are.
by dahart | 2025-05-03 15:36:40+00:00
I agree, and it’s objectively true, that there are no guarantees on investment. I don’t think GP was making any arguments that implied otherwise.

> It’s very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair

“Unfair” is subjective and an insanely deep topic we can’t even begin broach here thoughtfully. It’s always true that a profitable company has incomes that exceed its costs, by definition. Since costs include employee pay, it’s always true in a profitable company that employees are collectively providing a greater value to the company than they are capturing for themselves. You’re still arguing from a failed startup perspective, and by and large, failing and failed startups are not running the economy, nor are even a significant portion. The majority of people in the economy are working for someone else’s profitable company. People who have money do take risks on startups for the chance make it big, but those people had money to begin with.
by turnsout | 2025-05-03 15:37:00+00:00
In a tale as old as time, the mega-rich get richer. It used to be that early stage VCs and angels could see tremendous upside for taking an early risk. It’s utterly unsurprising that giant VCs have found a way to cram them down once the startup is successful and realize all the upside.

Between this and giant PE coming downmarket, we should all just bootstrap and say “f off” to outside capital. With AI coding models, you don’t need that money to build anyway.