MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nkrisc | 2025-06-28 21:05:24+00:00
These (along with Kleenex) are common examples of genericization, yet I assume through diligence on the part of those brands, I hear and see the actual generic terms used far more frequently. For example, I've never heard anyone under the age of 70 (by now) use "Nintendo" to mean any video game console. "Sticky note", "photocopy", and "tissue" are terms I personally hear used much more frequently than "Post-it", "Xerox", or "Kleenex", respectively.

But for "JavaScript"? What else is there? "JS"?

Edit: I guess there's "ECMAScript", but who actually says that (aside when they legally need to)?
by ralusek | 2025-06-28 21:05:38+00:00
They're not even in the same ballpark as the SOTA models, and they're not even in the same ballpark as the SOTA open source models, which was supposed to be their niche.

But even if they were, it's not immediately clear how they plan to make any money with having an open source model. So far, their applications of their AI, i.e. fake AI characters within their social media, are some of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard of.
by petercooper | 2025-06-28 21:05:52+00:00
No. It's a tiny expense. I mostly use GPT 4.1 Mini for what I'm doing as it's the best balance between results and cost, but Gemini Flash can do the job just as well for a little less if I need it.

As other commenters have mentioned, a firehose can mean many things. For me it might be thousands of different reasonably small things a day which is dollars a day even in the worst case. If you were processing the raw X feed or the whole of Reddit or something, then all of your questions certainly become more relevant :-)
by darkteflon | 2025-06-28 21:06:12+00:00
I really like Harlequin. Discovered it by accident when I was assessing Textual - I think they showcased it.

I can’t think of another DB TUI tool as nice. I use it mainly with DuckDB, for which I believe it was originally written (although the web notebook UI that now ships with the DuckDB binary is also nice).

Slightly OT, but PyCharm / Datagrip always feels quite flaky with DuckDB. Thanks to Harlequin, I never needed to dig into it too deeply. I only wish that DuckDB supported writes while attached (in read-only mode) from another process! Although I understand there are good reasons for not doing so.
by heavyset_go | 2025-06-28 21:08:08+00:00
That's where I'm at as an author of several popular open source libraries.

That's it, they're in maintenance mode and I'm not releasing anything again in the future.

My model used to be to build products and spin off components into generic open source libraries others could use, and some caught on. Now I'm just keeping them for myself or attempting to monetize them somehow.
by monetus | 2025-06-28 21:08:20+00:00
Indefinite royalties on Spotify are one thing, but how are they supposed to work in neural nets? Dividing equal share based on inputs would require the company to potentially expose proprietary information. Basing it on outputs could make sense as well I suppose, but would take some slightly ridiculous work for an arguable result.

Your point remains, but the problem of the division of responsibility and financial credit doesn't go away with that alone. Do you know if the openAI lawsuits have laid this out?
by smikhanov | 2025-06-28 21:08:57+00:00
Kagi is cool (as a company), really.

The whole idea of running your company while thinking about TAM and whatever is totally from a VC playbook. If you don’t take VC funding, you stop caring about TAM. Instead, you care about whether having the profit you have makes you — yes, you, personally — comfortable about your life. This is a much, much healthier line of thinking than trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach.
by dimal | 2025-06-28 21:09:12+00:00
People pay for software all the time. Hell I pay $30/month for a fucking email client (Superhuman). But no one has tried it for a social network. I think the problem is that people think a social network is worthless unless you hit Twitter scale, but perhaps lots of smaller, focused social networks at $2/pop could work. People are now saying that Discord is being enshittified, right on schedule. Maybe there's an opportunity to poach some communities.
by sxp | 2025-06-28 21:09:31+00:00
> And one way to help make that happen is to substantially increase the guest worker fees large corporations pay to fund scholarships, apprenticeships, and job training opportunities for American workers. This is something that I have advocated from my first days as a U.S. senator.

This is the proper solution. Ideally, the H1-B program would remove quotas and lotteries and switch to a pure auction program for the fees. E.g, a Dutch auction for the X thousand available slots where the fee can be deducted from federal income taxes. If companies really want the best talent in the world, they should be willing to pay for it.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-28 21:10:38+00:00
I think this is key. When you hire people to do work, they'll find stuff to do even if it isn't really necessary or a long term good for the company.

My favorite other example of this is when I see a UI redesign that didn't actually benefit anyone and was more a style change than anything, and sometimes actively makes usability worse (cough Liquid Glass cough) In those situations I always think "well, some designers on staff needed to justify their paychecks".
by coderatlarge | 2025-06-28 21:10:48+00:00
without siding with the perspective being voiced, i feel compelled to point out your comment sounds like you believe there is a real alternative to criticize yet participate. even if you attempt to disengage and decide to go live in a cabin in the woods off the grid, the irs and any number of other agencies will go after you and your loved ones for doing basic human things like having and raising kids in a non-sanctioned way. so is there really any practical alternative to just voicing dissent?
by KaiserPro | 2025-06-28 21:10:49+00:00
Meta has a culture issue.

There are three centres of "AI" gravity: GenAI, FAIR & RL-R

Fair is fucked, they've been passed about, from standalone, to RL-R then to "production" under industrial dipshit Cox. A lot of people have left, or been kicked out. It was a power house, and PSC (the 6month performance charade killed it)

GenAI was originally a nice tight and productive team. Then the facebook disease of doubling the team every 2 months took over. Instead of making good products and dealing with infra scaling issues, 80% of the staff are trying to figure out what they are supposed to be doing. Moreover most of the leadership have no fucking clue how to do applied ML. Also they don't know what the product will be. So the answer is A/B testing what ever coke dream Cox dreamt up that week.

RL-R has the future, but they are tied to either Avatars, which is going to bomb. It'll bomb because its run by an prick who wants perfect rather than deliverable. Moreover splats perform way better than the dumbarse fully ML end-to-end system they spend the last 15 billion trying to make.

Then there is the hand interaction org, which has burnt through not quite as much cash as Avatars, but relies on a wrist device that has to be so tight it feels like a fucking handcuff. That and they've not managed to deliver any working prototype at scale.

The display team promised too much and wildly underdelivered, meaning that orion wasn't possible as a consumer product. Which lets the write team off the hook for not having a comfortable system.

Then there is the mapping team who make research glasses that hovers up any and all personal information with wild abandon.

RL-R had lots of talent. But the "hire to fire" system means that you can't actually do any risky research, unless you have the personal favour of your VP. Plus, even if you do perfect research. getting it to product is a nightmare.
by Karliss | 2025-06-28 21:10:58+00:00
That's the thing you don't need to enforce anything if there is no law which forbids you from doing things. It's the copyright law which restricts you from doing most of the things that GPL license gives you permission. GPL gives you back the rights to copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any GPL licensed software you receive. Without copyright law you could copy, modify, create derivative works and redistribute any software you receive.

Sure having source code would be nice, but then again half the software nowadays is using electron and written in javascript anyway. Also plenty of examples of hardware manufacturers using software/firmware copyright as excuse and making legal threats to people who have made their own software to control hardware they bought even though they didn't have access to original source code.

There are probably more examples of people reverse engineering an reimplementing or decompiling large nontrivial software than there examples of companies making their whole software open source due to using a GPL licensed library (as opposed to avoiding the GPL licensed code or violating the GPL by not releasing the source code).
by justin66 | 2025-06-28 21:11:37+00:00
> I don't necessarily agree that that article proves the IDF is firing on children, there's actually no evidence of that presented in the article.

I think the appropriate term is "circumstantial evidence." A doctor wouldn't be in the position to actually witness the cause of a gunshot wound (hey, maybe all these well-placed gunshot wounds are the result of Palestinians shooting their own kids, I guess would be the alternate explanation...), but let's not pretend that these reports are not evidence of crimes, evidence worthy of investigation.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-28 21:12:04+00:00
n=1 data point here, but most of my free time these days is spent learning Finnish, a notoriously difficult language for English monolinguals. (I haven't always been in the monolingual camp, but a decade away from Latin has 99% put me back there.)

For the most part, I don't feel like it has made me any sharper. Had I taken the ~2000 hours I'm in the hole for so far and spent them on going to the gym and sleeping more I'm nearly certain that would have had a much larger effect on my day to day mental acuity. Had I spent it on my career I'd probably be substantially richer. I probably have another ~2000 to go before I reach a level where I'm happy plateauing.

In general I think it's very hard to justify learning a foreign language when subjected to a normal adult person's cost-benefit analysis. I persist mostly because I just really, really, really want to reach true proficiency, not the fake proficiency that gets you an A in Spanish or Latin class, as I outlined in [1]. If you don't have a similar drive your time and energy is probably better spent elsewhere.

[1]: https://andrew-quinn.me/thoughts-on-language-learning-at-the...
by Dylan16807 | 2025-06-28 21:12:47+00:00
> I'd say that's a bit of a wrong or misleading statement. I think the correct version is "everything[1] can be encoded as a number". The concept of number is a very particular concept! It's pretty absurd to say "a screwdriver is a number" or "a word is a number". That is true for the peano axiomatization of numbers; but to me in particular, I believe numbers are a generalization (and formalization) of the idea or concept of quantity. There's a particular idea that refers to say 'two' apples, the quantity of apples. A word is not a quantity, it's a different concept. Even though each of them could be encoded as a number somehow!

Well if we're using a more narrow view, then "BB(748)" isn't a number, it's an encoding of a partial algorithm. And it shouldn't be surprising that an algorithm might be unprovable in ZFC.

The actual number, the quantity, is quite easy to write down inside ZFC. And so is the beaver turing machine itself. The hard part is knowing which of the 748-state machines is the beaver.
by ednite | 2025-06-28 21:13:31+00:00
Great piece. I assume you already know this and I’m not suggesting you’re saying otherwise, but I’d just like to comment that while

“stretching beyond comfort zones is essential for professional development and growth…”

is absolutely true, but there’s a fine line between stretching and pushing too hard. A good manager knows how to challenge their team without burning them out.

Pushing doesn’t mean overloading. Great managers stretch without snapping, by checking in regularly, managing workload, and knowing when pressure is motivating versus when it’s destructive.

Can't find the subscribe button on your blog! Definitely worth reading.

Thanks for sharing.
by hansvm | 2025-06-28 21:15:30+00:00
- Attach a screen to the camera. Bonus points for bothering to calibrate that contraption.

- Watermarking is nearly useless as a way of conveying that information, either visibly distorting the image or being sensitive to all manner of normal alterations like cropping, lightness adjustments, and screenshotting.

- New file formats are hard to push to a wide enough audience for this to have the desired effect. If half the real images you see aren't signed, ignoring the signature becomes second-nature.

- Hardware keys can always be extracted in O(N) for an N-bit key. The constant factor is large, but not enough to deter a well-funded adversary. The ability to convincingly fake, e.g., video proof you weren't at a crime scene would be valuable in a hurry. I don't know the limits, but it's more than the 2-10 million dollars you need to extract a key.

- You mentioned the analog hole problem, but that's also very real. If the sensor is engineered as a separate unit, it's trivial to sign whatever data you want. That's hard to work around because camera sensors are big and crude, so integration a non-removable crypto enclave onto one is already a nontrivial engineering challenge.

- If this doesn't function something like TLS with certificate transparency logs and chains of trust then one compromised key from any manufacturer kills the whole thing. Would the US even trust Chinese-signed images? Vice versa? The government you obey has a lot of power to steal that secret without the outside world knowing.

- Even if you do have CT logs and trust the company publishing to them to not publish compromised certs, a breach is much worse than for something like TLS. People's devices are effectively just bricked (going back to that 3rd point -- if all the images you personally take aren't appropriately signed, will a lack of signing seem like a big deal?). If you can update the secure enclave then an adversary can too, and if updating tries to protect itself by, e.g., only sending signed bytecode then you still have the problem that the upstream key is (potentially) compromised.

- Everyone's current devices are immediately obsolete, which will kill adoption. If you grandfather the idea in, there's still a period of years where people get used to real images not being signed, and you still have a ton of wasted money and resources that'll get pushback.

Etc. It's really not an easy problem.
by 3abiton | 2025-06-28 21:15:31+00:00
> MCP seems like a more "in-between" step until the AI models get better. I imagine in 2 years, instead of using an MCP, we will point to the tool's documentation or OpenAPI, and the AI can ingest the whole context without the middle layer.

I doubt the middleware will disappear, it's needed to accomdate the evolving architecture of LLMs.
by theahura | 2025-06-28 21:15:41+00:00
- Could be wrong about Scale. I'm going off folks I know at client companies and at scale itself.

- idk I've trained a lot of models in my time. It's true that there's an arcane art to training LLMs, but it's wrong that this is somehow unlearnable. If I can do it out of undergrad with no prior training and 3 months of slamming my head into a wall, so can others. (Large LLMs are imo not that much different from small ones in terms of training complexity. Tools like torch and libraries like megatron make these things much easier ofc)

- there are a lot of fantastic researchers and I don't mean to disparage anyone, including anyone I didn't mention. Still, I stand by my beliefs on ml. Big changes in architecture, new learning techniques, and training tips and tricks come from a lot of people, all of whom are talking to each other in a very decentralized way.

My opinions are my own, ymmv
by grendelt | 2025-06-28 21:18:18+00:00
> This is a great time to be on the air

Actually it's not. It's just wall to wall QRM. You can't exactly setup on a single frequency and call CQ without some asshat setting up right on frequency. I abhor Field Day because it's chaos. POTA, state QSO parties, 13 Colonies, Museum Ship Weekend, those are my speed.

Most every ham club that sets up for Field Day talk like they're doing "public service" and "outreach", but then they post up at some obscure location quite a way away where most any 'public' would be. The scant visitors they get are either ignored or greeted in an overly excited way and then every old timer wants a chance to impress upon the visitor their view of radio which invariably runs off all but the most determined visitors who can see past all that. I've been to over a dozen different club field day events across the country and most of them are pretty cringy.

---

The best was Tucson almost 20 years ago because my wife and I happened to be tent camping on the same mountain peak where they were setup. She retired to the tent early, I played radio well into the night after the daytime RF pandemonium died down. In the morning one of the club members who also runs a restraunt made everyone omelettes to order on his catering flat top.

One of the worst was Palm Springs RATS. Their setup was at their EOC and closed to the public. I had to essentially "prove" I was a ham to even be allowed in with them. (I told them my callsign but that wasn't enough. "Hi. I'm <callsign> in town for work and thought I'd drop in to do Field Day with you guys." "Do you know anyone here?" "No, I'm just in town for work." "Well, this is a ham radio event." "Yeah, it's Field Day. I'm just here for the week ahead and thought I'd come play radio with you guys." "...and you're not a member?")

Some club in DC/Arlington was pretty awful too. Again, there for work. Two old timers took turns mansplaining ham radio to me most of my time there. Nevermind I was a 30-something dude and with-code Extra. I was on their "get on the air" station doing CW and they kept talking at me while I had headphones on copying callsigns and listening for a break in the pileup.

These days I just don't even both going out because I've been disappointed so many times. Maybe I'll give it a go this evening to yet another new club's setup and see what new form of disappointment awaits.
by ecb_penguin | 2025-06-28 21:18:31+00:00
You need to read the fine print on the slide you linked. They carefully chose a cohort to show these numbers. It only apply to investors that backed 3 or more companies during a demo day. And, as you can see, the more YC drinks it's kool-aide, the worse it performs. Even years when the market was gangbusters, YC still saw decreased returns year over year.

It's an odd metric to choose, which makes me believe it's one of the few positive ones.

Also, as I've said, Ponzi schemes work great for the early people. You give $50k to an unprofitable company and convince someone else to give them $1m. You get your investment back plus a little bit, and you leave someone else holding the bag of an unprofitable company.

> These returns outperform the S&P.

These very specifically chosen returns outperform the S&P :). That's why it's mostly kids that go through YC.
by moffkalast | 2025-06-28 21:18:53+00:00
Of course VC loan sharking is a major part of the problem. But it's also tiring reading blog after blog of people who say they want to do the right things and do them right or whatever the trendy thing is that month, all as a thinly veiled pretence to get as much funding from whoever wants to give it to them and try to make themselves the next Zuckerberg or Bezos.

If people actually believed in something they'd make it open source or a non-profit, not a convenient vehicle for personal enrichment. Imagine if Wikipedia was a for-profit startup, it would've eventually ended up as an unusable cesspool of advertising.
by Diggsey | 2025-06-28 21:22:00+00:00
I think what's most unintuitive is that most (all?) "paradoxes" or "unknowables" in mathematics involve infinities. When limiting ourselves to finite whole numbers, paradoxes necessarily disappear.

BB(748) is by definition a finite number, and it has some value - we just don't know what it is. If an oracle told us the number, and we ran TM_ZFC_INC that many steps we would know for sure whether ZFC was consistent or not based on whether it terminated.

The execution of the turing machine can be encoded in ZFC, so it really is the value of BB(748) that is the magic ingredient. Somehow even knowledge of the value of this finite number is a more potent axiomatic system than any we've developed.
by ameliaquining | 2025-06-28 21:22:03+00:00
I feel like the takeaway here is that jq should probably be considered an indispensable part of the modern shell environment. Because without it, you can't sensibly deal with JSON in a shell script, and JSON is everywhere now. It's cool that you can write a parser in awk but the point of this kind of scripting language is to not have to do things like that.
by tialaramex | 2025-06-28 21:22:10+00:00
No.

You're probably thinking of Genericisation. This isn't a law in the sense you probably mean, there is no statute about it, no legislature wrote it, nobody signed anything. Instead Genericisation is a legal doctrine related to the core idea in trademark law that we can't have exclusive use of descriptive marks.

Suppose you make a Big Car and you try to trademark "Big Car" as your exclusive mark for this new product. That's just describing the car, it's generic so you can't do that, it's OK to trademark "Giganticar" or "Waterluvian Car" or something because people can describe what their similar product is with the words "big car" but if you were allowed to own "Big Car" they can't do that.

Genericisation says well, if your product is so successful that now everybody knows what a "Waterluvian" is, and most people shown a new big car from say, Ford, say "Waterluvian" so that even Ford's sales people struggle to teach the guys on the forecourt not to call this a "Waterluvian" - that's now a generic term, you can't stop Ford just saying they're making a Waterluvian.

Genericisation only applies for crazy famous stuff. Kleenex is an example because your mom knows what a kleenex is, the guy who mows your lawn knows, Elon Musk knows, everybody knows, that's actually famous. Javascript probably wouldn't meet that requirement. My mother does not know what Javascript is, my boss does, because he's a software engineer, and maybe the average numerate graduate knows, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it.

Dilution is a related idea, also for very famous things. Dilution says for these famous things it's not OK to use the famous mark for any other purpose even though it's not related. So Disney toilet paper isn't OK, Coca-Cola brand vibrators, not OK, and so on. Nobody thinks the vibrator is a beverage, but Coke is so famous that doesn't matter. That doesn't impact here either.
by jemmyw | 2025-06-28 21:22:42+00:00
Why should they be in that market at all? I don't understand why we've got to this place where every big tech company needs to have it's fingers in every pie or "they're falling behind". AI / LLMs look to be on their way to being infrastructure more than product in and of themselves. A patient huge company could build on top of what others are doing and wait for the market to settle, then buy for vertical integration.