MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crazygringo | 2025-08-12 18:55:16+00:00
> but this will be an inflated valuation company backed by someone, who is willing to prove a point.

People don't generally spend $1B to prove a point.

They'll spend it on a network of users that is genuinely that valuable though. That's what Zuck did in dropping $1B on Insta.

And it seems entirely possible that if Insta were built today, it could be done with a single person.
by cesarvarela | 2025-08-12 18:55:32+00:00
Aren't people just asking Claude and/or Gpt to do web searches instead?

I had for quite some time only relied on o3 pro for every query and it always defaulted to web search so hallucination rate was (seemingly) very low.

Now I'm using Claude more and he (it?) needs to be reminded that it he has a web saerch tool but other than that it works great.
by fruitworks | 2025-08-12 18:55:51+00:00
I've looked into the "source code", and it doesn't. There is no such thing as useful PoW. Qubic isn't actually a decentralized cryptocurrency. It's closed source, runs as a EFI executable, and is only accessible from their discord channel.

The attack is no different than paying miners to join a malicious pool. It works as long as money flows in.
by tempfile | 2025-08-12 18:55:54+00:00
I honestly am not trying to be rude when I say this, but this is exactly the sort of speculation I find problematic and that I think most people in this thread are complaining about. Being able to tell Claude to have a go has no relation at all to whether it may ever succeed, and you don't actually address any of the legitimate concerns the comment you're replying to points out. There really isn't anything in this comment but vibes.
by verall | 2025-08-12 18:55:58+00:00
I work in a FAANG equivalent for a decade, mostly in C++/embedded systems. I work on commercial products used by millions of people. I use the AI also.

When others are finding gold in rivers similar to mine, and I'm mostly finding dirt, I'm curious to ask and see how similar the rivers really are, or if the river they are panning in is actually somewhere I do find gold, but not a river I get to pan in often.

If the rivers really are similar, maybe I need to work on my panning game :)
by paviva | 2025-08-12 18:56:32+00:00
Most likely Gide ("Croyez ceux qui cherchent la vérité, doutez de ceux qui la trouvent", "Believe those who seek Truth, doubt those who find it") and not Voltaire ;)

Voltaire was generally more subtle: "un bon mot ne prouve rien", a witty saying proves nothing, as he'd say.
by mgh2 | 2025-08-12 18:56:37+00:00
https://archive.is/bxEtW

All those events don't tank the stock market because they were based primarily on fear.

What will tank it are lies based on greed.

> Dot-com: overvalued companies with no revenue

> Mortgage: banks lying/lending about credit scores

> Covid: continuing online & EV trend, meme stocks, SPACs

> AI: continuing scaling laws, high ROI?
by IAmGraydon | 2025-08-12 18:56:51+00:00
>This assessment fits with my anecdotal evidence. LLMs just cannot reason in any basic way.

Agreed completely, and the sentiment seems to be spreading at an ever-increasing rate. I wonder how long it will be before the bubble collapses. I was thinking maybe as long as a few years, but it might be far sooner at this rate. All it will take is one of the large AI companies coming out and publicly stating that they're no longer making meaningful gains or some other way that shows the public what's really going on behind the curtain.

I'm certain the AI hype bubble will be studied for generations as the greatest mass delusion in history (so far).
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-08-12 18:57:21+00:00
I was on LW when it emerged from the OB blog and back then it was a interesting and engaging group, though even then there were like 5 “major” contributors - most of which had no coherent academic or commercial success.

As soon as those “sequences” were being developed it was clearly turning into a cult around EY, that I never understood and still don’t.

This article did a good job of covering the history since and was really well written.

Water finds its own level
by dhosek | 2025-08-12 18:57:35+00:00
The way growth in memory availability changes the scope of problems is really quite astonishing. I cut my teeth writing code for Apple ][ computers with theoretically up to 128K of RAM, but in practice much closer to 40K for most use cases, but it does make me much more conscious of memory and CPU usage than younger devs who never faced these sorts of constraints.

Thinking of the example given about being able to just load the word list into memory, I did something of that ilk when my son’s fifth grade class read a book which had a concept of dollar words: You assign a value to each letter, a=1, b=2, … z=26, add up the value and try to get exactly 100. It was pretty trivial to write a program that read the word list and produced the complete list of dollar words (although I didn’t share that with my son, I did give him access to the word list and challenged him to write the program himself).

At the moment, I’m building up a Spanish rhyming dictionary by using a Spanish word list, reversing the words and sorting the reversed list to find the groups of words that are most likely to rhyme, which was something that 30 years ago would have been a challenge on my desktop computer but now is a brief script that I’m just as likely to manage through perl 1-liners and shell pipes as not.
by recfab | 2025-08-12 18:58:19+00:00
I recently tried out Task Warrior for tasks and this is why I switched back to Obsidian + DataView.

Forgetting to check TW is the big reason it didn't work, but the secondary reason is that I take a lot dev logs on context and the `annotate` command is too clumsy to be practical for that.

I like the idea of a CLI tool for todos, but it needs to integrate with my notes.
by tibbar | 2025-08-12 18:58:38+00:00
Yet I think most people err in the other direction. They 'know' the basics of health, of discipline, of charity, but have a hard time following through. 'Take a simple idea, and take it seriously': a favorite aphorism of Charlie Munger. Most of the good things in my life have come from trying to follow through the real implications of a theoretical belief.
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-12 18:58:49+00:00
> Trump collects wins[1] for his base

Trump collects wins for himself and his base flip-flops along with him and his every whim.

It's not about smart or not, he doesn't care beyond what he can get from it. He doesn't care about any retaliations and he knows he has his base eating outta the palm of his hand. Smart doesn't play into any of it, it's not needed. The Project state takes care of the smarts part of the administration
by gottorf | 2025-08-12 18:59:11+00:00
How convenient of your political opponents to be so cartoonishly evil, so that only the most ignorant or craven could possibly support them!

In reality, Trump gained in all minority populations between 2020 and 2024. He actually lost white Protestants, and white voters in general, in the same time period[0]. In income, too, poorer voters shifted more towards the Republican candidate, while the more well-off shifted more towards the Democratic candidate.

This has been a fascinating realignment in traditional partisan composition. You're probably right that historically the Republican Party has been hard on those who aren't white, rich, and religious; but over the past 10 years or so, it's actually the Democratic Party that is the party of the white, rich, and religious[1].

[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/demographic-...

[1]: The new left-liberal dogma that comes in many names, but has a lot of overlap with traditional religion.
by verall | 2025-08-12 18:59:19+00:00
> Another rather interesting thing is that they tend to gravitate towards sweep the errors under the rug kind of coding which is disastrous. e.g. "return X if we don't find the value so downstream doesn't crash".

Yes, these are painful and basically the main reason I moved from Claude to Gemini - it felt insane to be begging the AI - "No, you actually have to fix the bug, in the code you wrote, you cannot just return some random value when it fails, it actually has to work".
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-12 18:59:23+00:00
I took the claim ("Atom used to be the base, now VS Code is") to mean that custom DE toolchains used to be predominantly built on Atom but are now built on VS Code, not that VS Code was built on Atom. (The statement is pretty clearly saying VS Code replaced Atom as the base for something else, not that Atom was VS Code's base.)
by MarkusWandel | 2025-08-12 18:59:32+00:00
After several tries, I managed to click the blue "here" before it disappeared. It took me to a help page that does not offer basic HTML, namely:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049?authuser=0&visi...

So if the basic HTML mode is still buried in there somewhere, how do you get to it, if only for nostalgia's sake?
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-12 18:59:37+00:00
Yeah, this is what all the bubbleists miss. We got FAANG++ out of the last bubble, and they literally rule the world with the tech that was promised during said bubble. Catsdotcom and dogsdotcom failing had 0 impact on the tech itself.

It's the same today. A lot of the hyperVCfunded startups will fail, without a doubt. But the tech giants will get their money from this tech, and it will be ubiquitous in ways we can't even imagine now.
by mandeepj | 2025-08-12 18:59:56+00:00
Thanks for such a detailed response!

Recently, I've been travelling for events, so my dates are fixed, and that's why I could not connect with your scenario! Travel bookings and other web searches are ripe for automation. Even if the system can bring down the search results to the final 3 instead of a complete automation, I'd still call it a win. Shameless plug, I'm working on such an agent, although currently at a very early stage.

> I only trust myself, my wife, and my sister in law to get this right.

Can you please elaborate on that? Do others not look at cost savings across the board and focus only on one item out of all?
by johnmaguire | 2025-08-12 19:00:52+00:00
Oh interesting. This claim makes more sense, but I'm actually surprised by it too - my memory of things is that Sublime Text 2 (released 2012) was one of the most popular editors for scripting languages (JS, PHP, Python, etc.) However, there was a long period of inactivity before Sublime Text 3 was released (2017) with support for Python 3 plugins, and ST was getting stale as Python 2 was slowly phased out.

During that time, Atom was released (2014). But I don't recall it ever being especially popular - at least outside of the JS ecosystem. For one thing, it was kind of slow on release (people still complain about Electron!) and while it offered a lot of customization, these customization often seemed to worsen its performance. It was VS Code that really seemed to draw a wider audience from my perspective.

That said, I switched to vim around the time Atom came out, so I may be out of touch. I doubt there are any solid stats anywhere...
by TrackerFF | 2025-08-12 19:00:55+00:00
It never made much sense to me.

If one person can make a billion dollar company, it likely means that the product itself isn't too complex or big - unless said person has been stealth developing a product for years. But in this case, let us assume it is something founded recently, and aided with AI because, well...AI. That's the pitch right?

So what moat could such a company have? If you can be one man building a billion dollar company in a very short time, hundreds, probably thousands of competitors will spawn in an instant. And everyone will be racing to the bottom to acquire customers.

Ok, so maybe one of those - the most popular, will receive massive VC funding, so that they can simply outspend their competitors into market dominance. But still, that doesn't change the fundamentals: That the product is likely trivial enough to be solo-coded by a bunch of devs out there.

I think it is mostly AI founders hyping up their AI products. "Now you too can become a billionaire overnight, if you just completely integrate these AI tools into your workflow!"

My take is that as the big AI players advance, and the models become better, we'll get some sort of platform where we can just generate whatever tools we need on the spot. That will, to some extent, kill off the LLM wrapper business. In the end, why pay $10 a month for some subscription if you can get the same product directly from the company that makes the machinery. Right now this isn't the case, as they don't have any such tools - but, I'd guess that in a couple of years that is possible.
by tcmart14 | 2025-08-12 19:01:00+00:00
As others have said, we did see effects, but a quick recovery of many of these events or the full scale of damage still isn't known and quantified. We definitely are in a bubble, but like you suggest, diversify. Don't stop investing, just be smart. Market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Time in the market also beats timing the market. And lastly, it sorta isn't surprising that things quickly recover. Tons of people's retirement accounts are injecting money into the stock market regardless of what is going on. We will likely never see long term significant drops just due to the fact that we've devised a system of a non-stop garuntee stream of money into it.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-08-12 19:01:12+00:00
What do you mean when you say "we understand superposition perfectly well"? To be very simplistic about this, are you proposing to know the physics of why entanglement can cause information to seemingly travel instantaneously over a distance when this seems to contradict what we know about the speed of light? Does this trigger no questions in your mind about some physical mechanism we don't understand here?

I understand that we have math that says that superposition does work, but we don't actually understand the physics of it. One of the foibles of modern physics is thinking that knowing the math is enough. Newton knew the math of his 100% internally consistent version of physics, but we know that there were observations that were not explained by his math that we now understand the physical mechanisms for.

I understand that "things that are beyond the math and physics I know" may be philosophy in your mind, but that is not a correct definition of philosophy.
by simonw | 2025-08-12 19:01:59+00:00
Yes, my argument is mainly with respect to paying customers who are companies, not individuals.

I have trouble imagining why a company like Anthropic would go through the additional complexity of cheating their individual customers while not doing that to their corporate customers. That feels like a whole lot of extra work compared to just behaving properly.

Especially given that companies consist of individuals, so the last thing you want to do is breach the privacy of a personal account belonging to the person who makes purchasing decisions at a large company!
by cnst | 2025-08-12 19:02:00+00:00
Would you be okay if LinkedIn and GitHub banned your account without any explanation? Or are you of the opinion that it's not a possibility because you follow all of their ToS to the letter at all times? Do you admit that you'll never provide any objective feedback about these companies since that may (or even should?) violate their ToS in your opinion?

It's interesting that you immediately assume that she's actually disparaging LinkedIn in any way, without any such proof being available. Providing any critical opinions whatsoever, about the company as a whole, is now disparaging the individual employees of the company? Why are you disparaging the author of the essay? What if she's your colleague, too?

You might want to check your biases if your first instinct is to immediately assume anyone who's been wronged in any way by any bigtech platform is immediately an entitled person by having an issue with such an action, and is doing nothing more than disparaging the colleagues of yours.

How can you be sure that the person who's been deplatformed is not a colleague of yours, too?

Why is it okay to disparage private individuals in private capacities (and to deny them their livelihood in these cases of LinkedIn and GitHub bans), but not okay to provide less than ideal feedback about monopolistic multibillion-dollar companies?
by Analemma_ | 2025-08-12 19:02:55+00:00
The thing is, the people who were saying that were wrong even at the time. Fertility was already declining in the late 60s when The Population Bomb was released, but population was still increasing from the earlier boom, in the same way your car will continue coasting up the hill for a little while even after you release the accelerator. People were freaking out about absolute numbers, instead of extrapolating trends for the data they already had, because they were being actively misled by folks like Ehrlich.

So this is less "we believed one wrong thing, are we now believing a second wrong thing?" than "we believed one wrong thing, and corrected it to what we should have known all along".
by Balgair | 2025-08-12 19:03:11+00:00
Wow!

As a fiction writer/noodler this is amazing. I can put not just a whole book in as before, not just a whole series, but the entire corpus of authors in.

I mean, from the pov of biography writers, this is awesome too. Just dump it all in, right?

I'll have to switch using to Sonnet 4 now for workflows and edit my RAG code to be longer windows, a lot longer
by yumraj | 2025-08-12 19:03:14+00:00
I think the biggest risk in having an actual one-person billion dollar company is the Bus Factor [0]

Billion dollar valuation depends on investors, investors will never pay that valuation due the inherent risk in a one-person company. They’ll force them to hire for redundancy.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
by twic | 2025-08-12 19:03:48+00:00
At some point in the future, there won't be more people who will live in the future than live in the present, at which point you are allowed to improve conditions today. Of course, by that point the human race is nearly finished, but hey.

That said, if they really thought hard about this problem, they would have come to a different conclusion:

https://theconversation.com/solve-suffering-by-blowing-up-th...
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-12 19:03:52+00:00
People have been predicting an AI winter ever since DNNs hit it big, and that was 2012/2013 or so. And then every year since 2015 they've been saying "this is the year the AI bubble will finally burst!" And then repeat that the next year.

ChatGPT was just another big leap in a bunch of big leaps that occurred in the last 15 years. You are being disingenuous in pretending that people didn't see AI as being hyped before ChatGPT came out.
by nudgeOrnurture | 2025-08-12 19:04:00+00:00
1 billion is not that much money.

my first question was: woe the hell is Heather Cox Richardson?

Ah, a historian. poor girl. doomed to never get the truth until ...

I had app and platform ideas in 2018 that would have brought quite a bit of a ruckus to the civil and CSR industry and a few game ideas that I still have not seen on the market but I also haven't talked about them so maybe that's the issue.

I have 2 or 3 practically finished screenplays on the level of movies that broke box office records . never talked about them either. neither was of any of it ever in any notes.

I babble a lot. just to bring the intentions of others to the surface.

I have ideas all over the place.

LIKE SO MANY OTHERS.

it's not gonna be a traditional unicorn.

there's gonna be an overarching narrative that's still missing, but that person won't focus on software. there's too many outs when people buy in, when people believe, when people just feel it, when they just know "this is what I want, this is what everyone (pop segment) wants".

if it's gonna be an established person like the one I mentioned above, it's gonna be some fake, whaled up BS. like bitcoin. like it happened so often in the past.

the wrong way to lure someone out who can actually make it. a one man one billion dollar company ...

come on, guys. that YT add was already a little .. much
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-12 19:04:22+00:00
No, I choose the obvious one (#2), but that it is obvious requires considering it in the context of the other actions by the Administration regarding the military and law enforcement and related areas happening prior to, concurrent with, and since the deployment to LA (including, particularly but far from exclusively, the ones for which the deployment to LA was done explicitly to support), rather than considering one isolated fact about the LA deployment in a vacuum.
by linohh | 2025-08-12 19:04:25+00:00
Don't do it. It's a place that enables child abuse with its culture. These people are serious wackos and you should not give your kid into their hands. A lot of people come out of that Steiner Shitbox traumatized for decades if not for life. They should not be allowed to run schools to begin with. Checking a lot of boxes from antivax to whatever the fuck their lore has to offer starting with a z.
by jorvi | 2025-08-12 19:04:50+00:00
It is not really a nuanced take when it compares 'unassisted' coding to using a bicycle and AI-assisted coding with a truck.

I put myself somewhere in the middle in terms of how great I think LLMs are for coding, but anyone that has worked with a colleague that loves LLM coding knows how horrid it is that the team has to comb through and doublecheck their commits.

In that sense it would be equally nuanced to call AI-assisted development something like "pipe bomb coding". You toss out your code into the branch, and your non-AI'd colleagues have to quickly check if your code is a harmless tube of code or yet another contraption that quickly needs defusing before it blows up in everyone's face.

Of course that is not nuanced either, but you get the point :)
by laserDinosaur | 2025-08-12 19:04:56+00:00
For some comparison of difficulty, there's an old game called Squares which is very similar to yours. It does a good job of ramping the difficulty up pretty fast, but it allows the game have fun short gameplay loops because of the extra gameplay mechanics (ie, you are not just moving but collecting squares too).

Gameplay Video: https://youtu.be/n8nRCyjCy_Y

Apparently you can still play it online at: https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/games/squares2
by jart | 2025-08-12 19:05:02+00:00
Don't call him a stupid kid. He represents everything I believe in as a hacker. He's smart, beautiful, talented, and wants to live life pulling off cool stunts that inspire the rest of us, with or without permission. Silly rules aren't meant for people like him. It's a travesty that a hacker forum would hate hackers so much and cheer on a scheming third world government stamping out his dream. A good, wise, enlightened government would try to cultivate this kind of curiosity and spunk, rather than seeing it as an opportunity to inflict pain and bleed someone for a small amount of money. When I grew up in America, the movies idolized people like him, and that's one of the reasons America has been so successful. I hope he isn't so traumatized by this unfair abuse that he never wants to be audacious again.
by pletnes | 2025-08-12 19:05:55+00:00
Being a consultant / programmer with feet on the ground, eh, hands on the keyboard: some orgs let us use some AI tools, others do not. Some projects are predominantly new code based on recent tech (React); others include maintaining legacy stuff on windows server and proprietary frameworks. AI is great on some tasks, but unavailable or ignorant about others. Some projects have sharp requirements (or at least, have requirements) whereas some require 39 out of 40 hours a week guessing at what the other meat-based intelligences actually want from us.

What «programming» actually entails, differs enormously; so does AI’s relevance.