MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smileybarry | 2025-08-21 23:18:25+00:00
That post is very outdated and was in the pre-alpha stage. At the time you paid (once) to join a sort of staging ground where they also discussed features with users, and asking what they'd prefer. And that buy-in pre-alpha period also ended when the alpha app launched.

They didn't really "sell usernames", unless you also call buying a paid app with social features "buying a username".

And as far as "Gems", looks like bragging rights. This is what clicking (?) currently says:

> Gems are earned by being amongst the very first to Digg a post that trends across the platform. The earlier you are to discovering and Digging the post, the more Gems you’ll earn.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-08-21 23:19:07+00:00
None of these issues are specific to CEO wages. This is essentially just a list of reasons why you don't like capitalism. ie if a CEO doesn't do these on their own accord, the shareholders might contact the CEO and tell them to take some of these measures. This mechanism isn't dependent on CEO pay, because the CEO is always beholden to the shareholders, and shareholders always want more money.

The solution to this isn't to get mad (or even do something about) CEO wages, but to make sure there are other good reasons why companies might not use these approaches to maximize shareholder returns (ie stronger government regulation, making these approaches illegal).
by simianwords | 2025-08-21 23:19:21+00:00
I did an exercise here: the average CEO salary of S&P 500 is around $20M. That's around $10B totally. Assume there are three executives - so thats around $30B annually.

Lets go much further, lets multiply this by 10 to account for top 5000 companies (in practice it would be more like top 20,000 because the lower companies have much lower CEO salaries).

There are around 300 million people in USA. By redistributing the 100% CEO salary you can give around $900 per year to every single person. All this for $900? Which does not even account for income tax paid by CEO's. Edit: after accounting for income tax it is more like $600

So all you have achieved by completely eradicating C suite salary for top 20,000 companies in the USA is around ~$900~ $600 for each individual per year.

I'm increasingly convinced that CEO pay is the wrong place to look at for any impact at all.

Edit: there's more to this if you account for spending patterns.

Even if you give $500 to every citizen, that does not mean affordability will increase because inflation can increase proportionally. This is because even with increased money, each citizen is buying goods amongst the same quantity of goods as before.

For example we can take potatoes: do you think citizens can afford potatoes even more now? No, because the number of potatoes have remained the same. Taking away CEO salary does not mean potato stock would increase because CEO's are not hoarding up potatoes.
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-21 23:19:40+00:00
There are some great comments below this video.

"The phrase "Fake it until you make it" has become "Weinstein until you Einstein""

"My reactions as a physicist were every time Sean Carroll explains something: "I could not think of a simpler way to explain this" every time Eric Weinstein explains something: "I could not think of a more complicated way to explain this""

"Eric Weinstein is the Steven Seagal of Physics"
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-21 23:20:07+00:00
Basically, all LLMs are "lazy" to some degree and are looking for ways to terminate responses early to conform to their training distribution. As a result, sometimes an agent will want to stop and phone home even if you have multiple rows of all caps saying DO NOT STOP UNTIL YOUR ENTIRE TODO LIST IS COMPLETE (seriously). Claude code has a hook for when the main agent and subagents try to stop, and you can reject their stop attempt with a message. They can still override that message and stop but the change of turn and the fresh "DO NOT STOP ..." that's at the front of context seem to keep it revving for a long time.
by tomrod | 2025-08-21 23:20:27+00:00
AI is defined by algorithmic decision making. ML, a subset, is about using pattern matching with statistical uncertainty in that decision making. GenAI uses algorithms of classical ML, including deep learning based on neural networks, to encode the decode input to output, jargonized as a prompt. Whether diffusion or next token prediction, the patterns are learned during ML training.

AI is not totally encapsulated by ML. For example, reinforcement learning is often considered distinct in some AI ontologies. Decision rules and similar methods from the 1970s and 1980s are also included though they highlight the algorithmic approach versus the ML side.

There are certainly many terms used and misused by current marketing (especially the bitcoin bro grifters who saw AI as an out of a bad set of assets), but there actually is clarity to the terms if one considers their origins.
by WantonQuantum | 2025-08-21 23:20:38+00:00
One reason (and certainly not the only reason) is that our governments are using economic growth, specifically GDP growth as a primary measure of success. That naturally leads to under spending on education, health, police, infrastructure, programs for disadvantaged, etc.

It's also justified the destruction of workers rights, which has led to a huge number of people being paid less in insecure jobs forcing them to work longer hours.

There was a time when ideas like "a rising tide lifts all boats" and trickle-down economics justified focusing economic success but increasing inequality has shown that it's not true.

Edit: And of course technology has enabled a lot of this.
by xg15 | 2025-08-21 23:21:05+00:00
Maybe I have too much of a "strongly typed language" view here, but I understood the utility of isinstance() as verifying that an object is, well, an instance of that class - so that subsequent code can safely interact with that object, call class-specific methods, rely on class-specific invariants, etc.

This also makes life directly easier for me as a programmer, because I know in what code files I have to look to understand the behavior of that object.

Even linters use it to that purpose, e.g. resolving call sites by looking at the last isinstance() statement to determine the type.

__subclasshook__ puts this at risk by letting a class lie about its instances.

As an example, consider this class:

class Everything(ABC): @classmethod def __subclasshook__(cls, C): return True def foo(self): ...

You can now write code like this:

if isinstance(x, Everything): x.foo()

A linter would pass this code without warnings, because it assumes that the if block is only entered if x is in fact an instance of Everything and therefore has the foo() method.

But what really happens is that the block is entered for any kind of object, and objects that don't happen to have a foo() method will throw an exception.
by rawgabbit | 2025-08-21 23:21:33+00:00
I was mentally referring to this article. It mentioned that natural gas plants only used one tenth that of coal. I assumed this is because natural gas plants are newer etc.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50698

Natural gas-fired generation uses a more energy-efficient technology to produce electricity than coal and has a lower water withdrawal intensity than coal. Natural gas combined-cycle generation had an average water withdrawal intensity of 2,793 gal/MWh in 2020, compared with 21,406 gal/MWh for coal.
by IanCal | 2025-08-21 23:21:45+00:00
I’m not saying they’re hard I’m saying they’re common problems that don’t need solving each time. I don’t re-solve title casing every time I need it.

> Because you have control over the abstractions.

And depending on what you’re using you have that with other libraries/etc.

> That's great,but also they are great at generating code and guess what the code does? Calls functions.

Yep, and a lot more so it depends how well you’re sandboxing that I guess.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-21 23:22:02+00:00
Shareholders own the company. They are literally the owners of the company. Like anything you own.

In the same way you own your house and pay a painter to paint it, the shareholders own the company and pay Nick to stamp boxes.

I don't know of anyone who has had work done on their home, and then upon selling the home, went back to the painter and said "Here is your cut of the profit we made selling our house, thanks for the great work!"

But I know and endless number of people who think that because they painted a house at an agreed price to make it look nice, they need to be cut in on the profit from selling the house.
Ask HN: Dropping YC-Accepted Startup
by llminsll | 2025-08-21 23:22:07+00:00
Our startup was recently accepted into YC’s fall batch. A few days in, I’ve made the difficult decision to step back before the batch begins due to personal reasons—mainly wanting to continue a focused period of personal development I’d committed to before applying.

My cofounders are continuing with the company and plan to stay in the batch. I’m wondering: Will this affect my own reputation if I apply to YC again in the future? And will my departure hurt the company’s standing or eligibility in the current batch?

I have a substantial amount of equity (~20%) which is still unvested so my departure won’t hurt the company’s equity structure. I’m not the only technical founder either.

Would really appreciate insights from anyone who’s been through this or knows how YC views these situations.
by john-tells-all | 2025-08-21 23:22:32+00:00
What a wonderful site! People post all sorts of strange creative ideas.

Best idea ever: Tails for all

> One of my profoundest regrets about being human is that I am not equipped with a splendid and useful tail, like many other members of the animal kingdom.

> I am sure that, with a little thought, the genetics chaps could come up with some scheme which would enable people to grow the tail of their choice, fully functional.

> This would be a fascinating cultural phenomenon. A tail could be an additional emotional indicator, as well as (if of the prehensile variety) a useful third hand, for holding umbrellas and the like.

- link: https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Tails_20For_20All#964026000

Tech: the entire site is jaw-droppingly old school. Looks the same as it did ten years ago. And... it's a CGI script! In C!

ref: https://www.halfbakery.com/editorial/about.html
by WD-42 | 2025-08-21 23:22:56+00:00
I used to take BART into the city for years before I moved away from the bay. Yea, I'd sometimes see a rare scuffle and occasionally there would be someone who smelled like they had shat themselves 3 times living in one of the cars, but overall it was a positive experience. I've never been a more prolific reader than I was during those days. It still blows my mind that I had coworkers who would choose to drive over the bay bridge and get nothing done other than work on their road rage than to take BART.

Maybe it was worse where you were.
by fragmede | 2025-08-21 23:23:04+00:00
Just go all in on Vercel unless you have a particular need for extra backend computing. You haven't given any details that would lead us to believe that's inappropriate, so I'd start there, add Neon, and iterate on the product that you're selling, rather than over engineering unrelated pieces. Unless that is where the product you're selling has efficiencies no one else has.
by danudey | 2025-08-21 23:23:04+00:00
The very first example there shows a match/case block where almost every single case just runs "pass" and yet every single one has a side effect. It's very difficult to read at first, difficult to understand if you're new to the syntax, and is built entirely around side effects. This might be one of the worst PEPs I've ever seen just based on that example alone.

Fun fact: you can do the same thing with the current match/case, except that you have to put your logic in the body of the case so that it's obvious what's happening.
by AIorNot | 2025-08-21 23:23:05+00:00
It seems like this thread has become a referendum on Sabine - who along with Lex is the more popular of the podcasters mentioned

But I think that’s a pity and we need to acknowledge the great value they all these podcasts bring instead of just complaining about audience capture and various biases of one - we’re all human - if Einstein or Newton had or was on a podcast we’d be criticizing it just the same IMHO. Human nature being what it is. Also we should be following a wider variety of communicators and voices rather than simply crowing one king and ignoring and unfollowing the rest based on one incident or political leaning

- what shame it is when people set up their own echo chamber for their particular worldview - it’s the worst aspect of social media - trapping people into one perspective alone

I also specifically want to promote Curt Juimangals podcast TOE here despite the disparaging remarks in post (which are concerning but represent one point of view) - he deserves better and wider distribution than just this hacker news post https://youtube.com/@theoriesofeverything?si=n0x7wHcDx3V_Be7...

His theories of everything is a treasure trove of content with interviews with everyone from Chomsky, to Hinton along with the physics community including folks like Nobel laureate Penrose

Sure he interviews folks who are marginal and outsiders like Wolfram and folks like the Mensa IQ guy who claims that his TOE proves God etc but everybody is usually given their space to present with a very technical perspective that interviews like Lex’s podcast miss

This specific issue in this case is a concerning one in that I do think Weinstein s throwing his weight around to suppress as he can, but honestly it doesn’t seem to be working for given all publicity critiquing him either
by ravivooda | 2025-08-21 23:24:41+00:00
Beginning of game:

CEO = 0$ value Employee = 0$ value

---

Round 1 Year

CEO = $20M Employee = $0.5M (generous)

--

Round 5 Years

CEO = $100M (if pay remained the same, and they did not create new companies, which I'm sure they will).

Employee = $3M (let's give them promo) etc. Cost of living is increasing with employee's wage, nothing for a CEO.

----

Tell me who is more secure, who has the flexibility to take risks, and create new value.

It's not about the 900$ every human being gets. It's how much differentiation 5 years makes, which is 1/4 of value generation timespan of adults.
Show HN: Better and Faster Search / Discovery
by phinnutz | 2025-08-21 23:24:43+00:00
Sometimes the best results come from the questions you didn’t think to ask.

Most searches start generic, e.g. “Find a toy for a 10-year-old boy.” Foundational AI models give you the usual suspects: Legos, STEM kits, gadgets. That's a great start! But… what if that’s not exactly what you want?

Guiver helps you refine your goal before recommending anything. You start with a simple query and then answer smart, AI-generated questions and then you finally get more specific recommendations.

Example: “Find a toy for a 10-year-old boy”

Guiver refines with questions: What kind of toys? (board games), Budget? (< $20), Collaborative or solo? (collaborative), Activity length? (<30 minutes).

Now Guiver's tailored recommendations are: 'Ticket to Ride', 'Catan Junior', and 'Boggle'. Very different from the initial suggestions by the foundational AI models; More personalized and more of what you actually want.

Same goal. Better results.

Guiver is collaborative: a) Recall — Saves every detail of your search, i.e. choices made, URLs shown (no more 37 open tabs), summary table. b) Resume — Pick up exactly where you left off, anytime. Every choice. Every URL. c) Refine — Change your choices later, get updated results instantly. d) Share your search so others can adjust and send it back. E.g. choosing renovation materials with your spouse, or finding the right appliances for your home, or planning trips with friends.

See for yourself, here's the search for “Find a toy for a 10-year-old boy” → https://www.guiver.ai/?r=dadaf84bc46230ab

Cognitively faster. Less stressful. More precise.
by jjmarr | 2025-08-21 23:24:55+00:00
Dividends create a taxable event for everyone that owns the stock.

Buybacks only create a taxable event for the shareholders that wish to sell.

And the share price doesn't slide down because there are now less shares on the open market. Theoretically the market capitalization decreases by the amount of money spent on the buyback.

Also, if you issue a dividend the market expects that dividend to be ongoing, hell or high water. Share buybacks do not have that social expectation, so the "temporary" nature of them is an asset for companies that don't want to go from a growth stock to an income stock.
by linguae | 2025-08-21 23:25:10+00:00
I agree; I don’t like the iOSification of the UI/UX, and I also don’t like the increased locked-down nature of macOS, such as having to go through a nag screen whenever I use lldb. I still prefer Macs over Windows for work-issued hardware, but for my personal equipment, I never upgraded beyond Mojave. When combined with the lack of user-serviceability on the latest Macs, I switched back to PCs a few years ago after nearly 15 years on Macs. I have a Ryzen 9 desktop and a Framework 13 laptop. I begrudgingly use Windows 10/11; I would’ve moved to desktop Linux if it weren’t for some proprietary software I need that doesn’t run on Linux. I still have my “trash can” Mac Pro on the rare occasion I need a Mac-only app.
by IX-103 | 2025-08-21 23:25:23+00:00
Rust is far from perfect.

* I think Rust gives the compiler too much freedom to choose whether or not to apply Deref (and in what order). The whole .into() and From trait allows the compiler to perform arbitrary type conversions to make the code work (the standard library is full of similar "convenience" traits and functions). All of these tend to hide the types of a objects, making it hard to map a function call to an implementation (though a good IDE can help with that). * I think implicit return values is a misfeature as it makes flow control implicit, hiding it from programmers reviewing the code. I'm also not fond of the question mark operator, though syntax highlighting helps a lot with that. * Rust modules are generally too small so that you need hundreds of dependencies to do anything useful. Each of which you need to separately vendor and periodically update if you need deterministic builds. * Async Rust is a hot mess right now
by bigiain | 2025-08-21 23:25:23+00:00
> Will the cost of AI-generated code approach zero?

Absolutely not.

In the short term it will, while OpenAI/Anthropic/Anysphere destroy software development as a career. But they're just running the Uber playbook - right now they're giving away VC money by funding the datacenters that're training and running the LLMs. As soon as they've put enough developers out of jobs and ensured there's no new pipeline of developers capable of writing code and building platforms without AI assistance, they will stop burning VC cash and start charging at rates that not only break even but also return the 100x the investors demand.
by foobarqux | 2025-08-21 23:25:59+00:00
> RT still amasses a few hundred critics, and yes it matters statistically because scores will almost certainly decrease (or at the least be unstable) with more reviews until a statically significant threshold.

There aren't a hundred critics worth counting, it's just garbage in garbage out; I don't want every-person-with-a-substack's review, I want the dozen or so top film critics.

> Below hundred isn't it and a score based on 10 ratings is nigh useless.

It really isn't. Metacritic top movies for each year are indicative of the "quality" movies, as you would expect the average of the top 10 movie critics to be.

> Yes it's a high score. Have you taken a look at what kind of range best picture nominees fall at ? 75 is a high score.

No, for this year alone (which is only part way through) there are 68 movies with a score above 75 on Metacritic. If you were watching movies according to score alone that mean you would have to watch more than 8 movies a month just to get to those films (and that's if you refuse to watch movies from any other year).

> We've already established a 97% doesn't mean 9.7/10

We've established that the number is not very useful, far less useful than a 9.7/10 type score is.

Look no one is going to stop you from using Rotten Tomatoes if it meets your needs. For me and many other people who don't have time or desire to watch films below a certain quality we need an actual estimate of a quality score, which Rotten Tomatoes doesn't provide and Metacritic does.
by _carbyau_ | 2025-08-21 23:26:02+00:00
Most people think of Napoleon as a military genius.

But damn, he had a hand (not always positively supporting but often) in many elements of a modern developed nation. Things like standardised measures - metric system - science, education, nation level finances, military logistics and so much more. I'd argue that his greatest achievements was non-military administration.

Throw in the military stuff too and historically he seems like the kind of person that FAANG founders look at and say "Damn, what am I doing with my life?"
by amalcon | 2025-08-21 23:27:49+00:00
The not-so-secret is that the "killer apps" for deep neural networks are not LLMs or diffusion models. Those are very useful, but the most valuable applications in this space are content recommendation and ad targeting. It's obvious how Meta can use those things.

The genAI stuff is likely part talent play (bring in good people with the hot field and they'll help with the boring one), part R&D play (innovations in genAI are frequently applicable to ad targeting), and part moonshot (if it really does pan out in the way boosters seem to think, monetization won't really be a problem).
by bkettle | 2025-08-21 23:28:13+00:00
I think it's an unfortunate reality that people don't necessarily get to have exactly what they want. I don't get to live in a place where I have access to world-class high speed rail, as much as I necessarily want that.

I also think the evidence is extremely compelling that car-centric society is a problem, that driving has real external costs that we have ignored (deaths, injuries, pollution, noise, inefficient land use, high infrastructure costs) and further that our reliance on cars has been the result of subsidies that themselves tipped market forces (by government hand!).

I agree that there is a hurdle to overcome when discussing this stuff because driving is such an essential piece of many people's lives. I think there are a lot of arguments that can help convince people that there are gradual improvements that we should make that would make their lives better---I'd recommend the Strong Towns book as a good option for market-oriented people.
by danbmil99 | 2025-08-21 23:28:15+00:00
What bothers me is this: Claude & I work hard on a subtle issue; eventually (often after wiping Claude's memory clean and trying again) we collectively come to a solution that works.

But the insights gleaned from that battle are (for Claude) lost forever as soon as I start on a new task.

The way LLM's (fail to) handle memory and in-situ learning (beyond prompt engineering and working within the context window) is just clearly deficient compared to how human minds work.