MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by derefr | 2025-08-18 00:51:32+00:00
An interesting rabbit-hole I fell into the other day, was researching the French company Vantiva, the maker of my ISP's fiber ONT (and many previous cable modems I've had from other ISPs, under their previous names Technicolor / Thomson.)

If you trace out why Vantiva makes modems, it turns out that it's because all the patents for cable modems / coaxial carrier-network signal modulation and amplification were filed by RCA; GE bought RCA; and then GE divested its own + RCA's consumer-electronics businesses (including these patents!), selling that unit to Vantiva.

Presumably, cable modems were the kind of industry that only support a few big players, because there's not enough margin there after licensing costs are paid to patent-holders. The default winner of such a market would be a vertically-integrated player who holds those patents and can therefore make cable modems without licensing them.

That player was RCA (American); then GE (American); but is now Vantiva (French).

Vantiva released the cable-modem patents into a free IP sharing consortium kind of thing 15+ years ago now; but only once they already had an extremely dominant position in the space, with existing contracts with pretty much every ISP, such that they could be assured continued dominance even without the weight of licensing pressing down on all their competitors' backs.

Whenever I read about tech IP, I run into similar stories to this one. Some American company owned some tech innovation, but sold it to an overseas buyer some time in the late 80s / early 90s. And now it's not worth it to make that thing in America any more, because doing so would require licensing that IP from its current overseas owner.

(Perhaps, if America wants to be competitive, the government should encourage American firms with lots of free cash to [re-]acquire foreign companies that hold especially-valuable IP. Then, at least the IP incentives would lean in favor of vertical integration of manufacturing within the US.)
by bullen | 2025-08-18 00:51:38+00:00
But the article also says you can replace that public key, also they are from the motherboard, not CPU manufacturer.

I think it's going to be yet another failure like Nintendo and Sony have been struggling with for decades.

If you start requiring things, people will take out their soldering iron.

And this time they are trying to brick hardware we built ourselves, if you are still using a discrete header TPM your computer is from 2016, and then odds are you built it yourself!
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-18 00:51:51+00:00
They're imagining a benevolent system that will match them to the personal best deals for them despite all evidence that megacorporations are not in fact benevolent, and will in fact use that knowledge to find the worst possible (i.e. most profitable) deals that they'll still accept, or abuse their psychology to get them to buy things they shouldn't, etc.

They think the system is thinking "ohh! I bet X will like this pair of shoes! And this is a great deal on them!" when in fact a more accurate model is "Who is willing to pay the most to put a message in front of someone with the following detailed list of characteristics?" and then people bid for the right to manipulate you, so even if 2 companies are trying to sell you the exact same thing that you do want, the one that thinks they can extract more from you will pay more and win the spot.
by wiredpancake | 2025-08-18 00:51:58+00:00
There is no universal, easy and feeless option to send money to people though.

Sure, I could pay for Hackernews or Github or whatever else (these may be bad examples due to the lack of ads) but lets even say the blogpost linked above.

If I could easily send 0.20$ to someone instantly, without much thought, I would.

I was hoping cryptocurrency would solve this, although the complexity and immense fees with most networks really rule that out.
by timtim51251 | 2025-08-18 00:52:46+00:00
People waste their time and money with this garbage. I'm not saying its bad, but there's much better stuff out there. If you care about re-enamelization which everyone with bad to average teeth should, get some Prevident Rinse. Its prescription, its made by Colgate and it has a generic version also. There is also a prevident toothpaste.

Use the mouthwash once a week and you're good. If your dentist doesn't tell you about it and you don't have great teeth, its ONLY because they want to make more money off of you.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-18 00:53:11+00:00
That's true for chips but not necessarily for other high-value manufacturing sectors. Americans are still the world leaders in say metallurgy or nuclear engineering, for example: all the jet turbine blades are still made in America, and most nuclear reactors. Also ASML gets all the hype for EUV lithography, but Applied Materials (based out of Santa Clara, CA) is still a critical part of the supply chain for new semiconductor fabs. And the EV industry started in Fremont CA with Tesla, although they've since lost some of their edge to Chinese and Korean manufacturers.
by topato | 2025-08-18 00:53:26+00:00
So, an ai generated psuedo-game engine with a majority of users under the age of 13? I'm sure that WILL make a lot of money. Those of us who didn't grow up playing Roblox will find this comparison impossibly stupid.

Some what related: im still amazed that no one has made a Roblox competitor, as in, a vague social building game that tricks children into wasting money on ridiculous MTXs. Maybe you are right, but I think that taking an already sorry state of affairs, and then removing the only imagination or STEM skills required by giving children access to GenAI.... is a really depressing thought.

I kinda meandered with my point lol.
by allears | 2025-08-18 00:53:44+00:00
You don't seem very informed about wildfires. Indigenous people have indeed helped the Forest Service understand about forest maintenance, but those practices aren't always applicable due to the enormous buildup of fuel from decades of fire suppression, and the greatly increased drought, high temperatures, and wind due to the effects of climate change. It's true that many fires are triggered by power lines that have been poorly maintained, as well as human negligence and arson too, but once ignited, the ample dry fuel, the high temperatures, and the winds, have created a wildfire problem that's unprecedented. It's not the number of reported fires, it's the acreage that's consumed (along with structures and even entire towns).
by dgunay | 2025-08-18 00:54:11+00:00
Codex-cli does use MacOS sandboxing by default. It does unfortunately cause issues for my workflow because the agent is very restricted in what it is allowed to do (like, read/write the Go build cache) and its command whitelisting configurability is currently nonexistent. I'm looking into using containers to allow the agent more autonomy within its environment.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-08-18 00:55:27+00:00
I accidentally turned off my adblocker on youtube today, and I immediately got 2 ads, both of which were AI deepfakes of some celebrities selling "supplements" of dubious legality.

So, um, is this what internet ads are now? Because even if it weren't "ok" to block these ads, I'm sure as shit going to keep blocking them.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-18 00:55:37+00:00
>And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself.

Yay. Men get to spill their blood over a country that won't even give them enough pay to cover rent. The robots are cushy at home making weapons to kill more men with. Very good thing.

> If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory, but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.

Yup, just automate out the construction industry while we're at it.

Sorry for the cynicism, but but somehow I don't think even with more houses that we're going to have Gen Z and Gen Alpha survive the way The Boomers and early Gen X did.
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-08-18 00:55:56+00:00
It actually does, in a way. Amazon.com (not AWS) doesnt make any money on product sales - it makes almost all of its revenue from sponsored products. Walmart as well makes a huge percentage of its money from promoting products.

My company operates only on small ecommerce sites. Because we have a huge catalog of products, advertisers can come to us and launch a campaign, and we can automatically deliver across dozens of sites. We can connect small ecommerce sites to large advertisers so that they dont need first party relationships with those advertisers. The way I see it, we are helping smaller retailers be more competitive against Amazon by helping them squeeze more blood from the stone, as we like to say in advertising.

What keeps me up at night is who our customers are. Among our advertisers, we sell ads for alcohol. While those who see our ads generally already have high intent to buy alcohol in the first place, I know from family history that even the slightest temptation can put an alcoholic back at step 0. We dont run too many of those but im still struggling with it
by MillironX | 2025-08-18 00:56:12+00:00
I don't have any great ideas on how to do it right - I'm in the "don't know what I don't know" phase of electronics. Part of the reason I quit playing with electronics was that I already knew Visual Basic pretty well, and so I could program engaging things quickly while the electronics took a lot of fiddling with no understanding to sometimes get a result.

This has been a handicap in my career where I would by default reach for a Raspberry Pi or a National Instruments RIO in places where an IC or a Arduino would suffice. Stuff like data acquisition units (DAQ) and control systems are prime examples. Maybe by giving those applications first? I can think of several projects my 12-year-old self would have found a use for a DAQ or control system.
by kristopolous | 2025-08-18 00:56:27+00:00
ai fiction really shines in baffling surreal prompts that it tries hard to satisfy. Here's an example:

"let's write a story where donald trump is giving a speech to a crowd as people slowly discover he is secretly a northern red oak tree in a human suit to the shock of fans and reporters! The tips of his fingers become branches as he tries to deny it as wildly impossible meanwhile his human disguise continues to fail"

After some back and forth, here is what I got:

https://9ol.es/md/trump

No human would write something that crazy...
by mcdrake | 2025-08-18 00:57:19+00:00
I'm in a similar environment and found this article painfully accurate. I keep thinking my job is to solve problems and ship software...but those are clearly not the revealed preferences* of my org.

The author went from small companies to a big one. Has anyone gone the other way? I'm looking to make that shift and I'm curious how others framed their Enterprise™ experience in a way that resonates with smaller teams.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
by protocolture | 2025-08-18 00:57:19+00:00
>- new leadership will push out the old guard and replace them with friends

My mortal nemesis brings his whole helpdesk and development team across slowly whenever he starts at a new business. Which is crazy, because as far as I can see the benefit to him is simply loyalty. They dont complain or go over his head when he fails to deliver. I have receipts from staff who worked with him at other businesses where he just follows the same pattern.

1. Identify problems (The problem is the lack of a new CRM from a big microsoft partner.)

2. Spend lots of money to fix the problem (Free trips to vegas 3 times per year thanks to the CRM partner and microsoft)

3. Fail to deliver the CRM (The problem was not a big enough scope)

4. Rescope the project. (more bennies)

5. Would have failed to deliver it again however I just got a new job transforming another business enjoy your crapheap.
by laughing_man | 2025-08-18 00:57:40+00:00
The article identifies three areas as "high tech manufacturing": Computer and electronic products, Pharmaceuticals & medicine, and Aerospace products and parts.

It's likely microchip development would have happened somewhere else without large US defense contracts. The industry was literally created by defense contracts for things like spy satellites, combat aircraft, and ICBMs.

Same with aerospace. The entire commercial aerospace industry exists because of bomber development in WW II, and all the engine tech since was initially developed and deployed in military aircraft. Carbon fiber, radar, fly-by-wire, plus the entire manufacturing process that produces aircraft that work the first time were all technologies developed or made practical to manufacture for the military. There's a reason passenger aircraft aren't manufactured in countries without a lot of military spending - companies like Boeing, Airbus, UAC, and Comac all depend on military contracts to pay development costs.

What constitutes high tech manufacturing is probably a bit different today. I would include sectors like exotic materials (superconductors, boutique alloys, and almost-here stuff like graphene and CNTs) and battery tech.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-18 00:57:58+00:00
>it is said that one ought to focus on core competencies and let other companies handle the rest. Why shouldn’t a country do the same?

Because a country isn't a business. If a companies falls out, they move on to another company based on the market.

If a country falls out, we go to war and sanction everything. If you can't survive those sanctions, the war is lost before any blood is spilt. Or at least any blood spilt by foreign invaders; the citizens will burn down the country for you instead.
by topato | 2025-08-18 00:58:13+00:00
Frankly, that is all just speculative, once again. AI is hitting a significant roadblock. Look at how disappointing GPT-5 was. No amount of compute is ever going to match the hype matching those quotes.

The C-suite who don't realize how wrong they are about AIs potential are going to be facing a harsh reality. And artists will be the first to be hurt by their HYPE TRAIN management style and mindset.

Edit: most of all, the 3d generation in this LLM3d model is about the same as the genAI 3d models from a year ago... And two years ago... A good counterpoint would be Tubi's recently released, mostly AI gen short films. They were garbage and looked like garbage.

Netflix's foray, of memory serves, was a single scene where a building collapses. Hardly industry shattering. And 3d modeling and genAI images/videos are substantially different.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-18 01:01:01+00:00
>'ve been having similar thoughts about software engineering since one effect of LLMs is they make senior devs very productive, they make junior devs superfluous

Well that's the pitch they want to throw at you. Actual studies disagree.

>Maybe the same thing happens to manufacturing, and we just get rid of craftsmanship, machining, and logistics, and have everybody 3D-print their appliances in a factory-in-a-box they keep at their home, just shipping filament and chips and other raw materials directly to them.

I legitmately think we will hit General AI before we have anything close to this. We simply don't have the resources needed on an individual bases to faciliate everyone being a "factory worker at home".
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-18 01:01:40+00:00
>I stood beside the caskets of my mother, my father and my grandmother. Trust me, life is finite and death is real.

Yeah, many of us have stood beside, behind, slightly in front of, or perhaps at some angle to the caskets of some loved one. This makes us exactly zero percent experts in how final death is, since of course we have no real clue one way or the other. That's a statement of fact, taking all religion aside. Given that we don't yet know what consciousness itself is or what it emerges from for our perception, we can't say anything certain about its nature after death. You're trying to be clever with weary cynicism, but know no better than anyone else.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-08-18 01:03:22+00:00
I don't think conclusion matches what we're seeing, though. Real output being flat while population and consumption have massively increased means that much more of our consumed products are being manufactured abroad now. It's not just automation at work. The original article even talks about that, where it mentions how high tech manufacturing is shrinking as a percentage of the economy.

It might well be true that we're never going to see the kind of employment in manufacturing that we used to, but a blanket "the jobs are not coming back" attitude doesn't match the data either.
by antihipocrat | 2025-08-18 01:03:59+00:00
Who's voice are you using when adding your hand crafted prose? Mimicking the style of the 80% or switching to your own?

Perhaps I'm a Luddite, or just in the dissonance phase toward enlightenment, but at the moment I don't want to invest in AI fiction. A big part of the experience for me is understanding the author's mind, not just the story being told
by snickerbockers | 2025-08-18 01:04:24+00:00
Because there's no higher power that can prosecute China for antitrust violations if they ever leverage our dependence on them against us. America is making the same mistake Europe made a few decades ago, which is constantly downsizing itself into irrelevancy because "helpful" countries are more than willing to take on the burden of economic domination. When we reach the point that all we make is fiat currency and software then we have nothing to offer the rest of the world and we become decadent and impotent.

Also our airplanes suck, you could not possibly have picked a worse example of American heavy industry than the Boeing corporation.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-18 01:05:47+00:00
> The snag is: 'experts' aren’t neutral oracles.

Without knowing who/what the experts are, how they are used, what they are judging, what structure and mitigations are in place around their use, and what degree of neutrality is required - with all other factors and techniques being used - you can't make any such claim.

It's so easy to dismiss something.

A general algorithm isn't a claim that its practical use won't require accommodating the specific complications of each context.

Very much like how data scientists don't expect their best algorithms to operate well, without also resolving a stream of practical issues. In standard and ad hoc ways, as needed.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-18 01:05:50+00:00
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I see what you're saying, although with the way the world is going, I'm increasingly doubtful of the potential of that approach, because it seems that companies are becoming more brazen about explicitly selecting for their narrow and immediate self-interest. In other words, the more you use your responsibility and influence to enact change, the more likely you'll just lose that responsibility and influence (i.e., get fired, demoted, or just shunted away to places where you can make less of a difference). However, that's not entirely the case everywhere yet, and it sounds like maybe you've found a place that's big but still not entirely evil, which sounds promising. :-)

In any case, I didn't mean to imply that what you're doing is any more objectionable than anything I or a zillion other people do when we make the same tradeoffs you allude to. What I was mostly reacting to was that you mentioned those things in the section on things you viewed positively, whereas they seem to me like they still incorporate a tradeoff involving a significant amount of badness. Perhaps though you simply meant they were tipped at least slightly toward the positive side on balance, which makes sense.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-18 01:06:17+00:00
Most are, as ACA compliant plans have metal levels that are based on the expected annual costs that the plan covers.

A silver plan an employer subsidizes is similar to a silver plan from healthcare.gov (expect plan to pay 70% and insured to pay 30%).

https://www.healthcare.gov/choose-a-plan/plans-categories/
by vel0city | 2025-08-18 01:06:19+00:00
> I think if you take ads away from the internet, you'll also take away a lot of the bullshit and inaccurate or misleading information

Just a gut feeling, but I doubt it. You'll still get a lot of bullshit inaccurate/misleading information, just only pushed by those with the budgets to keep pushing it.

Right-wing podcasters that take money from the Russian government to spread disinformation[0] will still get their checks even if their supplement sponsorships get outlawed.

You can take away all of Alex Jones' money and he'll still find some way to put his nonsense out there.

[0] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/two-rt-employees-ind...
by zahlman | 2025-08-18 01:06:25+00:00
Whenever there's a submission about something unpleasant or undesirable happening in the real world, the comment section fills with people trying to connect those things to their preferred political hobby-horses, so that their outgroups can take the blame as the ultimate cause of all that's wrong with the world. Contrarily, stories about human achievement won't simply draw a crowd of admirers in my experience, but instead there's quite a bit of complaint about outgroup members supposedly seeking to interfere with future successes (by following their own values, as understood from outside rather than inside).

And most people here seem to think that's fine; but it's not in line with what I understood when I read the guidelines, and it absolutely strikes me as negativity.
by technick | 2025-08-18 01:07:16+00:00
Then society should do something about the invasion of privacy happening everywhere. Take Flock camera systems in Colorado as an example, Colorado has been trying to limit access to ALPR data to only municipalities within the state for immigration related cases. The state has even went as far as creating a law. Loveland police department gave federal officials (ICE, DEA, ATF) access to states ALPR data, completely bypassing the law on the books. Data like this has been weaponized and if you can't see it, not sure how I can help you.
by laughing_man | 2025-08-18 01:08:44+00:00
As I am retired, I can assure you beyond any doubt I cannot be replaced by an LLM in the workplace. If you don't realize that's going to happen you don't realize just how many people come to work shuffle proverbial paper from one side of their desk to another, making sure forms are filled out correctly or this month's TPS cover sheets are attached. If you're in programming or engineering you tend to think office jobs require a lot of context and invention. But most of them don't.

Ten years ago if you graduated with a law degree and went to work for one of the big NYC law firms, the first place they would put you is in a big room with dozens of other new lawyers doing discovery. You'd get a stack of documents to read, looking for relevance to the particular case that firm was working on. Those jobs are already gone, for the most part.

And didn't someone high up in Microsoft say 95% of the programming in the future will be done by LLMs? Do you expect Microsoft intends to keep the 95% of programmers it doesn't need anymore?
by foobarian | 2025-08-18 01:08:47+00:00
The more I read about this kind of thing, the more I wonder what it would be like to up and move to a bustling tech center in China like Shenzhen or similar. Where there are stores in walking distance selling electronics parts. Where you can walk into a shop and get PCBs made. Where you can meet and talk shop with fellow makers who are not just LARPing arts and crafts but actually doing cutting edge manufacturing. Has anyone done something like this?