MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway13337 | 2025-09-22 18:42:41+00:00
I'm surprised by the contraversy of my comment. Maybe I should have been clearer.

The banking /system/ in europe is superiour. It's crazy that the US isn't part of the IBAN system. ACHs suck, etc.

Revolut and Transferwise help a lot with country level bank shortcomings. But they're not really the same as those banks. And they're exactly two mega companies. In Portugal, there is MBWay, and in Denmark there was Visa Electron (might have changed). These payment systems are used everywhere here due to their low fee at the exclusion of other payment systems. I appreciate the low fees to the vendor but it means that Revolut and transferwise are not an every day banking solution here.

When I lived in Denmark, I could not get a visa electron card despite being a resident because I didn't have credit in the EU. This made me use cash for everything as local businesses did not take normal bank cards / credit cards.

In Portugal, banks charge to keep your money in them without offering interest. As an American, managing interest payments from a non-domestic bank is a tax nightmare so I wouldn't want it anyway. But it's notable that they don't have to compete here at all. It was the same, as I remember, in the other EU countries I was in. In contrast, US banks can be found offering competitive interest rates though brokerages are a better option, still.

My point was not some kind of America versus EU nonsense that this seems to have attracted. It's that banks had an outsized influence on politics in the EU.

If you look at the distribution of market cap of industries in the EU versus the US, you'll note that the financial industry in Europe is much larger as a percentage. Step back and think about what that represents.

The US economy has 14% of public economy in financials vs 25% in the EU:

https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/255599/msci-usa-imi-net... https://www.msci.com/documents/10199/b32acc80-b116-454b-a9c4...

A financial industry being the proportially largest sector is not a good thing. It's a rent that's being extracted from the productive economy.

There has also been a huge decline in bank count in Europe as they consolidate: https://data.ecb.europa.eu/data/datasets/CBD2/CBD2.Q.B0._Z.1...

A decline in business counts is not good. It's not good that the same trend for other business types is happening in the US, either. Western governments are now favoring large businesses that hold political capital at the expense of the smaller businesses. This isn't good no matter the industry.

We should all want our businesses and governments to improve. To do that, we must first understand deeply the problems.
by SigmaEpsilonChi | 2025-09-22 18:43:15+00:00
Oh hey, that's my game! I am so pleased you are enjoying it. This is a remake of a game I first published way back in 2014. This version was built by team of 22 high-schoolers from around the world, recruited through Hack Club (https://hackclub.com), where I have worked since 2018.

For anyone who just wants a sense of what the game is like without the fuss of playing it, here is the launch trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35nDYoIwiA8
by jt2190 | 2025-09-22 18:43:20+00:00
> Moreover, the [Henley] report uses a far narrower definition of ‘millionaires’ that does not include all dollar millionaires like the standard definition (people with net worth of 1 million dollars or more), but rather only individuals with liquid assets worth 1 million dollars or more, who are thus richer and more mobile on average than a standardly defined millionaire. In the case of the UK, the ‘millionaires’ identified by the report represent just a fifth (20%) of the UK millionaire population. Even then, the report is based on a small sample from within these narrowly defined millionaires and the sample is skewed towards centi-millionaires and billionaires, who are also likely to be the most easily mobile.

Are "people with net worth of 1 million dollars or more" considered very wealthy in the U.K. these days? In the U.S. there are many many homeowners who are millionaires by this definition, and that's not a population that would be likely to have the means to buy their way into another country.
by mwkaufma | 2025-09-22 18:43:52+00:00
> As a rough and simplistic sketch, think of it as some number of dollars per AI company’s monthly active users going into a collective pool to be distributed out to content creators based on what most fills in the holes in the cheese.

This is the old "blockchains will create new niches for creators" / "rent-seeking is Good Actually" argument, barely reheated. Total imagination bankruptcy from C-suite.
by DonHopkins | 2025-09-22 18:44:01+00:00
The word "hacks" is so charitable, when you could use "sociopaths".

Russ Hanneman raised his kid with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGy5SGTuAGI&t=217s

A company I'm funding, we call it The Lady.

I press the button, and The Lady tells Aspen when it's time for bed, time to take a bath, when his fucking mother's here to pick him up.

I get to be his friend, and she's the bad guy.

I've disrupted fatherhood!
by ben_w | 2025-09-22 18:44:16+00:00
For a while, it's become increasingly clear that the current AI boom's growth curve rapidly hits the limits of the existing electricity supply.

Therefore, they are listing in terms of the critical limit: power.

Personally, I expect this to blow up first in the faces of normal people who find they can no longer keep their phones charged or their apartments lit at night, and only then will the current AI investment bubble pop.
by criddell | 2025-09-22 18:44:39+00:00
> As a content publisher

It always bothers me a little when people describe themselves as a content publisher or content creator. Why content? Why not say you are a short film maker or writer or musician or videographer or journalist or painter or photographer or ...?

In the past, your work has been merely content to the people who are looking for bits -- any bits -- to place between and around the stuff they really care about: ads. These days I suppose your work may be seen by some as grist for the AI mill.

By calling your work content you are acceding to the idea that your work is only valuable in other contexts. It isn't! I bet it's something you made with care and thought.

Or maybe I misread and you really are a content publisher. You're the person running the CMS who is looking for other people's work to monetize. If so, nevermind.
by mgh95 | 2025-09-22 18:44:54+00:00
What revenues do these GPUs generate for OpenAI? OpenAI is not currently profitable, and it is unclear if its business model will ever becomes profitable -- let alone profitable enough to justify this investment. Currently, this only works because the markets are willing to lend and let NVIDIA issue stock to cover the costs to manufacture the GPUs.

That's where the belief that we are in a bubble comes from.
by lurking_swe | 2025-09-22 18:45:10+00:00
Sorry you had that experience.

My opinion is that parenting is supposed to play a major role here. Educating your child on the dangers of _why_ we avoid certain neighborhoods, _why_ we don’t do drugs, and surrounding them with good role models early is so so important.

I guess what i’m saying is, if you parents locked you up in a safe cage (like I grew up - in a “safe” suburb without access to much), you might have grown up to be a naive 18 year old. And then you’d maybe go off to college and end up with the wrong crowd doing drugs and other stuff anyway. Completely isolating a teenager from the world doesn’t teach them how to navigate it.

The pedo’s following you home is creepy as hell though. No comment on that. Damn.

Again, just my opinion. We can agree to disagree. Have a great day. :)
by openclassaction | 2025-09-22 18:45:17+00:00
A proposed $1.5B class action settlement has been filed against Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI. Authors allege that Anthropic used pirated books from shadow libraries (LibGen, Pirate Library Mirror, Books3) to train its models. About 465,000 works are on the preliminary list, with estimated payments of $3,000 per book if approved. The court has asked for a finalized Works List and sample claim form by late September. If granted, this would be one of the largest copyright-related settlements in U.S. history.

Beyond the payout, the case raises bigger questions: how should copyright law apply to generative AI? Can datasets built on unlicensed works be “cleansed”? And what standards should courts use when balancing innovation with IP rights?
by vintagedave | 2025-09-22 18:45:25+00:00
> A deadline (which as far as I understand, we agreed to) loomed. Either Ruby Central puts controls in place to ensure the safety and stability of the infrastructure we are responsible for, or lose the funding that we use to keep those things online and going.

This makes a lot of sense, and it puts the 'drastic' action in understandable light.

It also contrasts with the 'On September 9th, with no warning or communication, a RubyGems maintainer unilaterally...' from the Goodbye RubyGems letter. Perhaps that person did not have communications or insight?

Going forward I think we could judge the good faith, if it's uncertain, by if we do see people reinstated. Cutting off access (for urgency with a deadline) followed by reinstatement (because they contribute) would match this post. No doubt there will be hurt feelings on all sides, which is understandable, but I hope as humans everyone can get through it.
by lapcat | 2025-09-22 18:45:47+00:00
> To be fair to apple, many billion dollar businesses have been built for and distributed by the app store.

This sentence is missing something essential:

Many billion dollar businesses have been built for iPhone and distributed by the app store.

iPhone is the platform, whereas App Store is merely the exclusive method of software distribution as dictated by Apple. Contrast with the Apple Mac, where the App Store is not the exclusive method of software distribution.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-09-22 18:45:59+00:00
Any cultural grouping that claims Humboldt and Tahoe aren't more closely related to each other than either are to the central valley is quite wrong. California pretty cleanly splits into 4 cultural regions: SoCal, The Bay, The Central Valley, and the Mountain Folk.

If you posterize enough to get to a map this course, then you'd have "The Left Coast" running down the Sierras, with parts of Klamath and Cascade Ranges (notably excepting the Shasta corner, which is more closely related to the Klan country side of Oregon). This can be somewhat justified, if one argues that the difference between the cultural ideas of the Bay Area are just urban versions of those that occupy the mountains (oddly harmonious mix of hippies and libertarians vs. the Bay's coexistence of corporate libertarians and progressives).
by melenaboija | 2025-09-22 18:46:43+00:00
This still blows my mind.

If each human brain consumes ~20W then 10 GW is like 500 M people, that sounds like a lot of thinking. Maybe LLMs are moving in the complete opposite direction and at some point something else will appear that vaporizes this inefficiency making all of this worthless.

I don’t know, just looking at insects like flies and all the information they manage to process with what I assume is a ridiculous amount of energy suggests to me there must be a more efficient way to ‘think’, lol.
by prewett | 2025-09-22 18:46:51+00:00
Microsoft's APIs basically shove all the implementation details onto the API user. This is, of course, abysmal API design, but "tasteful design" (in any sense) and "Microsoft" have never been in the same building. But it does make sense. And it also tells you how to interact with Microsoft APIs: the same way you interact with the hardware details that assembly languages export to the user, namely through a wrapper. (But, taste is difficult to find; that wrapper might have imbibed some Microsoft "design" by virtue of being exposed to too much Microsoft.)

Rant: if you want antialiased text, you need to use Direct2D. Direct2D is one of those APIs that waste developer's lives. You have to allocate your own framebuffer, for crying out loud. And then, you have to reallocate it if it ever disappears for some reason, and the docs don't tell you when this might happen (hot swap a video card? change monitor resolution? User moves window to a monitor with a different video card?).

I found this out developing a cross-platform UI library, https://github.com/eightbrains/uitk, leading to my above conclusion that the only proper way to relate to the Microsoft API is through some layer.
by mmmllm | 2025-09-22 18:47:09+00:00
I have no problem with the concept of lab grown meat, or 'cruelty free' meat as it's sometimes known. However, unfortunately it isn't yet completely cruelty free as it uses fetal bovine serum (FBS) to kick start the process.

Honestly perhaps you should have tried going fully plant-based. I truly think dairy is the worst of both worlds. It's too easy to lean on cheese which is not nutritionally balanced. Dairy can also inhibit iron intake which might be why you felt tired.

The good thing about a plant based diet is that it forces you to eat a ton of vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds etc. I try and follow the Tim Spector recommendation to get 30 different plants and vegetables per week and easily exceed that these days. I never felt better, and my blood vitals are fine.

(yes I take a B12 supplment as all vegans must, but B12 is artificially added to cattle feed anyway as most modern cows don't make enough)

All that said, I also just don't think it's natural to consume breast milk from another animal. There are literally legal limits to how much pus (somatic cell count) can be in each liter/gallon of milk. No thanks.

D
by jrflowers | 2025-09-22 18:47:17+00:00
I am not aware of a single example of someone getting successfully sued for downloading a movie. Every lawsuit that I’m aware of (even going back to the Napster days) people got sued for sharing content using p2p software. The current lawsuit robots download a torrent and then wait for individual IPs to upload some chunk of a copyrighted file to them, which they then use as proof of somebody sharing copyrighted material for their complaint.

Even the Protecting Lawful Streaming Act of 2020 explicitly does not punish consumers of copyrighted content, only its distributors.

>Tillis stated that the bill is tailored to specifically target the websites themselves, and not "those who may use the sites nor those individuals who access pirated streams or unwittingly stream unauthorized copies of copyrighted works"

There are so many paragraphs in response to my “You can’t get in trouble for downloading movies in the US” post and none of them have any examples of people getting in trouble for downloading movies in the US.
by godelski | 2025-09-22 18:47:35+00:00
> without being coerced > you know like you're at gunpoint

I think this is the other part where people are using wildly different bars. It seems like you're in the camp that since no one put a gun to her head that she wasn't coerced.

Legally speaking, coercion doesn't require threats of physical harm, it also covers threats of financial or legal harm as well. So your interpretation is clearly too extreme.

There's a lot of gray area here and these non disparaging agreements are without a doubt in them. If you have an expectation of getting a severance package, like many companies offer as incentive programs (much like they used to offer pensions) and you later learn that you only get it on the condition of a non disparaging agreement, that can be reasonably interpreted as coercion. Is it or is it not is up to the lawyers, but let's not act like a situation like that is not in the gray area.

You keep mentioning her salary. Does anyone have actual numbers? We see people who read her book saying she was living paycheck to paycheck, so what's the argument? She's bad with money? Okay? So what? What difference does that actually make? It anything her lack of good financial planning (a thing most people aren't good at, regardless of income level) makes it easier to strong arm her. Again, is that coercion in the legal sense? Let's let the lawyers figure that out because we're just two idiots talking on the internet who don't have nearly enough information to make good conclusions.

But honestly, I'm more curious why you're so invested in this and quick to vilify her. We've had a lot of conversations over the years and I don't recall you ever being so quick to judge. Why is it that we're talking about her legal authorization to discuss Meta executives and not she claimed they did. Shouldn't that be our main concern? We shouldn't believe her outright but we'll have to make our own judgements on that, but isn't that the real story here? I care more about that than if she changed her mind and is now facing legal troubles. The answers to the truth of what she claims is critical to determining if her non disparaging contract was even legal and if she can be prosecuted for violating it. If she's a true whistleblower then it doesn't matter what she signed because the contract wouldn't legally be able to cover such things.

So at the end of the day, why does it matter. Right or wrong we're concentrating all our efforts on the wrong discussion. We're idiots in the Internet, not lawyers. But we are also Internet users and her claims have implications for all of us. So who fucking cares if she violated her contract or if the contract is invalid, what matters most is the validity of her claims. Why are we all acting like the validity of the contract has any influence on the validity of her claims. We're being fucking insane right now
by pcrh | 2025-09-22 18:47:50+00:00
The negative impact of wealth taxes is vastly over-stated.

Obviously the impact depends on the level of taxation, but it is instructive to compare it with inflation. Typical wealth taxes are in the region of 1% per year; a 1% (additional) annual rate of inflation would have the same impact on wealth as the tax and not be considered disastrous for any business except those with very marginal profitability.
by computerdork | 2025-09-22 18:48:17+00:00
Had a similar thought, yeah, Spotify is like this. I don't know what the numbers are, but a very, very large majority of musicians make very little money off of Spotify (Weird Al Yankovic said he made enough in a year to buy dinner for himself).

On the other hand, Youtube is pretty good. You can make some money off of youtube viewings, but what it's really great for is building an audience. Musicians know that Youtube is a good tool for building a successful music career.

As for devaluing content with oversaturation, yeah, agree with this. Ironically, media is both the bread and butter of the internet, but it has also become devalued with the shear amount of it. Still, this isn't a problem of the media companies. Content creators can either chose to engage and or not, and hope they breakthrough.

And you kind of said it, "The great commoditization of eyeballs continues." Money makes the world go round, and nothing is free. If we want a vibrant internet, companies have got to find a way to make money (although, monopolies aren't a good thing, but paying for good content and services seems like a good idea).
by parsabg | 2025-09-22 18:49:10+00:00
I just finished reading da Vinci's biography by Walter Isaacson, which left me with a different sense of what it means to finish a piece of work. He famously never "finished" anything and eventually abandoned most of the projects he started.

He worked on the Mona Lisa for 16 years, adding a brush stroke here and there until his death, never handing it to the wool merchant who commissioned it or his wife who was the subject of the painting.

His work is largely a collection of drafts and anti-*'s, but that hasn't taken away from his transformative role in the history of art, science, and engineering. There is beauty in unfinished work and in what we abandon. Finality is not necessary for greatness.
by txrx0000 | 2025-09-22 18:49:14+00:00
Monetization models that intentionally create scarcity are scummy, including the one proposed in the article. The existing intellectual property economy is scummy. But we can fix this.

Imagine a future where:

The Internet rewards passionate creators more than instrumental alpha-seekers. This is key. But how?

We publish everything for free under reciprocal licenses like the AGPL and CC-BY-SA, not permissive licenses like the MIT and CC-BY. Those who take from the pile must add to it, or at least not claim it as exclusively their own.

Creators are rewarded by the populace via direct payments, like how streamers are rewarded. People decide what's valuable and what's slop, not Big Brother.

This creates an incentive structure where:

Those who make software and content because they love it will have more resources to make more quality stuff.

Those who make software and content for the money but actually hate what they do will find something else to do because companies will pay them less.

There are two necessary conditions that must be met, that we can work on right now:

We recognize artificial scarcity as evil, so we can enforce reciprocal licenses socially and bypass the broken legal apparatus.

We use multiple competing payment platforms to pay creators and receive payments, so there is incentive for these platforms to get better.
by dredmorbius | 2025-09-22 18:49:29+00:00
And over sufficiently long terms, the Earth's not been all that stable.

There've been multiple Snowball Earths (based on geological evidence), and a few episodes in which (even had land-based life existed) the continents were barely habitable.

Even today large expanses (Antarctica, the Sahara and other deserts) are only barely habitable. Still Edens compared with the rest of the Solar System.
by nailer | 2025-09-22 18:50:02+00:00
> If you think that another user is trolling, you shouldn't be responding at all. This is in the guidelines: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."

It's really hard to do that in the current HN environment. We've had a number of confirmed hoaxes put straight onto the front page - the disabled boy that was presented as starving, the Anthony Aguillar allegations, the dead boy that's still alive. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nailer

How can we not respond to trolls when the trolls submissions are being manually unflagged?

The HN guidelines also state:

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics... unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.

The manual unflagging and influx of political chat created as a result recently makes it seem like the guidelines have been suspended.

> And you certainly shouldn't be responding with "their own language back at them" - that's the perpetuation of flamewar we're talking about.

OK, I won't do that again.

> If I didn't respond to an earlier question, the most likely reason is that I didn't see it. Either way, pointing the finger at others is a poor way to respond about your own rule breakage.

Do you want to respond now? If it is unclear, I understand that you are making that point, I disagree that I am pointing the finger at your in response to you discussing the combatative environment on HN and I am suggesting the environment has changed on HN due to the unflagging of stories that would have been dead anytime from 2-18 or whatever it is years ago.

The best way to handle this:

_____

Tell HN: most political submissions will now be removed

8000 points by dang

We recently started manually unflagging political discussions from the HN front page. This has caused a huge increase in the amount of combatative political discussion on the site and the we can see the change has not been for the betterment of HN. The HN guidelines state "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics... unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." and we're now going to go back to enforcing that rule.