MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zackmorris | 2025-09-02 16:29:17+00:00
I don't normally reply twice to the same thread, but I just wanted to say that I wish that the US had been founded with a co-equal branch of government comprised of people drawn via lottery (probably voluntary) like in ancient Greece:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

I believe that this was one of the great mistakes by our founders. I'm sure that many suggested it, but unfortunately their ideas were suppressed due to our roots in slavery, colonialism and aristocracy (meritocracy today).
by iLemming | 2025-09-02 16:29:21+00:00
This! Most people don't even realize how much we sacrifice just to get to the office - even if your commute is only 30 minutes (which sounds amazing for a developed country like the US) - it still adds up to 240 hours per year - equivalent to 6 weeks of work time. Now, if your employer is honest with you - they are paying these costs, in most cases - it comes out of your pocket.

Software developers have been building large projects successfully without ever seeing each other for decades. Somehow Linux kernel, Apache projects, Postgres, Mozilla, Emacs, or Neovim hackers do not need to be in the same office every day, yet they've been around for decades and they definitely have some of the best programmers involved. Complex software can be successfully developed without daily in-person interaction.

If you're striving to become a great software developer - do plan to switch to work fully remotely at some point of your life if not today. Because great software developers understand the value of time - they can build some amazing shit in six weeks, instead of spending that time on the road.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-09-02 16:29:22+00:00
Value is something that motivates people to do work (that creates value). It's like bartering (I'll fix your car if you mow my yard), but currency makes work fungible (I'll fix your car for $80, and then pay another guy $80 to mow the yard). Key to this is understanding that someone might be willing to cut the yard for $75, and someone else might do it for $60. Probably no one for $20 though.

Speculation, which you lean heavily on in your example, is essentially just gambling. (I'll get my driveway fixed up for $120, and -educated guess- it allows me to fix two cars for $80 each).

Value is found by everyone voting with their currency units on what the value of any given thing is.

99% of the time when you are confused about why something has low value, or why something has high value, you can dig into the market around it and find out why and it's almost always pretty logical (and if it's not, congrats, you can make money on fixing it). This is also fuzzy around the edges, it's never sharp lines. But the shape is consistent on the whole.
by antinomicus | 2025-09-02 16:29:25+00:00
Elvanse, which is lisdexamphetamine, is sold under the Vyvanse brand in the US. It is a prodrug for one of the isomers found in adderall. This just means that you take elvanse, which is initially sort of ‘inactive’ and your body eventually converts it into what can essentially be thought of as adderall, or more accurately, d-amphetamine. Adderall specifically also contains l-amphetamine which is absent from this drug, the l-amphetamine isomer is responsible for more of the unwanted nervous system / cardiac effects.
by python-b5 | 2025-09-02 16:29:28+00:00
Using LF on Windows is really not difficult. Any text editor actually worth using supports both types of line endings - even Notepad has handled this correctly for years now, from what I remember. I've never been caused any inconvenience as a Windows user by files with LF endings. I never use CRLF if I can avoid it; I only will if working on a codebase that already uses it throughout.
by llamasushi | 2025-09-02 16:29:33+00:00
The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models.

What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the world but if you can't get 100k H100s and a dedicated power plant, you're out.

Wonder how much of this $13B is just prepaying for compute vs actual opex. If it's mostly compute, we're watching something weird happen - like the privatization of Manhattan Project-scale infrastructure. Except instead of enriching uranium we're computing gradient descents lol

The wildest part is we might look back at this as cheap. GPT-4 training was what, $100M? GPT-5/Opus-4 class probably $1B+? At this rate GPT-7 will need its own sovereign wealth fund
by garciasn | 2025-09-02 16:29:46+00:00
https://archive.is/YmsDf

--

I attended Undergrad from 1997 to 2001 and I distinctly remember the first paper I received from a new Associate Professor in my major (History) that was a C-. I argued that it would have been an A-level grade in any other professor's class; this new professor told me, in no uncertain terms, that it was most definitely a C- grade and I needed to do better. I did and it made me a better researcher and eventually writer.

I finished that course with a hard-earned B+ and I felt better about myself and my abilities thereafter. As a D1 athlete, I had clear goals and expectations set for me by those who I was against and whom came before me. This was the first time in my academic career where I felt I had received a challenge and clear guidelines on how to improve; something I felt helped me achieve better outcomes.

Education is not intended to be a breeze; it's intended to be a challenge to help you stretch and grow. Just because you and/or your family is spending tens of thousands a semester does not give anyone the right to skate by with the bare minimum effort applied.

I have high expectations for my children academically. My undergrad and graduate degrees were paid for by others (athletics and my employer) alongside of my own work in both. I want my children to grow up and be successful and they will not be if I smooth the road for them in unfair ways. I explain that, in life, they will face uncertain and likely unfair challenges from external forces and they need to not only stretch and grow in their knowledgebase to challenge these forces, but they should also learn to navigate them with grace--an academic exercise in and of itself.
by adamgordonbell | 2025-09-02 16:29:49+00:00
> In the early days of FedEx, Smith had to go to great lengths to keep the company afloat. In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill.

Some who take on unreasonable risk will be among the most successful people alive. Most will lose eventually, long before you hear about them if they keep too many taking crazy risks.

Who is a great genius, and is who is just winning at "The Martingale entrepreneurial strategy"?
by coliveira | 2025-09-02 16:29:59+00:00
People like Gates, Musk, Buffet are only a side show. They are there because of support from Wall Street. They're new but at the same time indistinct from old money and working for the same goals.

Moreover, a "self-made billionaire" is just a drop on the global pool of wealth. It is even good for capitalism to have these new people as a showcase, so billions will believe they can be the next, when winning the lottery if far more likely.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-02 16:30:27+00:00
Of course, running a business is not like saving the planet. Tech companies are companies that make money by means of tech - it doesn't matter how sausage is made but that you are compensated for sausages delivered.

Which is why personal hobby projects are awesome!! No one is going to make a bank building an example of Federation standard issue phaser pistol as close to forms and functions as issued, but it'll be awesome nevertheless and regardless of quality. But it won't make a bank. But it'll be absolutely awesome.
by dfxm12 | 2025-09-02 16:31:00+00:00
The survey uses the term "unemployed" but it is a different metric than the "unemployed" metric.

I'm looking at the pdf you linked. I did a ctrl+f and couldn't find anything for "unemployed". I then searched for "employ" (in case there is some OCR bug) and the only hits I got were on a table that says "employment status" and the responses are "employed" or "not employed".

Can you point out where the survey uses the term "unemployed"?
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-09-02 16:31:05+00:00
You're missing the most important kind of great engineer: the guy who's got adequate technical skills but fantastic executive functioning skills. A lot of bright engineers target the "fun" problem or will otherwise get distracted, leaving a lot of simpler tasks ignored. Every team needs the dev who opens up Jira, opens a sorted list of tickets, and just knocks them down one by one, all day every day. Without them, the product will crumble slowly around an increasingly amazing and elegant core.
by terminalshort | 2025-09-02 16:31:37+00:00
Only at very small companies or at very high levels at larger companies. Typically everybody is going to have to go through the full loop. In 99% of cases knowing someone gets you to the interview and nothing more. If you mean the "best engineers" like people whose names are known or the type op AI people that Zuckerberg is personally making offers to, then yes that's different, but those people are such outliers that statements like "going through the hiring process like a chump" don't really make sense because 99.99% of engineers are "chumps."
by nonethewiser | 2025-09-02 16:32:17+00:00
>The perfect solution is to use React for the frontend (where its main purpose and strengths lie) and use something like PHP, Java, ruby or whatever for the backend.

>This insanity of server side react introduces all kinds of unnecessary quirks.

Im kind of confused by what you mean here. You can use PHP, Java, Ruby, etc. for the backend with Next.js. You can even use if for the SSR server if you want.

I guess you are actually talking about simply not doing server side rendering at all? Im just clarifying because I think that still constitutes using "React for the frontend." I mean, how could React be used for anything BUT the frontend?

The server side rendering is actually one of the objective goods Next.js offers (not necessarily that it handles the complexity of it well). I mean, if you dont need that, sure... that's one more reason to just use Vite. But the backend choice is irrelevant.
by ksaun | 2025-09-02 16:32:25+00:00
Sincere question: Do you have thoughts as to how we can invest our $ if our goal is to support the "good economy" instead of attempting to ride the wave of the rich getting richer?

I would like to be part of the solution instead of contributing to the problem, but it is challenging to identify companies in which to invest without supporting the status quo.

I am not "rich," but wish I could better vote with what assets I do have.
by rangerelf | 2025-09-02 16:32:37+00:00
Because, nature in its infinite wisdom, gets rid of what's not used.

You don't use your muscles? They atrophy. You don't make an effort to travel without a gps regularily, to force your brain to remember your way around naturally? Your spatial memory atrophies and becomes useless [here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-62877-0 ]

People don't need to learn math anymore, hence, no more calculus lessons? People are literally becoming idiots who can't calculate simple change at the cash register without pulling out their calculators.

It's exercise. It keeps the brain itself from atrophying. It stops you from becoming a "wetware LLM" that's just parroting whatever echo of a thought (natural or otherwise) goes through it.
by BrandonM | 2025-09-02 16:32:41+00:00
Just to add a counterpoint, I was hired as employee #3 in 2011. In 2020, I was able to sell 5.8% of my stake for $200K (as part of Series C). In 2021, I sold another 4.4% for $500K (Series D on terms too good to refuse). I still hold equity or options in nearly 0.5% of the company (which is still private).

My wife and I used about half the proceeds of those sales to buy a house (cash offer) in late 2021.

I don’t know what proportion of early employees get screwed, but people who do well are usually smart to avoid posting publicly about it (and I am apparently an idiot).
by black6 | 2025-09-02 16:32:58+00:00
Being "middle class" is a mindset, not a category of wealth. It's something of an anachronism from when there were two distinct classes: nobility/clergy, and the peasants. The middle class, the bourgeoisie (because they lived it towns, bourgs) didn't fit into either existing class. One can be wealthy or poor and still be middle class. Social conformity, infinitely expandable material demand, and emphasis on external, impersonal values are the hallmarks of this mindset.
by NoGravitas | 2025-09-02 16:33:09+00:00
I quite prefer the link "peek" in Zen, which I'm led to understand is based on the one in Arc. Shift click a link, it opens up in a configurable-size floating modal (90% by default) on top of the current page, with controls to pop it out into a full tab or close it. It's only a small improvement over "open in new tab, switch to new tab, close new tab", but it feels nice.

The new link preview in Firefox seems a lot less useful.
by kbolino | 2025-09-02 16:33:40+00:00
In order to implement grapheme cluster segmentation, you have to start with a sequence of Unicode scalars. In practice, that means a sequence of 32-bit integers, which is UTF-32 in all but name. It's not a good interchange format, but it is a necessary intermediate/internal format.

There's also the problem that grapheme cluster boundaries change over time. Unicode has become a true mess.
by duxup | 2025-09-02 16:33:42+00:00
It's not clear to me that each new generation of models is going to be "that" much better vs cost.

Anecdotally moving from model to model I'm not seeing huge changes in many use cases. I can just pick an older model and often I can't tell the difference...

Video seems to be moving forward fast from what I can tell, but it sounds like the back end cost of compute there is skyrocketing with it raising other questions.
by jtolmar | 2025-09-02 16:33:46+00:00
From the article:

> The kernel is still adding support for some 32-bit boards, he said, but at least ten new 64-bit boards gain support for each 32-bit one.

And

> To summarize, he said, the kernel will have to retain support for armv7 systems for at least another ten years. Boards are still being produced with these CPUs, so even ten years may be optimistic for removal. Everything else, he said, will probably fade away sooner than that.

So, no, he does not think that at all.
by declan_roberts | 2025-09-02 16:34:04+00:00
I haven't read an article this on-point in a long time. As someone comfortably working remotely at BIGTECH it's actually really frustrating.

OK you have a 60% pay cut and forced relocation back to the Bay Area. Let's jump right into the conversation about how you're going to make up for that to attract talent. Don't tell me it's a virtue because I'm not stupid and you're not stupid.
by ThrowMeAway1618 | 2025-09-02 16:34:19+00:00
>That'll surely make things work out great. right?

Yep. I'm not sure why we're even bothering with deportations. Just shoot 'em in the head and grind them up for fertilizer and pig/chicken feed.

And if a few hundred thousand citizens get caught up in that, it's no big deal. They wouldn't have been involved if they didn't look like illegals, right?

Besides, folks like me (with the map of Ireland all over my face) won't get caught up in that. So why should I care?

Yeah, why bother deporting them. Shooting them is quicker and cheaper. We could save even more money by converting warehouses to gas folks and then we can cremate them and/or use them as agricultural inputs.

Easy peasy. I mean, it's not like they're human or anything. My god! They're criminals, every last one of them! Rapists, killers, gang bangers. If they weren't subhuman, we wouldn't need to treat them like this.

But they're not like us decent, hard working people. They're evil, twisted murderers, just like the pedophile demonrats who murdered all the ICE folks during the Obama and Biden administrations.

Both Biden and Obama just sent the Marines in to ICE offices and killed them all dead!

So it's perfectly fine to do that to all the brown^W illegal people too, right? I certainly won't have to worry about it, nor will the other white^W real Americans.

USA! USA! USA!
by vannevar | 2025-09-02 16:34:24+00:00
In evolutionary algorithms, fitness climbs rapidly from a random start, then tends to level off over generations. The "split-and-hit-the gas" dynamic makes sense if you think of a given phenotype occupying a certain phase space. If a sudden divergent mutation throws it into a new phase space, it's sort of resetting the evolutionary clock: fitness in the new dimensions of the space increases more rapidly, amplifying the divergence from the other evolutionary branch.
by alphazard | 2025-09-02 16:34:29+00:00
I wouldn't recommend a traditional calculus course to anyone. There's no reason to do derivatives or integrals by hand, and that's most of the course. The practical applications of running differences and running sums can be taught to people with minimal programming experience and without algebra.

I've never done an integral by hand as part of any productive activity. Monte carlo integration and loops for multiply-and-add have proven incredibly useful. Why not teach those directly?
by scellus | 2025-09-02 16:34:51+00:00
So far it doesn't seem like winner-take-all, and all the major players (OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Google, Meta?) are backed by strong partnerships and a lot of capital. It is capital-intensive this round though, so the primary producers are big and few. As long as they compete, benefits mostly go to other parties (= society) through increased productivity.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-09-02 16:35:02+00:00
> this has nothing to do with not answering emails.

For you maybe, sometimes the entitled do not recognize the liability their antics bring to other business dynamics.

>you mean customers?

You mean your potential 1 sale is worth more than years long account activity your competitors have shown? Some customers are just not worth the grief, and you make more profit not selling to them... Too-big or too-small some people are just are not worth the risk... You'll be out of business if you ignore this...

>> It is rude to "ghost" people,

>no its not. ignoring people is as old as time.

Hence the mystery is solved, some companies won't want that kind of contradictory business relationship liability. People often can't get away with that behavior unless they are running a fast food outlet with low value stakes. lol =3
by ankit219 | 2025-09-02 16:35:04+00:00
Their projections for ARR at the end of this year at a high of $9B[1] at the end of this year. And reported gross margins of 60% (-30% with cloud providers partnerships). All things considered, if this pans out, it's a 20x multiple. High yes, but not that crazy. Specially considering their growth rate and that too at a decent margin at gm level.

[1]: It was $3B at the end of May (so likely $250M in May alone), and $5B at end of july (so $400M that month).
by yoyohello13 | 2025-09-02 16:35:41+00:00
I was recently studying some basics of quantum computing and had to re-learn a bunch of linear algebra. I thought I had forgotten everything, but when I sat down to review the material I picked it up very quickly (much faster than when I was in undergrad). It was like riding a bike. I think we think we forget, but the knowledge is actually dormant and much easier to get back.

So I don't think forgotten knowledge is wasted, it's still valuable.
by seneca | 2025-09-02 16:35:48+00:00
It feels a bit unreasonable to me. Anthropic is arguably comparable to Google's Gemini program. Is Gemini 10% of Alphabet's value? If so, how much of that is because of its ability to consume and interact with things like YouTube and Workspaces?

I could see two or three percent, but this seems like a pretty big stretch. Then again, I'm not a VC.
by jimt1234 | 2025-09-02 16:36:03+00:00
> Wealth inequality is high. High enough you can feel it like a vibe in the air.

I agree, but I think it's more than just a "vibe in the air". Throughout my youth and young adulthood, we (GenXers) knew vaguely about rich people, but nothing specific, just that rich people existed and they had nice stuff. Now, thanks to social media and the decline of humility, the lifestyles of rich people isn't just known, it's pushed in front of our faces constantly. And too often the message is straight from A Bronx Tale: "The working man is a sucker".
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-09-02 16:36:17+00:00
If we make a comparison to the dotcom bubble, this bubble will take the equivalent of catsdotcom and dogsdotcom, not the equivalent of FAANG++. And even that comparison is iffy, because we just don't know where the end is with this one. We've seen capabilities only increase so far. We've also seen prices decrease by orders of magnitude between SotA "generations". Things continue to scale, and no one knows how far it'll go. There's a reason everyone is doing the coding agent cli of the month, and everyone is heavily subsidising coding - data, more data, and crucially (hah) signals on generation quality, acceptance rate and so on. Take that, put it in the new generation, training goes brr, post-training goes RL, etc.
by janwilmake | 2025-09-02 16:36:27+00:00
really cool! the problem with new standards though is that it's hard to adopt. what's your plan to adoption? because nobody will understand it if it's not in terms of things they already use/understand.

curious if this can somehow slot into oauth too, or this is impossible? I've been thinking about oauth proxies that alter the oauth scopes into more fine-grained ones, working on this. maybe this is the key to adoption.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-09-02 16:36:43+00:00
Its not about the technicalities of whether someone got deported or not, its about detaining a green card holder like Jemmy Jimenez Rosa in an illegal fashion. Its about detaining scores of tourists for bullshit reasons, when they're entirely willing and able to leave the country, hiding them across a range of detention centres so their friends, families and lawyers can't find them and preventing their access to the legal system. Its tyranny, they're not interested in justice, they're chasing targets for bonuses, they're trying to hit numbers for headlines, or maybe even for prison kickbacks as most of the holding cells are privately run.

The founding fathers of the US cared about tyranny, about the rights of people. Thomas Paine himself believed in "natural law", a set of rights that were natural for people to have and the state came _second_ to those natural laws.

Remember that the USA was created in counter to a European norm at that time where people's rights were systemically stamped upon by a ruling elite. Its not about citing evidence or giving statistics, its about believing that humanity itself has rights and a government needs to follow specific rules in order to curtail those rights that respect the natural rights of people. How ICE are operating is not American and its the polar opposite of patriotic.

Right now, ICE can bowl up to anyone on the street wearing masks, not identify themselves and bundle them into a van and take them to an undisclosed location for weeks, if not months with zero recourse. You don't need statistics to understand that's tyranny.