MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cheema33 | 2025-09-06 06:09:13+00:00
We have some devs in other countries. We pay them about $80K/yr. We have been trying to hire locally. The positions have been advertised for about 6 months at $140K/yr. We have only had unqualified people apply so far. We then bumped the salary to $160K. Still no go.

Again, we get takers, but they can't match the skill level of overseas devs at double the salary.

Will we pay the 20% tax/fine? Grudgingly yes. Particularly if this stuff becomes law and local labor force becomes even more expensive than it is now.

I can also see people coming up with creative ways to circumvent having to pay the tax. It is possible that some companies will move out entirely or create a legally separate entity offshore that is responsible for all the work that they wish to outsource.

The same sort of thing happened with manufacturing jobs. You can wish for those jobs to come back all you want. It is not happening in any significant numbers.
by noelwelsh | 2025-09-06 06:09:28+00:00
You need to consider the externalities of the activity, which in this case includes taking a whole country offline. I strongly believe this would make the whole activity a net negative. I very much doubt that recycling some copper wires produces more value than the cost of losing the Internet and fixing the cable.

Recycling old cables is probably valuable, in isolation, but not when this can occur.
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-06 06:11:37+00:00
> With this approach, how would you measure the effectiveness of the sunscreen when it's been absorbed by the skin

You can eliminate the "can't possibly work" cases much faster and cheaper.

More importantly, it is cheap enough to be always used as a baseline verification when human testing is so expensive that it can only be used as a random sample double-check.

It's like unit testing vs full user acceptance testing. You can and should do both, but the latter isn't for every PR.
by davidatbu | 2025-09-06 06:12:02+00:00
Just to make sure I understand you correctly, you're claiming that the person who started (and lead onto maturity) LLVM, Swift, and MLIR, writing millions of lines of c++ and leading dozens of engineers in the process, is primarily good at self promotion (as opposed to, say, language design, or compilers, or tackling really hard and long term software projects)?
by bruce511 | 2025-09-06 06:12:08+00:00
There's an ultimate end-game here, but we're not culturally ready for it yet.

Right now, we attach income to work. You get job, you get paid. The two are bound at the hip.

For over 100 years we've been watching as machines take over doing the work. Society is more productive than ever, but with far fewer people. Right now we kinda gloss over this by creating "bullshit jobs". We have some social safety nets, but we scorn those who use them.

Fast forward another 100 years. Machines now produce everything. 1% of people have (necessary) jobs. 99% collect a "basic income", machines do all the productive work, all "income" flows back around as taxes to become redistributed as basic income.

Right now this sounds very dystopic. Culturally we still bind "job" to "worth" in a very visceral way. If I suggest "everyone gets paid, even if they dont have a job", that provokes a very intense response in some countries and a less intense response in others.

As mechanization increases, actual jobs decrease. This trend is obvious. As a whole the idea of creating a "bottom level" of society is quietly becoming mainstream. Generally pushing that "bottom level" upwards is happening.

It's not hard to forsee a future where production is sufficient, energy is cheap, the "bottom" is quite high, where we tax production (not people), where we dispense with the fiction of bullshit jobs.

Some cultures are more ready for it than others. And there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth along the way. Societal change has always been thus. But the end result is inevitable.
by rsolva | 2025-09-06 06:12:43+00:00
Yeah, me included, until we where going to NL and suddenly was left with no other option becuase our diesel car broke down.

I expected a nerve wreaking trip with the eUP, but got slightly more confident after some planning. Using abetterrouteplanner.com and a charging card from elli.eco, I could drop by almost any charging station and avoid apps or paying with a credit card.

Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands is flush with chargers, so a range of ~130 is actually more than enough.

After the first trip was a success, we have repeated the trip up and down several times, and will take the same trip this October. And by success, I mean a very respectable Wife Approval Factor and a pleasant trip all-around.

The only real downside I have found is that after the 7th or 8th charge, the battery start to get hot, and since there is no cooling the charging time drops from ~10 minutes to more like 18 minutes. But that usually only happens at the last one or two stops.

I know this is far outside the norm and I plan to get another used electric car with some more range at some point, but I'm in no hurry. Having tried what I thought to be almost impossible, I was surprised to find how painfree it actually was.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-09-06 06:12:57+00:00
I brought all the rabbit in from a big union data center job in Texas, over a decade ago. We had spent weeks installing thousands feet of 500kcm (that's a THICK wire) and I brought in trashcans full of bare bright.

Scrapyard actually called the police requiring our facility manager to visit (they assumed it was all stolen, since there wasn't a drop of corrosion on any copper).

>populated by characters that will most defintly get your attention, which is a mistake, because you dont want thiers.

Really appreciated that they let me cut in line (the police forced this) so-as to not attact this unwanted attention.

This was fifteen years ago, but IIRC they handed me/boss a check for $6k (made out to my company). Lots of leering onlookers.
by davidatbu | 2025-09-06 06:18:00+00:00
Fwiw, Chris has detailed in many podcasts that Mojo will definitely be entirely open source in the future, and that the only reason it isn't now is that he learnt from his experience running Swift as an open source project that the open contribution and planning model is a bad fit, and basically counter productive, at this stage of a language's lifetime.

That is why they opted to open source in stages (ie, the stdlib is open source right now, and they expect to open source the compiler soon).
by starchild3001 | 2025-09-06 06:18:40+00:00
If I had to guess, I’d say the original Tesla founders had a greater influence than Musk. His track record, frankly, is unimpressive. He’s been promising full self-driving “next year” since 2016, yet it’s still nowhere close. Aside from the Model S and X, there hasn’t been a major innovation under his watch. The real groundbreaking work likely came before him. His reign? Far from remarkable. Each year has been a cycle of overpromising (often outright lying) and underdelivering. As for Tesla’s stock? Well, markets can stay irrational far longer than most people can remain solvent.
by sdesol | 2025-09-06 06:18:44+00:00
> But in my testing, other models do not work well. It looks like prompts are either very optimized for Claude, or other models are just not great yet with such an agentic environment.

Anybody who has done any serious development with LLMs would know that prompts are not universal. The reason why Claude Code is good is because Anthropic knows Claude Sonnet is good, and that they only need to create prompts that work well with their models. They also have the ability to train their models to work with specific tools and so forth.

It really is a kind of fool's errand to try to create agents that can work well with many different models from different providers.
by zkmon | 2025-09-06 06:19:26+00:00
It's the concentration of power, monopolies driving this trend of ignoring the fines and punishments. The fine system was not designed for these monstrous beasts. Legal code was designed to deter the common man from wrong doing. It did not anticipate the technological super powers doing winner-take-it-all in a highly connected world, and growing beyond the control of law. Basically, it's law of jungle for these companies. Law and punishment is never going to have any effect on them, as long as they can grab enough market share and customer base. Same as any mafia.

We are entering a world which is filled with corporate mafia that is above law (due to insignificant damage it can cause). These mafia would grip the world providing the essential services that make up the future world. The State would become much weaker, as policy makers could be bought by lobbying, punishments can be offset by VC funding.

It is all part of the playbook.
by jiggawatts | 2025-09-06 06:20:10+00:00
> Because just developing the variations would be faster than all of the debate. So the amount of time you waste in meetings and deliberation goes down as well.

Thank you for articulating something I knew but haven't been able to express as eloquently.

It frustrates me to no end to watch half a dozen non-technical bureaucrats argue for days about something that can be tried (and discarded) in a few hours with zero consequences.

"Let's write a position paper so that everyone involved can agree before we do anything."

Noooo! Just do it! See if it works in practice! Validate the marketing! Kick the tyres! Go for a test drive. Just. Get. Behind. The. Wheel.
by KronisLV | 2025-09-06 06:20:18+00:00
This is really cool and should work well with something like RooCode as well. Usually I keep going back to either Claude Sonnet or Gemini 2.5 Pro (also tried out GPT-5, was quite unimpressed) but both of those are relatively expensive.

I've tried using the more expensive model for planning and something a bit cheaper for doing the bulk of changes (the Plan / Ask and Code modes in RooCode) which works pretty nicely, but settling on just one model like GLM 4.5 would be lovely! Closest to that I've gotten to up until now has been the Qwen3 Coder model on OpenRouter.

I think I used about 40M tokens with Claude Sonnet last month, more on Gemini and others, that's a bit expensive for my liking.
by chasil | 2025-09-06 06:20:39+00:00
Interesting quotes from the article:

"There has not been a significant improvement in the minimum attenuation—a measure of the loss of optical power per kilometer traveled—of optical fibers in around 40 years...

"The new design maintains low losses of around 0.2 dB/km over a 66 THz bandwidth and boasts 45% faster transmission speeds...

"The new fiber is a kind of nested antiresonant nodeless hollow core fiber (DNANF) with a core of air surrounded by a meticulously engineered glass microstructure.

"The team believes that further research can reduce losses even more, possibly down to 0.01 dB/km, and also help to tune the fiber for low-loss operation at different wavelengths. Even the losses achieved, however, open up the potential for longer unamplified spans in undersea and terrestrial cables and high-power laser delivery and sensing applications, among others."
by tene80i | 2025-09-06 06:23:18+00:00
It’s very funny when people declare “piracy isn’t stealing”, as if the metaphor of piracy is all about singing and drinking.

Copying and distributing works isn’t identical to theft (deliberately depriving someone of their property), but you’re enjoying someone’s work without compensating them, so it isn’t totally unlike depriving them of something.

I guess it depends how you feel about refusing to pay a window washer. Or indeed you not being paid by your employer. It isn’t theft, but someone is clearly stiffing someone else.

As for only big companies benefitting from the copyright regime… seems like an ideological assumption. I know plenty of authors and they are quite happy having legal protections around their work which means they can earn from their labour.
by tomhow | 2025-09-06 06:23:23+00:00
We try to avoid predictability on HN, which means we don't always need there to be someone making this comment every time Google sunsets a product. Yes, Google has shut down a lot of products. They've also launched a lot of products. It doesn't need a comment like this each time. Comments are always fine if they're thoughtful and substantive, but this kind of comment isn't one of those.
by wholisticguy | 2025-09-06 06:23:38+00:00
This is the main value of a blockchain. You can do business with someone you don't specifically trust without requiring a third party in the middle to mediate the financial transaction.

The only people that need to run a verifier node are those that don't trust the other verifier nodes to do it properly. It's opt in, most will not run one, but a business that has enough money at stake can if they want to.

Then the blockchain client software provides the framework for cryptographic assurance that the two copies of the ledger are in sync.
by 0dte | 2025-09-06 06:23:52+00:00
I think western companies will be just fine -- Anthropic is settling because they illegally pirated books from LibGen back in 2021 and subsequently trained models on them. They realized this was an issue internally and pivoted to buying books en masse and scanning them into digital formats, destroying the original copies in the process (they actually hired a former lead in the Google Books project to help them in this endeavor!). And a federal judge ruled a couple months ago that training on these legally-acquired scanned copies does not constitute fair use -- that the LLM training process is sufficiently transformative.

So the data/copyright issue that you might be worried about is actually completely solved already! Anthropic is just paying a settlement here for the illegal pirating that they did way in the past. Anthropic is allowed to train on books that they legally acquire.

And sure, Chinese AI companies could probably scrape from LibGen just like Anthropic did without getting in hot water, and potentially access a bit more data that way for cheap, but it doesn't really seem like the buying/scanning process really costs that much in the grand scheme of things. And Anthropic likely already has legally acquired most of the useful texts on LibGen and scanned them into its internal library anyways.

(Furthermore, the scanning setup might actually give Anthropic an advantage, as they're able to digitize more niche texts that might be hard to find outside of print form)
by crote | 2025-09-06 06:24:54+00:00
Why? Should we first suspect carrots of making people grow red hair, suspect eggs of causing pregnancy, and suspect Left Twix of causing left-handedness?

We don't know the cause of autism. We do know that autism has a heritable component, with significant rates of both siblings having it (which could be explained by environmental factors) and both parent and child having it (which cannot be explained by environmental factors). Surely it would make a lot more sense to suspect a genetic component first?
by realz | 2025-09-06 06:25:35+00:00
I'm not sure "failed" is quite the right word. There are plenty of forums still thriving in specific niches. But yeah, they definitely lost their position as the dominant form of online community.

Could fragmentation be the reason? In forums, every topic has its own little island with separate accounts, different sites/rules/interfaces. Compare that to just posting in a subreddit or Facebook group where you're already logged in. Switching websites requires mental work that social media doesn't.
by lordkrandel | 2025-09-06 06:26:27+00:00
Wait... maybe... Linux not being a product... is the reason of its success as an alternative. And making it into a product... would make it lose what makes it different, the freedom to fragment and choose what you want from it. Maybe a company can profit from that. But Linux is not a product, there is no single enterprise behind it. Meaning also that is not made for profit. And also, that profit is not necessary, maybe not even wanted. Huh? Shocked, fellow capitalist?
by seabass-labrax | 2025-09-06 06:27:55+00:00
The hardware graphics acceleration stack is heavily shader-based now, so there's less and less graphics code being written in systems languages like C. In a way, people are still writing their own graphics engines, it's just for such a different platform from the unusual Turing-computer CPUs that all the old techniques go out of the window.

Nothing stopping you from writing it the old fashioned way though - you can just keep generating a single screen texture in the CPU and let the GPU idle!
by kriops | 2025-09-06 06:29:02+00:00
In addition to being unnecessarily aggressive, this is a strawman and whataboutism.

Food for thought: Do you think slavery is or was a “service to humanity”? Because that is what you are advocating: Forcing some set of people to work for free for another.

Also why do you think it has become so cheap in the first place?

This is not to say that eradicating malaria might not make a lot of sense by the way. But you are being incredibly disingenuous, and your argument is based on bad premises.
by wholisticguy | 2025-09-06 06:31:21+00:00
You do so at the pleasure and convenience of duopoly of credit card payment processors (Visa and MasterCard).

And occasionally, they will withdraw that service for arbitrary and capricious reasons

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44685011

Crypto stablecoins running on blockchain rails provide an alternative to that network.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 06:31:45+00:00
That's a problem in San Francisco proper too. If I think about my trips to Japan, in the population centers, at best, a car trip will take about the same time as a public transit trip, but the majority of the time transit will be faster, sometime significantly so.

But inside SF, even during rush hour, it'll still nearly always be faster for me to drive (or get an Uber). The reason is because there's precious little transit infra that doesn't share the road to some extent, and even when there are dedicated bus lanes or off-street train tracks, there's still traffic lights, and the buses and trains are slow and make enough stops that any gains are lost. Then on top of that, transfers take time, and if you're even slightly off on your timing, you might have to wait for up to 15 minutes for the next bus at your transfer point.

I agree with your assessment of inter-city trips as well; SFO airport to my house in SF is also so frustrating, because I live a few blocks from a Caltrain station, but having to go from SFO->BART->Caltrain->home... that transfer in the middle is a killer. My home is only a few blocks farther to the freeway than to the train station, so even in rush-hour traffic it's still only a 20 minute drive, while BART+Caltrain will take 30-45 minutes, and that's during a time of day the Caltrain trains run at their most frequent.

I've lived in SF for 15 years, and I think I've only taken BART/Caltrain to or from SFO a handful of times. I can't even remember the last time; it's been at least 10 years (probably before Uber/Lyft was a thing). Nowadays I always take a Lyft, and while I cringe at the price ($30-$50, depending on time of day), it's so worth it when a) I'm worried about not making my flight if transit is slower than I expect, or b) I'm getting back home and just want to be home.

And yeah, I get that I'm privileged enough to be able to afford to take a car. Many people aren't; they have to pay with their time, which just really sucks. We never get that time back.
by ScottContini | 2025-09-06 06:32:04+00:00
If you look at the chatgpt conversation which is linked at the bottom of the article (it will take a minute to load because it is very long), you will see that my initial approach was using matrices over GF(2). I am in the process of writing a blog about how I thought I could solve this quickly using ChatGPT, but unfortunately it took me down a bunch of rabbit holes that didn't work. Ultimately the ideas that did work were my own, but I still think using ChatGPT is useful if you know how to use it right (keep it on a tight leash, more details coming soon).

Back to the matrices... I thought I have an idea using matrices that would solve it really fast. It didn't work. There were dependencies in the matrix that I did not expect that made the idea fail. You can see all the details in the chat log.

With your recommendation, it is not clear to me that you are dealing with the problem that there is an integer addition of the state values to get the outputs. This integer addition ruins the direct usage of linear algebra to solve the problem. The initial approach that ChatGPT suggested, which is its own idea (not mine), was that we could bring in the integer carry bits as unknown variables and derive them via induction. I could come back to that idea, but I am sceptical that will work.

Eventually I got fed up with ChatGPT's implementation and it trying to help debug, which was only slowing me down. It kept trying to change the underlying data structures during the debugging. I had to scold it about that: you cannot change things when you are debugging it.

Ultimately, I did away with the linear algebra and just approached it from some simple observations about how bits affect other bits. It is linear algebra under the hood, but I did not use matrices at this point.

One of the reasons why I wrote the blog is to encourage more people to look at this. We should be able to invert this in 2 or 3 outputs, whereas Z3 requires 5. Nothing I am doing is complex. I would love to see someone produce a tool that breaks it really quickly. And I really mean a tool, not just a statement on why it is weak. We all know it is weak, but web security researchers need tools to use that demonstrate exploits based upon primitives that are wrongly used. So I would strongly encourage people with ideas to implement them and blog about the ones that work.

I have another idea on the plate that I think might bring the search down to 2^20 effort, but need time to work out details. Free time is the hardest thing in life for me to find: I just have a busy life. But I also have a passion for building fast tools and puzzle solving.
by crote | 2025-09-06 06:32:23+00:00
Just one slight problem:

Tylenol was introduced in 1955. Autism was first scientifically documented in 1926. If Tylenol causes autism, how did those parents in the 1920s get their hands on it?

Also, wouldn't there been a clear link between Tylenol sales and the occurrence of autism? Where is the data showing that the adoption of Tylenol in the 1960s resulted in a rise in autism, and that the "rise" of autism in the 1990s is linked to an increase in Tylenol use?
by casey2 | 2025-09-06 06:32:26+00:00
IDK. There are tons of things that can happen on (and in importantly for sunscreen) human skin. (Skin sweats in the hot sun, but of course your skin can have various reactions to and with chemical) This seems like the simplest and most effective method for testing effectiveness (should probably come up with some other tests for carcinogenic properties though)

The problem is that testing has to be reproducible but usage doesn't.
by monkeyelite | 2025-09-06 06:34:57+00:00
That’s right, and saying otherwise is actually robbing him of his rightful talent and ability.

> really hard and long term software project

That’s kind of what I mean. He commits to projects and gets groups of people talking about them and interested.

Imagine how hard it was to convince everyone at apple to use his language - and how many other smart engineers projects were not chosen. It’s not even clear the engineering merits were there for that one.
by notpushkin | 2025-09-06 06:35:02+00:00
I’m still using Swarm personally and agree 100%.

I’ve dealt with a fair bit of Swarm internals for https://lunni.dev/, and I’m ready to switch to k8s any moment. Don’t wanna lose Compose Spec support though, so I’ve started an IaC thingy that can map it to both k8s and Swarm resources. (Now I need to find some time for it!)