MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by msabalau | 2025-09-24 18:07:37+00:00
I dunno. It's not at all clear what "small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly" even means, over what time, and in what society. The post itself, as a piece of thinking, seems, charitably, a vague sentiment that might later turn into something that could be analyzed.

In general terms, in the US, in living memory, I'm not sure that large organizations occupy more space in people's day to day lives than smaller ones.

In the US, since say the 1990s, the percentage of people, say, working in small businesses are roughly the same. The number of local non-profits has exploded since over that time. The trend towards media consolidation that had occurred over the prior century would begin to be unwound, and tech consolidation would only partially reverse this. We have far more access to diverse points of view than most people did for most of the 20th century.

If there is there is shift, I suspect, it's not about where people work or interact, it seems mostly that businesses, small and large, feel free to dominate people, in a way that was considered in bad form prior to Reagan/Thatcher and the fall of communism as an alternative to the West that would be appealing to post-colonial societies.

But that's just a notion as vague as the original post.
by w10-1 | 2025-09-24 18:07:43+00:00
Great post.

But not sure I'd pre-position small organizations as having some kind of "role" -- effect maybe?

I'm reminded of a term "the locus of relevant possibility" used to characterize where people spend their time and effort. This enables one to compare across activities (say, believers, merchants, workers, etc.), and also to propose that change happens where people put their efforts -- nowadays into larger organizations.

Small organizations became relatively less effective at producing any relevant possibilities for people due to loss of locality for people and gain of targeting by large organizations.

People now are participating fans in sports, politics, hardware, and of course work (most jobs come with a cultural context). If/when organizations get better at targeting people, they can scale.

"Local" is a function of time/space/effort cost. Often now it's hard to visit your parents, but easy to engineer complex PR with someone across the world. So physical locality is not a proxy for relevance or possibility any more.

(Too bad locality is still the basis for political representation.)

There's also a key difference in the small organization: it incentivizes people to take some responsibility for others, i.e., some organizing roles, to keep the organization afloat. A world with large effective organizations has fewer leaders -- fewer individuals effecting change.

Probably the main small organizations are personal work networks. That's what determines ability and possibility in an increasingly productive world. In many cases, it centers on a rainmaker effect: people who can find and/or make work are followed.

(I would love to see some clean way to distinguish the organizations with their own cultures vs. those that labor under rainmaker sub-cultures -- alignment vs competition, efficiency vs relevance...)
by derefr | 2025-09-24 18:07:57+00:00
> One would think if there was real interest someone would click to watch a video?

If a third-party product PR fluff-piece gets me interested in a product, I click over to the product's own site (and maybe watch a first-party video, if available.) I trust the product's vendor to understand and explain the product's USP a lot better than some third-party marketing agency will.
by 9rx | 2025-09-24 18:08:05+00:00
> for tracking source code changes (that is, changes to structured text files).

Which is exactly what they claim to use it for.

> so they could have gone simpler.

Maybe, but they also claim that it is a desirable, maybe even necessary, property to ingrate with existing git use. So you can only go simpler until you have to actually interface with git and then any possible downsides of git come rearing their ugly head at this point anyway. So what have you gained by just not using git from top to bottom?
by vkou | 2025-09-24 18:08:32+00:00
Better yet, the 7-7-7 rule.

> The FCC's 7-7-7 rule was a 1953 regulation that limited a single entity from owning no more than seven AM radio stations, seven FM radio stations, and seven television stations nationwide to promote broadcast diversity. This rule was a response to concerns about media consolidation and was eventually eased, then replaced by the 12-12-12 rule in 1984 and later abolished by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.

If you're wondering how we got to the universe where every piece of mass media that's blasted at you is owned by <5 entities, look no further.

So much for diversity of speech or a marketplace of opinions. Speech is actively being funneled into a single box, and the box is owned and operated by a monoculture of media billionaires.

This forum in particular wails and gnashes its teeth anytime that big tech exercises control over publishing, while turning a blind eye to this rot in trad-media - which is a thousand times worse.

If I were made king for a day, the first thing I'd do would be to break up these conglomerates. You'd either be allowed to be a media conglomerate with the GDP of a small country and a reach of a hundred million people running an agnostic platform, or you're allowed to exercise editorial control. Pick one, I don't care which, but you have to pick one.

(That this isn't a popular position among people seeking to maximize speech and diversity of ideas is perhaps revealing of their real values - the promotion of the monoculture pushed by trad-media.)
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-09-24 18:08:33+00:00
No, I'm far too cynical to believe that anyone has my interests at heart. But I will acknowledge one side as being openly anti-democratic while the other is merely spineless in the face of opposition.

My opening statement being contradictory was, admittedly, my fault. I couldn't tell if you were trying to champion the right wing or if you were trying to build a both-sides argument, so I tried to cover both bases. And that just made me look silly.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-09-24 18:08:48+00:00
But the reason LLMs aren't used to build features isn't because they are expensive.

The hard work is the high level stuff like deciding on the scope of the project, how it should fit in to the project, what kind of extensibility the feature might need to be built with, what kind of other components can be extended to support it, (and more), and then reviewing all the work that was done.
by thelastgallon | 2025-09-24 18:09:04+00:00
Self driving cars will need a full array of sensors as long as there are human drivers. Eventually, everything will be self driving, all cars, roads, signposts will be designed for self driving. Then, a car can function with minimal self driving hardware. All cars will be in constant communication with each other, building a model of traffic in their car brain, instantaneously shaping traffic for continuous flow without congestion or accidents.
by ardit33 | 2025-09-24 18:09:22+00:00
No sure why this comment got downvoted. The 90s were more of no hidden fees at all. You paid the ticket, and that's it. Usually 2 baggages were included in the flight (standard), and food was free. US inland trips had crappy snacks, and some soda, but international ones all had food and drinks, including alcoholic ones.

Prices of tickets were more expensive for sure, so air travel was more of a luxury.

The era of the hidden fees started during the late Bush era, and with the advents of online booking, and with the rise of the 'cheap airlines' like RyanAir, Spirit, etc...

They had hidden fees as part of their busisness model. The larger carriers started following suit with more restricitons for the cheapest base tickets (no luggage) and more fees for things that used to be included before.

This is completely different from the 90s, which you paid and things were more upfront.
by dingnuts | 2025-09-24 18:09:52+00:00
"remote" can just mean "far enough from the financial district that I can afford a little space" as it turns out. You're not WRONG but just being in the same time zone as your coworkers gets you 90% of the in person benefits and, realistically, it's too hard to work with a team that is on a vastly different tz.

Local can still be better than global while still allowing people to work from home and convene in meat space as needed
by rimunroe | 2025-09-24 18:10:26+00:00
I assume this is a somewhat flippant/sarcastic response, but it completely ignores the gist of the message (well, multiple messages) you're replying to.

> I say this as a parent who pays for assigned seats because we choose to buy tickets that reflect our actual level of flexibility.

For what it's worth, I'm saying all this as a parent who flies on airlines where assigned seats are the only option afaik
by ninininino | 2025-09-24 18:10:45+00:00
"I started working in 2000, and had a decade under my belt leading teams and becoming CTO of a Web 2.0 era startup before I made as much money as new grads expect to earn today fresh out of school."

The dollar had an average inflation rate of 2.55% per year between 2000 and today, producing a cumulative price increase of 87.60%.

In other words, if you were paid 60k in 2000 you would need 112200 to make the same inflation adjusted income (but note that income tax increases as you increase in income in absolute terms, so that new inflation-adjusted income is less net of taxes).

If you reached 100k in 2000 you would need 187k today (and again, tax makes it worse).
by parpfish | 2025-09-24 18:11:32+00:00
same here. i use it as a kind of mental bookmark as i move down the page because I know that its very, very likely i'll get distracted by somethingand have to temporarily leave the article.

however, this is probably a habit for a minority of users because it only makes sense on desktop. if you're reading on a mobile touchscreen-device this highlight-as-you-go tic just doesn't make sense
by dillydogg | 2025-09-24 18:11:39+00:00
Spoiler, I haven't read the article, but my understanding is cardiolipin targeting antibiotics have failed in the past because our mitochondria are enriched for it. (Which makes sense here because the mitochondria are derived from ancient bacteria). I'm sure there is potential for optimization for medical applications, but we will have to be very careful for adverse effects.
by kwoff | 2025-09-24 18:11:47+00:00
I haven't incorporated Anki yet, but I guess a similar idea would be Memrise. My experience with that for Korean was that it was too intense in the beginning, since it was throwing random (though basic) phrases of like 9 syllables at me, and I couldn't keep them straight. I am considering trying Memrise again, since I've gone through A2 level on Busuu since then, and know more basic phrases and grammar. I do think I should be building my own Anki set by this point, but I've been too lazy.

Helping with language learning is one of the things I think ChatGPT is excellent for. I have a long-term conversation only about Korean, and I can ask questions like "how would a Korean understand [some grammatical structure]?" and it gives very insightful answers, and even refers back to vocabulary that I've already used or other discussions about similar topics.
by re-thc | 2025-09-24 18:11:50+00:00
> I don't think it matters whether it is SA or NSA, the end user doesn't know the difference, the important thing is to see if there is an improvement

It does. It could be a hardware issue (need a new phone), software issue (e.g. OS support) or even configuration. It might not be turned on by default. I've also seen implementations where old physical sims needed be replaced.

> the study simply tries to understand if there is an improvement between the 5G and 4G label on the phone

Which misses a lot, e.g. modem changes on newer phones and bands supported, etc. As people keep buying new phones things will change.
by sarchertech | 2025-09-24 18:11:51+00:00
If you are on a visitor visa you can't work. An American worker has many many more options. They can take contract work while they job hunt. They can work anywhere they want not just the limited subset of companies will to sponsor them. They can get unemployment. If all else fails they can temporarily work in the service industry.

A large percentage of American workers have a spouse who also works full time whose health insurance they can switch too. If a company fires an H-1B employee they can also withdraw their I-40, which means their spouse will lose their work authorization.

>Paying COBRA for 18 months is wildly expensive

It's $400-$700 a month on average for an individual. More expensive for people with families, but as I discussed above in the majority of families, both parents work.

Someone here on a visitor visa also doesn't qualify for any ACA subsidies that an American scraping by on contract work while job searching would qualify for.

At a population level, if you divide people into 2 groups. And you add significant extra consequences to being fired to group B, group B will work harder to avoid being fired all else being equal.
by jmyeet | 2025-09-24 18:12:17+00:00
What I find fascinating about these kinds of legitimate complaints and the comments here and elsewhere is nobody wants to talk about the root cause: capitalism. What I've come to realize is Americans in particular can't define capitalism but will die on the hill of defending it. Another casualty of the Red Scare. Let me explain.

People often like farmers markets. People like locally grown produce. People like Mom and Pop stores over big chains. These things aren't strictly true but they're generally true.

Walmart is capitalism. A farmer's market is socialism. Your local Italian restaurant run by a family of immigrants is socialism. Olive Garden is capitalism.

What's the difference? Easy. The worker's relationship to the means of production. If you buy from a local grower at a farmer's market, that grower likely owns their farm and any production facilities. If you buy from Walmart, you're paying the Walton family, Blackstone, Vanguard and all the other shareholders (or capital owners). That money leaves your community.

This is rent-seeking behavior. And it's exactly what private equity is. What additionally makes private equity profitable are the legal enclosures PE firms create to increase profits at your expense. So they'll buy a medical practice, which was previously owned by the doctors most likely, and jack up the prices to pay off the LBO and their investors. They then use noncompetes to stop those medical practitioners in that local area or state (depdning on what they can get away with).

At this stage of capitalism, every aspect of your life is getting financialized. Housing, health care, education, vets, food, water, utilities and so on. In every one of them is rent-seeking behavior to use the legal system to create an enclosure for them to jack up prices at your expense.

Terence is a smart guy but the word "capitalism" doesn't appear once. Instead there's lip service to the notion of "economies of scale". This is in part propaganda. Why? Because if it were really true, why do all these large companies need legal protections of their business? Like states who ban municipal broadband?

Secondly, Terence notes essentially the destruction of community. This is an intentional goal of neoliberalism because any form of community or collectivism is dangerous to a neoliberal project. Also, people spending time on community is lost profit for some company who would rather you were creating shareholder value instead.
by projectazorian | 2025-09-24 18:12:55+00:00
The EDL is basically a union of street thugs, fascist politicians who split off from the BNP, and political opportunists like "Tommy Robinson".

Fascist is an accurate enough term for their politics, the stated political positions may not align 100% to historical fascism, but given all the fascist associations most objective observers would say that's likely to be a product of political positioning rather than any genuine ideological differences.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-09-24 18:12:56+00:00
Yeah, Cursor tab completion is basically in the realm of magical mind reading and might still be the most insane productivity demonstration of LLM tech in software.

It obsoleted making Vim macros and multiline editing for example. Now you just make one change and the LLM can derive the rest; you just press tab.

It's interesting that the Cursor team's first iteration is still better than anything I've seen in their competitors. It's been an amazing moat for a year(?) now.
by hmokiguess | 2025-09-24 18:13:08+00:00
Zed was supposed to be the answer to Atom / Sublime Text in my opinion, and I kinda do want to use it as my main driver, but it just isn’t there yet for me. It’s shameful because I like its aesthetics as a product more than the competition out there.

Just this other day I tried using it for something it sort of advertised itself as the superior thing, which was to load this giant text file I had instantly and let me work on it.

I then tried opening this 1GB text file to do a simple find/replace on it only to find macOS run out of system memory with Zed quickly using 20gb of memory for that search operation.

I then switched to vscode, which, granted opened it in a buffered sort of way and limited capability, but got the job done.

Maybe that was a me issue I don’t know, but aside from this one-off, it doesn’t have a good extensions support in the community for my needs yet. I hope it gets there!
by sigilis | 2025-09-24 18:13:13+00:00
The structure of giant corporations today is like those centralized societies that were so inefficient in your example. The mandates to put AI in everything are one example of out of touch leadership throwing money and effort blindly towards things of dubious value. The sycophantic managers, afraid that they will be eliminated for insufficient fervor for the board’s latest fascination, will seize upon anything to prove themselves loyal and useful to those above them.

By moving the locus of control, whether it be considered the ceo or shareholders, so far from the actual business and implementing mandates based on whatever the current fancy is and meaningless targets of growth on such a giant scale you get the same sort of excesses.

The current system is marked by irrationality and uninformed and ill considered decision making. With smaller organizations and actual business competition they would be held to account by their competitors or just by running out of money before something catastrophic for the greater economy happened.
by solatic | 2025-09-24 18:13:58+00:00
Author posits a causal relationship in a zero-sum game that he provides no evidence for. Paraphrasing, that uncontrollable intangibles like technology gave slightly more power to individuals and much more power to large organizations at the expense of small organizations. Since when do these uncontrollable intangibles exhibit a genuine agency of their own? Is there some zero-sum pie of power to be distributed? So if I go into the desert or wilderness, somewhere where there are no individuals, small organizations, or large organizations as of yet; that means it is literally impossible for any of them to come in, develop it, and make it a center of power?

There's a much simpler explanation. Most entities most of the time (with such probabilities increasing with the size and age of the entity) seek to defend and expand their power. The American political tradition held that the blessings of liberty would be granted and prosperity would grow if the power of the largest such entities were kept in check; first and foremost the British Crown, second the newfound American governments (at different levels), and eventually the largest private entities as well. But America abandoned its commitment to that tradition in all but name. America is no longer committed to property rights, free markets, free expression, or free association, such protections exist today only on paper. So every entity makes locally optimal decisions, leading society into a slow collapse.
by Atlas667 | 2025-09-24 18:13:59+00:00
The ad viewer rationale is parallel to advertiser interests and state goals. The media will try to satisfy it's advertisers editorially as well as comply with some state narratives for state favors.

Advertisers have massive leverage over what gets published in the media through pulling and pushing their ad funding.

And "Ex" NSA/CIA/FBI employees work in all branches of communications/media and many in editorial roles like "Foreign Policy Editors/Analysts", "Law Enforcement Analyst" or as consultants for editors.

It's not just "the media" who is destroying the country, it's capitalism and their profit motive.
by vmg12 | 2025-09-24 18:14:13+00:00
> but who decides how those resources are deployed

The current system selects people that have allocated resources effectively in the past by providing them more resources to allocate.

> We've ran high-risk R&D projects successfully before as public projects

And what is stopping countries from doing this today? This isn't an either or thing, public projects can still exist, there is no law of nature saying that massive companies are the sole source of innovations but for some reason people treat it like they are mutually exclusive. You bring up projects from decades ago but are there any modern examples?

Since when has throwing money at systems that haven't shown success worked? And you are suggesting that we take money from others to throw it at a system that doesn't work.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-09-24 18:14:20+00:00
I've found this to be a funny framing on the left because it always ignores what happens when the group stops being outcast. It's always a framing based around the current time and conveniently orients itself around the mores of the current era. Anime and otaku interest groups used to be like this in the '80s and '90s, generally ideologically aligned, creating parallel economies, in response to attack and scorn from the outside. Then it became mainstream. The stigma in liking anime went away. And with it the pressure to organize against the mainstream.

We need to think about durable small organizations, not ones that are based around the social mores of the moment. The magic of a neighborhood group is that as long as people live in an area together there will be neighbors.

FWIW opposition-based interest groups have a long history in pretty much every state we've ever had records of.
by nis0s | 2025-09-24 18:14:25+00:00
What an interesting experiment to see if LLMs make better search engines (they do, more or less). I found Last dragon chronicles by d’Lacey, Dragons eye by Steer, and Dragonfly in Amber by Gabaldon. There are some details about the characters which have the tattoos, but I am not sure how accurate those details are. There’s also Dragons daughter by McLaughlin.
by jermaustin1 | 2025-09-24 18:14:42+00:00
Now that you are saying that, I wonder if HOU to LAX or LAS is better served because it stays south of the Rockies. And since I've almost always been based out of Houston, or when I lived in NYC, flying home to HOU or vacationing in DEN, those flights never had to cross the Rockies.

I bet you are on to something.
by paxys | 2025-09-24 18:14:50+00:00
Facebook Dating isn't a standalone product, so people are likely going remain on the app even after they get into a relationship. The service only exists to funnel young people into the Facebook ecosystem. The dynamic is very different from a regular dating app where once you get somewhat serious with someone even having the app still on your phone will be seen as a massive red flag.

And Facebook itself has been used as a dating/matchmaking service since well before Facebook Dating or Hinge/Bumble etc. were a thing.