MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by forgetfulness | 2025-10-31 14:22:08+00:00
Circular investments were also a compounding factor in the Japanese asset price bubble.

The practice was known as “zaitech”

> zaitech - financial engineering

> In 1984, Japan’s Ministry of Finance permitted companies to operate special accounts for their shareholdings, known as tokkin accounts. These accounts allowed companies to trade securities without paying capital gains tax on their profits.

> At the same time, Japanese companies were allowed to access the Eurobond market in London. Companies issued warrant bonds, a combination of traditional corporate bonds with an option (the “warrant") to purchase shares in the company at a specified price before expiry. Since Japanese shares were rising, the warrants became more valuable, allowing companies to issue bonds with low-interest payments.

> The companies, in turn, placed the money they raised into their tokkin accounts that invested in the stock market. Note the circularity: companies raised money by selling warrants that relied on increasing stock prices, which was used to buy more shares, thus increasing their gains from investing in the stock market.

https://www.capitalmind.in/insights/lost-decades-japan-1980s...
by daft_pink | 2025-10-31 14:23:01+00:00
I’m guessing that pros are just going to pay the adobe subscription rate, since a thousand bucks a year isn’t much when it’s a tool for your work.

Non-pro users are much more likely to seek out another tool.

Honestly, the reason I don’t use adobe products is their 2 user limit. If it were 5 users like microsoft, I would probably pay, but I have vm’s and multiple computers and I’m not paying for two subscriptions for acrobat.

PDF expert is good enough.
by DrScientist | 2025-10-31 14:23:06+00:00
> Pure common sense would tell you that in such a dense urban environment a 2 or 3 to one military to civilian ratio would not be unexpected during the course of a military operation.

So a ratio of 3/1 is fine is it?? I wonder if you can guess what date a ratio of 379/1195 comes from?

Note the ICC warrants aren't one-sided.
by willis936 | 2025-10-31 14:23:21+00:00
Which is like comparing a person on a bike to a leopard.

The numbers I saw would be dramatically higher if sampling in freefall. Methodologies aim to average out those effects. It's easy enough to lie with disingenuous comparisons. It just doesn't make sense that something that needs to spin large rotors at supersonic speeds is more efficient than something that spins much smaller rotors.
by SiempreViernes | 2025-10-31 14:23:22+00:00
As this very news item shows, it's not particularly easy to pass laws either; GDPR took over four years from the commission proposal to a final negotiated text.

We're now at over four years[1] since initial consultations were held and there's still not a formal consensus position in the council and the encryption bypass is explicitly excluded in the Parliament's draft, so it's not like we're particularly close to a law being enacted.

Basically the asymmetry you are describing is pretty exaggerated

[1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/PIN/?uri=CELEX:52...
by darkwater | 2025-10-31 14:24:17+00:00
Being exact doesn't mean it is not an approximation, which was the initial topic. Being exact in science means that 2+2=4 and that can be demonstrated following a logical chain. But that doesn't make our knowledge of the universe exact. It is still an approximation. What it can be "exact" is how we obtain and reproduce the current knowledge we have of it.
by ssivark | 2025-10-31 14:24:34+00:00
Do check out the links in my original comment above, which explain that the whole motivation behind all this (of which lenses are just a small part) is modularity. Modularity and composability are two sides of the same coin---being able to construct a complex whole by combining simple parts---depending on whether you view it top-down or bottom-up.

Suppose you refactor a field `T.e.a.d` to `T.e.b.d`, for whatever reasons. How many places in your codebase will you have to edit, to complete this change?

Dot access exposes to the outside world the implementation details of where `d` lives, while lenses allow you to abstract that as yet another function application (of a "deep-getter" function) so your code becomes extremely modular and flexible. A good language implementation then hopefully allows you to use this abstraction/indirection without a significant performance penalty.
by zemvpferreira | 2025-10-31 14:25:09+00:00
There’s one key difference in my opinion: pre-.com deals were buying revenue with equity and nothing else. It was growth for growth’s sake. All that scale delivered mostly nothing.

OpenAI applies the same strategy, but they’re using their equity to buy compute that is critical to improving their core technology. It’s circular, but more like a flywheel and less like a merry-go-round. I have some faith it could go another way.
by ralfd | 2025-10-31 14:25:23+00:00
> In his lecture, Sapolsky alleges that Patterson spontaneously corrects Koko’s signs: “She would ask, ‘Koko, what do you call this thing?’ and [Koko] would come up with a completely wrong sign, and Patterson would say, ‘Oh, stop kidding around!’ And then Patterson would show her the next one, and Koko would get it wrong, and Patterson would say, ‘Oh, you funny gorilla.’ ”

More weirdly was this lawsuit against Patterson:

> The lawsuit alleged that in response to signing from Koko, Patterson pressured Keller and Alperin (two of the female staff) to flash the ape. "Oh, yes, Koko, Nancy has nipples. Nancy can show you her nipples," Patterson reportedly said on one occasion. And on another: "Koko, you see my nipples all the time. You are probably bored with my nipples. You need to see new nipples. I will turn my back so Kendra can show you her nipples."[47] Shortly thereafter, a third woman filed suit, alleging that upon being first introduced to Koko, Patterson told her that Koko was communicating that she wanted to see the woman's nipples

There was a bonobo named Kanzi who learned hundreds of lexigrams. The main criticism here seems to be that while Kanzi truly did know the symbol for “Strawberry” he “used the symbol for “strawberry” as the name for the object, as a request to go where the strawberries are, as a request to eat some strawberries”. So no object-verb sentences and so no grammar which means no true language according to linguists.

https://linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/kanzi/
by pjmlp | 2025-10-31 14:25:31+00:00
Instead of ranting, you should have realized that is the default output without configuration file, which isn't that easily to provide in compiler explorer, without going through the trouble of a project template.

Naturally on a real project there would be an heavily customised static analysis tool, that would only allow a build to succeed with the feedback from the SecDevOps team, alongside feedback loop from pentesters.

We have seen how far just _use_ the program has been a thing tracking down C security issues for the last 37 years, starting with Morris Worm.

And to quote Dennis Ritchie,

> To encourage people to pay more attention to the official language rules, to detect legal but suspicious constructions, and to help find interface mismatches undetectable with simple mechanisms for separate compilation, Steve Johnson adapted his pcc compiler to produce lint [Johnson 79b], which scanned a set of files and remarked on dubious constructions.

-- https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/chist...
by KaiserPro | 2025-10-31 14:25:50+00:00
Modern finance is all about debt.

Central banks don't print money[1] but investment banks do. Think about it like this: Someone deposits $100. The bank pays interest, to make money on to pay that interest, ~$90 is loaned out to someone.

Now, I still have a bank slip that says $100 in the account, and the bank has given $90 of that to someone else. We now have $190 in the economy! The catch is, that money needs to be paid back, so when people need to call in that cash, suddenly the economy only has $10, because the loan needed to be paid back, causing a cash vacuum.

But that paying back is also where the profit is, because you sell off the loan book, and you can get all your money back, including future interest. So you have lent out $90, sold the right to collect the repayments to someone else as a bond, so you now have $120, a profit of $30

That $30 comes pretty much from nowhere. (there are caveats....)

Now we have my bank account, after say a year with $104 in it, the bank has $26 pure profit AND someone has a bond "worth" $90 which pays $8 a year. but guess what, that bond is also a store of value. So even though its debt, it acts as money/value/whatever.

Now, the numbers are made up, so are the percentages. but the broad thrust is there.

[1] they do
by NBJack | 2025-10-31 14:26:12+00:00
Read up a bit on the effort needed to get a fab going, and the yield rates. While engineers are crucial in the setup, the fab itself is not as 'fungible' as the employees involved.

I can spin up a strong ML team through hiring in probably 6-12 months with the right funding. Building a chip fab and getting it to a sensible yield would take 3-5 years, significantly more funding, strong supply lines, etc.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-10-31 14:27:13+00:00
Ed Zitron has been shouting into the void about this for quite some time: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/

He also has a podcast called Better Offline, which is slightly too ad heavy for my taste. Nevertheless, with my meagre understanding of the large corporate finances I was not able to find any errors in his core argument regardless of his somewhat sensationalist style of writing.
by srmatto | 2025-10-31 14:27:13+00:00
As of right now it seems like if you have the old V2 apps installed they can still be (re)activated with your old Serif/Affinity license that is tied to an email. I was able to just do that with Designer v2. I also seem to be able to re-down them through the Apple App Store and they work fine. You do get a prompt "Would you like to keep your app linked to your Affinity Store account? This allows you to automatically stream any free or purchased content you have directly to your app." But its unclear to me what that means at the moment given that Canva has changed the licensing model.
by rockostrich | 2025-10-31 14:27:16+00:00
Do you live in NYC or SF? I just did a quick scan of prices before taxes for different high cost of living areas and those are the 2 that are above $10.

They list the chicken serving as 32g of protein, 8 comes from the tortilla, 4 come from rice, and 8 come from beans. You can get another 10 or so from cheese, corn, etc. which are all no extra charge. In my experience, they don't really skip on portions. I usually get a burrito with chicken, brown rice, fajitas, a couple of the salsas, corn, and lettuce and the thing cannot be rolled.

If you have a better option locally then that's great. A lot of people don't.
by mlyle | 2025-10-31 14:27:26+00:00
You've never had the experience of having a somewhat challenging / unusual request result in an agent abruptly dropping the call?

They can figure out pretty quickly that A) it's going to be hard to help you, and B) you're going to suck a lot of their time, and C) their poor luck of getting your call is going to make them look worse to their management.

I had a sequence of this happening three times with a utility. Unfortunately, it's the fourth agent who actually helped me that got yelled at, at no fault of her own. But I was pretty pissed at that point.
by sho | 2025-10-31 14:27:32+00:00
5 hours in and I'm pretty disappointed in Anthropic's response to this. Looking at their status page you'd think everything was OK, the downtime was only 37 minutes, a fix is in place and they're "monitoring" - that's total BS. I can't even log in. I can forgive downtime, we've all been there, but I really don't like when companies try to smooth it over with little self-serving minimizations of the disruption.. while it's still in progress!

I use Claude Code for programming work, but I choose OpenAI anywhere customer-facing and this cute little outage is making me feel better about that with every passing minute. NOT cool.
by al_borland | 2025-10-31 14:27:58+00:00
The future roadmap we thought we had seems to have gone away. I won’t be using the “free” version, as there are unknown strings attached I’m sure. If not now, down the road.

Yes, I can keep using v2, but how much do I want to invest in an app that I know has an expiration date for me? I need to start planning my exit, so I’m not left in a bad spot down the road.

I’m curious what Apple plans to do with Pixelmator. They bought it a while back. I was a Pixelmator user, but switched to Affinity. Now I’m not sure what to do.

I’m lucky though, as I’m just a hobbyist, so it’s not as serious as it is for some who have professional workflows who need to look at finding something that will still allow them to do their job.
by ajross | 2025-10-31 14:28:06+00:00
> In the cases we're interested in here the variable does vary, what it doesn't do is mutate.

Those are synonyms, and this amounts to a retcon. The computer science term "variable" comes directly from standard mathematical function notation, where a variable reflects a quantity being related by the function to other variables. It absolutely is expected to "change", if not across "time" than across the domain of the function being expressed. Computers are discrete devices and a variable that "varies" across its domain inherently implies that it's going to be computed more than once. The sense Carmack is using, where it is not recomputed and just amounts to a shorthand for a longer expression, is a poor fit.

I do think this is sort of a wart in terminology, and the upthread post is basically right that we've been using this wrong for years.

If I ever decide to inflict a static language on the masses, the declaration keywords will be "def" (to define a constant expression) and "var" (to define a mutable/variable quantity). Maybe there's value in distinguishing a "var" declaration from a "mut" reference and so maybe those should have separate syntaxes.
by skydhash | 2025-10-31 14:28:16+00:00
We could do this. And if you take a look at some solutions like the old VisualBasic/Delphi/Unix scripts, the philosophy is the same: Create small software quickly that solves some user/business needs. Systems like Java/.Net and their IDEs, as all as current mobile SDK, they run against that need.

A bit of tangent: I think the idea of coddling users is what’s leading to the complexity of all those system. We’re building cathedrals when we need tents. Instead of having small, sharp software tools that can be adjusted easily, we’re developing behemoths that’s supposed to handle everything under the sun (systemd, a lot of modern package managers, languages that is tied to that one IDE,…)
by tonyarkles | 2025-10-31 14:28:19+00:00
First-order: because of the capex and lead times. If you grab a bunch of world-class ML folks and put them in a room together, they're going to be able to start producing world-class work together. If you grab a bunch of world-class chip designers in the same scenario but don't have world-class fabs for them to use, they're not going to be able to ship competitive designs.
by throwway120385 | 2025-10-31 14:28:50+00:00
I think what they're getting at is that they sometimes use composition of functions in places where other people might call the underlying functions as one procedure and have intermediate results.

At the end of the day, you're all saying different ways of keeping track of the intermediate results. Composition just has you drop the intermediate results when they're no longer relevant. And you can decompose if you want the intermediates.
by lproven | 2025-10-31 14:28:59+00:00
> The code browser in Eclipse

> https://i.sstatic.net/4OFEM.png

«

Error 1011 Ray ID: 9973d6cc1badc66a • 2025-10-31 14:28:28 UTC

Access denied

What happened?

The owner of this website (i.sstatic.net) does not allow hotlinking to that resource (/4OFEM.png).

»
by bob1029 | 2025-10-31 14:29:51+00:00
One person can implement a transformer model from scratch in a weekend. Hardware is not the valuable part of machine learning. Data and how it is used are.

The "magic of AI" doesn't live inside an Nvidia GPU. There are billions of dollars of marketing being deployed to convince you it does. As soon as the market realizes that nvidia != magic AI box, the music should stop pretty quickly.
by klustregrif | 2025-10-31 14:29:53+00:00
The increase in value of the companies outweighs the transactional costs and then you borrow against the value of the company and make new circular deals. It works really well for a very long time and then at some point it doesn’t. The trick of the game is to get big corps involved and key decision makers so that the government bails out everyone in the end.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-10-31 14:30:14+00:00
Yeah, sure, remind me what were Qualcomm results last year. 10 billions?

But, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't spit on McDonalds 6 billions either and the soybean market is one of the fastest growing in the agrifood business, with huge volume traded, probably one of the most profitable commodity at the moment.
by crazygringo | 2025-10-31 14:30:20+00:00
Microsoft isn't selling any stock. It's using its cash.

And an increase in revenue isn't the point. Microsoft isn't doing this to try to bump its short-term stock price or anything -- investors know where revenue is coming from. Microsoft is doing it because it thinks OpenAI is a good investment and wants to make money with that investment and have greater control.
by acdha | 2025-10-31 14:30:43+00:00
I think you could construct a stronger version of this complaint as FP languages not prioritizing usability enough. C was never seen as a great language but it was relatively simple to learn to the point that you could have running code doing something you needed without getting hit with a ton of theory first. That code would probably be unsafe in some way but the first impression of “I made a machine do something useful!” carries a lot of weight and anyone not starting with an academic CS background would get that rush faster with most mainstream languages.
by ryandrake | 2025-10-31 14:30:49+00:00
> To me the freedom I'm referring to is similar to that of childhood - where you're not worried/concerned about "the system". You're just doing your own thing in your own world. That kind of purity no amount of money can resolve, even in an early retirement scenario.

The only ways you can live as an adult unconcerned about the system is 1. if you actually have a substantial financial backstop (trust fund, wealthy parents, etc.) and just pretend you don't, or 2. if you don't have a financial backstop, at which point "doing your own thing in the world" just means being a vagrant, drifter or bum.
by belter | 2025-10-31 14:30:52+00:00
> Everything seems to indicate that once the models are trained, they are extremely profitable

Some data would reinforce your case. Do you have it?

Here is my data point: "You Have No Idea How Screwed OpenAI Actually Is" - https://wlockett.medium.com/you-have-no-idea-how-screwed-ope...
by catlikesshrimp | 2025-10-31 14:30:53+00:00
I was thinking new devices having to pass tests in the spirit of the electromagnetic interference tests for certification. Except models having to pass the tests yearly / quarterly / any time period. Such expenses would be covered by the manufacturer during the official life of the device offered by the manufacturer.

I understand your point. What you describe is happening in Australia. Hopefully any law targetting botnets and any other in the future has a clause forbidding this behavior of banning provider not approved devices when they are technically compatible.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-10-31 14:31:27+00:00
Ultimately free software isn't beholden to its users, as they aren't paying customers.

Free and open source developers are free to build whatever the heck software they want on the basis of "I find this software neat/useful/funny, you can use it too if you'd like".

The way it works is you grab the sources, make a fork, implement your desired changes (e.g. hide 80% of the features), and do a release that is in line with your own vision. "But that's a lot of work" someone might say, ... and yet people routinely think someone else should do such volumes of work for them in order to ensure a project is in line with their needs.
by nakamoto_damacy | 2025-10-31 14:31:53+00:00
no, we use atomic clocks now... j/k

piezoelectric refers to generation of electricity from pressure applied to the material... the inverse of that effect is what generates oscillation.. quartz has a natural resonant frequency determined by its shape, size, and the way it’s cut, and when you apply AC it oscillates at a specific frequency.. the applied electricity causes is the material to deform.. that is the basic physical effect used in oscillators

MEMS oscillators are increasingly replacing quartz in compact, rugged, or integrated designs.

PLL-based frequency synthesis is used to scale a low-frequency reference (e.g., 25 MHz crystal) up to CPU/GPU GHz speeds.
by rockostrich | 2025-10-31 14:31:57+00:00
I wouldn't really call it ripping me off if that's what they need to set their prices at in order to survive. NJ is an expensive state so it's not really surprising. I was just using a couple of the closest places to me in the suburbs as an example. If I were to go into a city like New Brunswick which has a large hispanic population and a ton of local places then there are definitely spots with cheaper options but there are still a ton that are more expensive than Chipotle.
by abc3 | 2025-10-31 14:32:04+00:00
> There's an awful lot of negativity here, but as someone who's 55 and has earned a good wage since I was 17, I really wish I had taken investing more seriously from the very beginning. While I knew of compound interest, I really didn't understand it until like a decade ago. If I'd started putting 5% of my money into a target retirement plan from 17, I'd be retired now. As it is I'm not doing badly, but I really wish I'd started earlier.

I'm 55, too. If I'd started studying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, and Rust at 17, I'd be retired now. Waitaminnit....

Sarcasm aside, target retirement plans wouldn't come along for decades. Investing was very, very different when we were 17. And many of the people who were 55 when we were 17 had just lost a terrifying amount of their life's savings in a stock market crash that made Taleb rich because he'd bet against the market.

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that a 17-year-old today should do exactly what we wish we could have done when we were 17. About the best they can do is follow advice that's now centuries old: make friends, learn skills, live below their means, and, maybe, earn credentials.
by Eisenstein | 2025-10-31 14:32:09+00:00
The bubble part is that nvidia is getting revenue from people investing money in their hardware in order to sell something that has not yet been shown to be profitable. If it turns out no one can make enough money selling AI generated data to justify the costs spent on the compute needed to generate it at the current rate, then what nvidia are selling becomes much less valuable, and the whole thing collapses. We haven't figured out yet whether or not that will be the case.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-10-31 14:32:30+00:00
It was written in the early 80s on a mechanical typewriter, and released only a very few months after the first Apple Macintosh. Modems were insanely expensive back then and not many people had them.

So much of the things in the book that we think of as familiar didn't even really exist when Johnny Mnemonic was written in 1981, again on a mechanical typewriter.