MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by robertjpayne | 2025-10-03 00:12:37+00:00
This right here. AI has no moat and none of these companies has a product that isn't easily replaced by another provider.

Unless one of these companies really produces a leapfrog product or model that can't be replicated within a short timeframe I don't see how this changes.

Most of OpenAI's users are freeloaders and if they turn off the free plan they're just going to divert those users to Google.
by yibg | 2025-10-03 00:13:14+00:00
To be honest, I don't think things would be much different. If Hamas took only military personnel hostage, the IDF would still be bombing Gaza and demanding they be returned.

When Gilad Shalit was taken hostage Operation Summer Rains followed. That was one soldier. You really think if Hamas took hundreds of soldiers hostage, they wouldn't go bomb Gaza?
by k310 | 2025-10-03 00:13:18+00:00
It’s not just Thiel. There’s a whole subculture attached to such notions, and to “superiority of the tech lords” (my phrase)

Here is more on the antichrist matter (or non-matter) [3]

And the ultra-libertarians around it.

Curtis Yarvin is so well known now, especially in the bay area, that there are already jokes and comedy routines (cant find the references right now) about “parties with Yarvin” and people impersonating him to draw attention.

'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook’ [0]

Silicon Valley Whistleblowers Warn Elon Musk 'Hijacking' Republicans to Control Entire US Government [1]

Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right [2]

[0] https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...

[1] https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/07/silicon-valley-whistleblo...

[2] https://archive.ph/6xtwN. (FT)

[3] https://www.christianpost.com/news/palantir-ceo-peter-thiel-...
by belval | 2025-10-03 00:13:22+00:00
> it's insane that these companies aren't just training up more internally

Adding headcount to a fast growing company *to lower wages* is a sure way to kill your culture, lower the overall quality bar and increase communication overheads significantly.

Yes they are paying a lot of their employees and the pool will grow, but adding bodies to a team that is running well in hopes that it will automatically lead to a bump in productivity is the part that is insane. It never works.

What will happen is a completely new team (team B) will be formed and given ownership of a component that was previously owned by team A under the guise of "we will just agree on interfaces". Team B will start doing their thing and meeting with Team A representative regularly but integration issues will still arise, except that instead of a tight core of 10-20 developers, you now have 40. They will add a ticketing to track change better, now issues in Team's B service, which could have been addressed in an hour by the right engineer on team A, will take 3 days to get resolved as ticket get triaged/prioritized. Lo and behold, Team C as now appeared and will be owning a sub-component of Team B. Now when Team A has issue with Team B's service, they cut a ticket, but the oncall on Team B investigates and finds that it's actually an issue with Team C's service, they cut their own ticket.

Suddenly every little issue takes days and weeks to get resolved because the original core of 10-20 developers is no longer empowered to just move fast. They eventually leave because they feel like their impact and influence has diminished (Team C's manager is very good at politics), Team A is hollowed out and you now have wall-to-wall mediocrity with 120 headcounts and nothing is ever anyone's fault.

I had a director that always repeated that communication between N people is inherently N² and thus hiring should always weight in that the candidate being "good" is not enough, they have to pull their weight and make up for the communication overhead that they add to the team.
by epolanski | 2025-10-03 00:14:40+00:00
If you don't see the evidence of different individuals having very different productivity in every field, including software, (measured in $/hr like every economist does btw) that's a you problem.

Of course different scientists with different backgrounds, professionalism, communication and leadership skills are going to have magnitude of orders different outputs and impacts in AI companies.

If you put me and Carmack in a game development team you can rest assured that he's going to have a 50/100x impact over me, not sure why would I even question it.

Not only his output will be vastly superior than mine, but his design choices, leadership and experience will save and compound infinite amounts of money and time. That's beyond obvious.
by stingraycharles | 2025-10-03 00:14:51+00:00
This has plagued Google internally for decades. I’m reminder of Steve Yegge’s Google rant [1] from 14 years ago, and ChatGPT is evidence that they still haven’t fixed it.

It’s amazing how pervasive company cultures can be, and how this comes from the top, and can only be fixed with replacing leadership with an extremely talented CEO that knows the company inside out and can change its course. Nadella from Microsoft comes to mind, although that was more about Microsoft going back to its roots (replace sales oriented leadership with product oriented leadership again).

Google never had product oriented leadership in the same way that Amazon, Apple and Microsoft had.

I don’t think this will ever change at this point.

For those who haven’t read it, Steve Yegge’s rant about Google is worth your time:

1 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-03 00:15:09+00:00
> once the war in Gaza ends, everyone will all too be happy to forget that it even happened. Even if they won’t say it out loud.

It may have a lasting effect in America. Which would mean Israel finding friends in Russia, China and/or India, the latter two which would probably be fully on board with an actual ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
by djtriptych | 2025-10-03 00:15:12+00:00
ok but also two drones crashing isn't "more" of a problem than one drone crashing really.

Sounds like the anamoly here was a very unsafe landing zone (which is outside the customer agreement as it happens).

small steel cables take out human pilots too..

Would be really curious how they might guard against adversarial drone deliveries. Kinda weird to have end users basically piloting your $100K (I'm guessing) vehicles.
by the_lucifer | 2025-10-03 00:15:31+00:00
Apologies, didn't check HN for a while. I recommend it if you can get it around ~500-ish USD. I paid $750 (for the body) + $150 (for a 23mmF2 lens) in Jul 2024 used with a bunch of accessories including 4 batteries.

The biggest annoyance I've found is the horrendous battery life on the X-T3. For a long day outside on a trip, I end up going through at least 3 batteries.

The XT-4 is identical to the X-T3 (well, more so than any other x-tn -> x-t(n+1) camera) but fixes a few of the flaws in the X-T3 with massively improved battery life + IBIS which I'd recommend just because a lot of acclaimed lenses these days forgo OIS (ref: many Sigmas for instance), which could be worth it over the long term.

If you are very price sensitive then the X-T3 is still a really good purchase, with nifty features like dual SD slots which make it great to have backups/RAW+JPEG on two cards. Compared to an average photo from a phone, there just isn't much computationally going on in mirrorless cameras so even an x-t1 would be a good purchase.

If you want to shoot photos for the experience rather than getting clinically perfect images, and do not want absolute performance wrt focusing etc., it's definitely at the top IMO; analog with every control having a dedicated physical control (ISO, Shutter Speed and Exposure Compensation and aperture on Fuji lenses). I love it because it's the equivalent of driving an air-cooled Porsche, warts and all.
by danbolt | 2025-10-03 00:16:01+00:00
I promise I’m not that whiggish when it comes to automation, but there was a time when a good portion of human labour was washing clothing, and now that’s become much less of a thing for much of the world.

Perhaps food service and in-person retail will start to go that way too. It’s my hope we can navigate that and still make a place where it won’t be so bad.
by emmelaich | 2025-10-03 00:16:04+00:00
Here's a curious thing I found when visiting government officials in Fiji a while back.

They all wrote the fancy 'g' rather than the simplified 'g' we use now. I assume they copied text from textbooks rather than (say) from teachers from England.

As a real young'un I used to attempt to do the same as an exercise but it's not easy to make it look good.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-10-03 00:16:39+00:00
I can see why you'd make that analogy, but that wasn't quite what I was trying to say. I just meant that not all expenses are created equal.

Plenty of companies have high burn rates due to high R&D costs. It can make them look unprofitable on paper, but it's a tactic used to scale quicker, get economies of scale, higher leverage in negotiating, etc. It's not a requirement that they invest in R&D indefinitely. In contrast, if a company is paying a heavy amount of interest on loans (think: WeWork), it's not nearly as practical for them to cut away at their spending to find profitability.
by Atheros | 2025-10-03 00:17:07+00:00
The discover and fix phase is over. In August 2025, the FAA announced Part 108 which codifies the rules. Up until now, companies have been operating under waivers. The comment period for Part 108 ends on October 6th. After that the rules may be changed slightly and then will be finalized.

https://www.regulations.gov/document/FAA-2025-1908-0023

You can select a few comments at random and quickly find a pattern: people are concerned that the drones everywhere except in the densest of areas do not have to see where they are going. If they hit a manned aircraft it's the manned aircraft's fault and the drone operator has no legal liability. Does that sound like something FAA employees wrote themselves? How much motivation will be there to "iteratively refine" when they have no legal liability and even admitting that a possible improvement exists would create legal liability?
by frank_nitti | 2025-10-03 00:17:14+00:00
Yes

https://youtube.com/shorts/nNfDr18C6H4?si=CKalCaG0DMUP3rZZ

This and my original comment apparently struck a nerve for some people, but I’m just sharing what I observe from the links I’ve included. I’d love to see some actual response to the content of these videos given Kirk’s apparent change of heart on Israel (especially if I’m off-base) as opposed to just downvotes with substance-free responses
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-03 00:18:05+00:00
>In USSR they actually recognized gifted students and placed them into specialized classes and schools where they would thrive. They treated it as a matter of national security.

I remember decades ago my undergrad statistics teacher pulling up some data on collegiate club (like chess and poker, not like ultimate frisbee) winnings in competition.

I forget what the point of the lecture was, something about data distribution types, but the takeaway was that Miami Dade Community college consistently punched above its weight class since it educated a population that was on average subject to more USSR style "identify those gifted in a niche and develop their skills" than the baseline.

That said, there's a reason those people were attending community college in Miami...

>an engineer or a scientist would earn not much more than a blue collar worker.

The blue collar trades were preferred because you had more opportunities to get stuff to barter, better still if your job involved going out and about and doing things, you could meet many people to transact with.
by al_borland | 2025-10-03 00:18:18+00:00
We’re searching Mars for signs of water, life (or past life), and other things that would signal to be more habitable.

The Moon would be similar to the space station, needing to be continuously supplied from Earth. The goal for colonization should be that it could become self-sustaining at some point.

The US also went to the Moon before Mars.
by jameshilliard | 2025-10-03 00:19:09+00:00
> How could one cause a famine accidentally, without intent to murder civilians?

There isn't credible evidence of a famine in Gaza. I'm not saying things are great(it is a war zone after all), but they certainly haven't gotten that bad. Look at pictures of Palestinians on the street in Gaza and compare them to pictures of people in countries where there is actual famine, they look nothing alike.
by all2 | 2025-10-03 00:20:33+00:00
I haven't looked into 'formal' verification methods for FSMs, so I did some light googling. I found this guy [0] which gives an overview of potential methods.

I'll have to think about testing methods more. There are a few things I would want to know about a single FSM: does it exit (various exit states, either error final state or valid final state), are there unreachable states, does it loop in places it shouldn't, does it enter states it shouldn't for a given stimuli (Events + Guards are the params for this test). I think there's also a place for event fuzzing to try and break the machine.

[0] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/verification-testing-fsms-too...
by godelski | 2025-10-03 00:21:48+00:00
Maybe maybe not. I think it is a useful feature for power users. The question is if targeting power users will help mass appeal. I'd argue with an app like Signal, yes it would. The power users are effectively their evangelists. APIs could enable a lot of features that people are asking for like location sharing, bots (e.g. on your IOT devices), and so on. The concern is more that introducing those things creates security risks but I think that's okay. Put a "developer mode" type switch like in Android.

But there are also other things I'd like to see.

For mass appeal I'd like to see them integrating Signal Stickers[0] into the app so people can search stickers. This has been a surprisingly common complaint among people I've converted over.

For both groups I'd love to see something like this feature request[1] I like that it could serve as the backbone of a mesh network and AirDrop is a incredibly popular. Would be super cool if you could hold a copy of the APK on your phone and drop it over to others to install that way. I imagine even a rudimentary mesh network could really reduce server loads. My GF and I often sync pictures to each other this way. No reason that needs to go over the network when we're sitting 5 feet from one another.

For power users I'd love to see a nuking capability. Bidirectional. I want to know that if I am at a protest or something and get picked up by the Gestapo that either I or a trusted friend can wipe my phone. It's not a cure all, but it greatly reduces the chances of "incriminating" evidence being found on my device. But such a feature seems quite unpopular on their forums (I am very much not a fan of their forums and the community there...)

[0] https://signalstickers.org/

[1] https://community.signalusers.org/t/signal-airdrop
by obiefernandez | 2025-10-03 00:22:32+00:00
my biggest TIL takeaway from that article was an "oh wow" moment:

The other sound that ‘ȝ’ once spelled is the “harsh” or “guttural” sound made in the back of the mouth, which you hear in Scots loch or German Bach.4 This sound is actually the reason for the most famous bit of English spelling chaos: the sometimes-silent, sometimes-not sequence ‘gh’ that you see in laugh, cough, night, and daughter. Maybe one day I’ll tell you that story too.
by bee_rider | 2025-10-03 00:22:59+00:00
The past/present company they remind me of the most is semiconductor fabs. Significant generation-to-generation R&D investment, significant hardware and infrastructure investment, quite winner-takes-all on the high end, obsoleted in a couple years at most.

The main differences are these models are early in their development curve so the jumps are much bigger, and they are entirely digital so they get “shipped” much faster, and open weights seem to be possible. None of those factors seem to make it a more attractive business to be in.
by brewdad | 2025-10-03 00:23:14+00:00
I hate the AppleTV thing for baseball. I pay for the MLB.TV package yet those games aren't included unless I also buy an AppleTV subscription.

College football is going the same way with ESPN and FOX properties on cable/streaming but also needing Peacock, Paramount+ and I think AppleTV next season.

For MLS the deal has been pretty good I think. Mainly because everything is all in one place.
by cosmic_quanta | 2025-10-03 00:24:42+00:00
Babel sounds awesome, I should give it a try.

I've been using Pandoc for my static site, which I also used for my PhD thesis. I wrote pandoc-plot[0] to render figures in documents like the author does, inspired by Matplotlib's plot-directive[1]. I feel like this feature is a must for technical writing, but getting the details right is tricky!

[0]: https://github.com/LaurentRDC/pandoc-plot

[1]: https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/sphinxext_plot_directive_a...
by jameshilliard | 2025-10-03 00:24:45+00:00
> But now, dear reader, just do as instructed and visit the links [0] and [1]. The comic imagery is not antisemitic. But a claim here to the contrary, and the fact that we don't have infinite time to check claims, might have fooled you, as it very nearly fooled me. Fortunately, I clicked and read by myself.

I posted the link because it's incredibly obvious that these are variations of classic antisemetic tropes, I'm really not sure how one could argue otherwise.
by flyinglizard | 2025-10-03 00:25:39+00:00
We can talk endlessly about strategy and long term implications (for example, the destruction of the Iranian "ring of fire" network of proxies, the permanent changes in Syria and Lebanon, etc), but consider something much more basic: Israelis around Gaza can finally live securely. There are no rockets coming from Gaza, no mortars, no chance of another October 7th or smaller incursions as long as the Israeli military is there. Israelis have peace. No Gazan rocket can disturb the life in Tel Aviv or Ashdod.

This couldn't and shouldn't have been a re-run of the countless previous clashes with Hamas. Israel needed to go all out to change the security situation, permanently.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-10-03 00:25:44+00:00
> Based on logical (to me) probabilities , both sides would be doing "Bad things”

This doesn’t make sense from a Bayesian perspective. Israel’s war capacity far outstrips anything Hamas can field by orders of magnitude in every metric.

Assigning the uninformative prior here requires a degree of ignorance that is not credible.
by flexagoon | 2025-10-03 00:27:17+00:00
You can set up any static site generator (like Astro or Hugo) with a pre-made blog template. Then you'll just have to write posts in markdown files and the generator will handle the rest.

(Or you can write a custom template in any of those, they both don't add any JS or anything else to your page by default unless you explicitly add it. I like Astro more since it's basically just HTML with extra features unlike Hugo which uses a separate templating language, but they're all pretty much the same)

You can deploy it automatically and completely for free on platforms like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages, which are pretty easy to set up and will automatically build and deploy new versions of your site on every git push.
by cozzyd | 2025-10-03 00:28:04+00:00
Residential buildings usually have operable windows (and often balconies). My condo building is only 17 stories tall, but my windows open all the way. On the other hand, it's an old building and there might be new rules for new buildings, since for those I usually only see the windows open a little.

Still it would be silly to deliver through the window. The rooftop might make more sense (can just drop off package and not accessible to random people on the street).
by tguvot | 2025-10-03 00:28:11+00:00
iirc, gaza farms and fishing provided less than 10% of calories to population. animal farms were dependent upon imported animal feed.

ps. good chunk of farms were actually not for gaza consumption but for export (to israel and other places). stuff like strawberries, some leafy greens, etc. but in general farming in region is hard. there is no water. droughts been severe. Israel survives by desalinating majority (80%) of potable water (and supplying it to jordan, west bank, gaza) and recycling 90% of waste water for use in agriculture.
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-10-03 00:28:59+00:00
I think it is reasonable to expect that a game that is called ”Autism Simulator” is likely neither going to a) be easy b) very enjoyable c) make much sense. You could also complain similarly about the game called ”Paying Hospital Bills Without Money” being unfair or that ”Terminal Cancer Ward” -game is impossible to beat. Hell, why not complain that Josef K in Kafka’s trial is quite unfairly treated? I think it is fairly reasonable to expect the player to manage their expectations and consider the game more as an art piece. Otherwise you miss the point completely.
by margalabargala | 2025-10-03 00:29:34+00:00
Potentially.

The main ingredient in Hamas' rocket fuel is sugar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_candy

That would be an acceptable justification for confiscating sugar. If Hamas were making rocket fuel somehow out of baby formula, then yes, that would be an acceptable justification.

That said baby formula cannot in fact be meaningfully used to make explosives, so this is not acceptable.
by bcrl | 2025-10-03 00:29:46+00:00
This! The cost of training models inevitably goes down over time as FLOPS/$ and PB/$ increases relentlessly thanks to the exponential gains of Moore's law. Eventually we will end up with laptops and phones being Good Enough to run models locally. Once that happens, any competitor in the space that decides to actively support running locally will have operating costs that are a mere fraction of OpenAI's current business.

The pop of this bubble is going to be painful for a lot of people. Being too early to a market is just as bad as being too late, especially for something that can become a commodity due to a lack of moat.
by SilverElfin | 2025-10-03 00:30:41+00:00
How are they Judeo-supremacist? Israel peacefully lets Islamic Arabs to live and practice their life - a whole 20% of their population. On the other hand, Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, literally talks about their Islamic supremacist goals in their charter. It’s not even something they’re afraid of admitting or think needs to be hidden.
by defrost | 2025-10-03 00:30:43+00:00
In context, of course pro Zionist leaders such as David Ben-Gurion were strongly in favour of a plan that saw a two-thirds majority Arab population pushed back into 43% of the territory, at the time such leaders were advocating acceptance of that plan as their ideal stepping stone to to future territorial expansion over all of Palestine.

Naturally the opposing Arab leaders were against a plan that saw a majority population receive less land, a plan that was being put forward by people openly stating it was a first step to total control of everything.

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Partition_Plan_...

It's a shame a better deal could not have been struck for the benefit of all the people with a millennium plus history in the Levant, of all faiths.