MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vlovich123 | 2025-11-26 16:11:18+00:00
Interesting - that’s a 1T market just in the US alone. Probably another 1T in EU. It’s unclear how much there is in the rest of the world (China is basically inaccessible to US firms and after that it’ll depend on low wage local labor vs AI models).

There’s also models getting more capable (larger share of the GDP) and GDP growing more quickly due to automation of GDP activities. But even without that it’s at least a 2T/year opportunity (assuming the model is even a little accurate).

To me this validates the bull case that is being raised in private equity. The major risks are not if the market or valuations exist but whether it’ll be captured by a few major players or if open models and local inference eat away at centralization.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-11-26 16:11:39+00:00
I think the margin isn't that large to be honest. If we compare available resources and data it is quite tiny and perhaps should be larger.

Also it doesn't feel solved to me at all. There is no general model, perhaps it cannot reasonably exist. I think these tests are benchmarks are smart, but they don't show the whole picture.

Domain specific image generation tasks still require a domain specific models. For art purposes SD1.5 with specialized and finely tuned checkpoints will still provide the best results by far. It is also limited, but I think it dampened the hype for new image generators significantly.
by satisfice | 2025-11-26 16:11:39+00:00
Except testers are needed. Testing is not merely a technical role. It's a social role. It's a commitment to think differently from the rest of the team. We do this because that provides insurance against complacency.

But, by the nature of testing, we testers are outsiders. No one is fully comfortable with a tester in the room, unless they are more afraid of failure than irritation.
by byko3y | 2025-11-26 16:11:55+00:00
>Rust turns unknown failures in C and C++ into known failures and suddenly the C/C++ people start caring about the failures

I'm actually the one who promotes paranoidal assert-s everywhere. I do agree the original statement from the article is ambiguous, probably should have written something like "memory safety in Rust does not increase reliability".

>The pacemaker argument is complete nonsense, because the pacemaker must keep working even if it crashes. You can forcibly induce crashes into the pacemaker during testing and engineer it to restart fast enough that it hits its timing deadline anyway.

I'm not sure whether there is a deadlock-free modification of Rust — deadlock is not considered an undefined behavior in Rust.
by WorldMaker | 2025-11-26 16:12:23+00:00
Directly related to which is the tech debt that accumulates just by using Access files in a shared folder. Access wasn't intended to work that way. It is documented in many places in Access' manuals to never do that. But it works and most versions of Access don't warn you when they detect you are using a shared folder, so most Access users don't question it.

But I have seen the maintenance burden first hand of solving weird Access lock file problems (if I never have to manually find and delete an .LDB file again, that would be great) and silent corruption issues and more. I've seen the workarounds of auto-backups of the shared folder and then auto-restores of those backups when silly things happen like the .MDB file is not the expected file size.

There's a special "joy" in needing to know the many under-the-hood versions of Access files and seeing apps that consume and/or produce more than one version at a time. That's just to maintain existing "apps", trying to migrate that data to modern databases for new apps is its own "joy" as well.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-26 16:12:45+00:00
Except the 7 firms make up >30% of all market growth, and move more capital than entire countries. Yes, they are hemorrhaging cash with every new customer, and burdening taxpayers by eating community electrical and water infrastructure.

In terms of business, it is not sustainable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-8TDOFqkQA

The hype-cycle is nothing new =3

"Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852)

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
by GrantMoyer | 2025-11-26 16:12:49+00:00
I largely agree with this, but at the same time, I empathize with the FA's author. I think it's because LLMs feel categorically different from other technological leaps I've been exited about.

The recent results in LLMs and diffusion models are undeniably, incredibly impressive, even if they're not to the point of being universally useful for real work. However they fill me with a feeling of supreme dissapointment, because each is just this big black box we shoved an unreasonable amount of data into and now the black box is the best image processing/natural language processing system we've ever made, and depending on how you look at it, they're either so unimaginably complex that we'll never understand how they really work, or they're so brain-dead simple that there's nothing to really understand at all. It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.
by hamdingers | 2025-11-26 16:12:54+00:00
> I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain. Many of my friends share that sentiment.

FTA.

I know tons of people where "tried it out" means they've seen Google's abysmal search summary feature, or merely seen the memes and read news articles about how it's wrong sometimes, and haven't explored any further.
by pydry | 2025-11-26 16:13:23+00:00
>Beneath the surface lies the total exposure, the $1.2 trillion in wages, and that includes routine functions in human resources, logistics, finance, and office administration. Those are areas sometimes overlooked in automation forecasts.

Those routine functions could have been automated before LLMs.

Usually when theyre not it's due to some sort of corporate dysfunction which is not something LLMs can solve.
by pizlonator | 2025-11-26 16:13:25+00:00
Here's a realistic path for how AI "replaces"/"displaces" a large chunk of the workforce:

- Even without AI most corpos could shed probably 10% of their workforce - or maybe more - and still be about as productive as they are now. Bunch of reasons why that's true, but here are two I can easily think of: (1) after the layoffs work shifts to the people who remain, who then work harder; (2) underperformers are often not let go for a long time or ever because their managers don't want to do the legwork (and the layoffs are a good opportunity to force that to happen).

- It's hard for leadership to initiate layoffs, because doing so seems like it'll make the company look weak to investors, customers, etc. So if you really want to cut costs by shedding 10%+ of your workforce and making the remaining 90% work harder, then you have to have a good story to tell for why you are doing it.

- AI makes for a good story. It's a way to achieve what you would have wanted to achieve anyway, while making it seem like you're cutting edge.
by Aurornis | 2025-11-26 16:13:53+00:00
> That's not how it works. LH and FSH are suppressed when you're on TRT, but they stabilize after cessation.

The testes atrophy over time when LH and FSH are suppressed. Even if LH and FSH return (which isn’t guaranteed) the testes need to be able to respond to those hormonal signals, but atrophied testes do not respond the same.

For someone with true intractable hypogonadism this hardly matters because they weren’t capable anyway. Many people prescribed TRT today don’t actually have intractable hypogonadism, though.

Body builders have some tricks to try to reverse this, but it’s not perfectly effective and even body builders know to cycle their steroids to avoid having prolonged periods of suppressed HPG axis activity. I was involved with weightlifting in my younger years but never dabbled with steroids or TRT. Everyone I know who did try testosterone or steroids thought they were doing it the safe way (HCG, PCT, limited cycle length) but became unable to produce enough endogenous testosterone by their 40s even with SERMs.

Men on TRT for years will have considerable testicular atrophy that is not totally reversible.

> The question is, why would someone with clinical hypogonadism cease TRT?

TRT is no longer limited to men with clinical hypogonadism. Men’s health clinics that advertise on social media, TV, and radio will prescribe to anyone who contacts them (and pays cash for the prescription and gear). In some surveys of patients on TRT, 1/4 of patients didn’t even have testosterone levels measured prior to initiation of TRT.
by whatamidoingyo | 2025-11-26 16:14:02+00:00
> We only use this data to confirm your identity, and after that, it is automatically deleted from our systems after a short time.

Isn't that what every company says before a data breach proves otherwise? I've been hearing a lot about Hetzner, thought about trying it out, but if the service is requiring me to submit a passport or even any form of ID, then absolutely not. Your service is dead to me.
by scottlamb | 2025-11-26 16:14:59+00:00
> Read the WebKit post.

Clearly I have already.

> See https://docs.rs/parking_lot_core/latest/parking_lot_core/ ... That's my ParkingLot API.

"just use parking_lot directly" is a weird way to say "use the `parking_lot_core` crate instead of the `parking_lot` crate".

...and note that I mentioned this in my earlier comment: (slightly more realistically, you could probably use the `parking_lot_core::park` portion of the implementation and build your own equivalent of `parking_lot::RawMutex` on top of it)

I'm not trying to be disagreeable here, but really you could save a lot of trouble if you were a bit more careful in your communication.
by gloftus | 2025-11-26 16:15:01+00:00
You can't enumerate the real numbers, but you can grab them all in one go - just draw a line!

The more I learn about this stuff, the more I come to understand how the quantitative difference between cardinalities is a red herring (e.g. CH independent from ZFC). It's the qualitative difference between these two sets that matter. The real numbers are richer, denser, smoother, etc. than the natural numbers, and those are the qualities we care about.
by shagie | 2025-11-26 16:15:11+00:00
POS stands for Point Of Sales in this context.

It was a linux running on (year appropriate) https://www.hp.com/us-en/solutions/pos-systems-products.html... - and add on all the peripherals. The POS software was standalone-ish (you could, in theory, hook it up to a generator to a register and the primary store server and process cash, paper check, and likely store branded credit cards)... it wouldn't be pleasant, but it could.

The logic for discounts and sales and taxes (and if an item had sales tax in that jurisdiction) was all on register. The store server logged the transaction and handled inventory and price lookup, but didn't do price (sale, taxes) calculations itself.
by adidoit | 2025-11-26 16:15:26+00:00
LLMs have high utility for coding. The PMF is so strong that even with just coding i feel they will see an ARPU expansion beyond conservative assumptions.

There are adjacancies in white collar work like financial analysis that they will go after. All these will capture high ARPU usage.

Consumer is not their only path to revenue but it is probably the easiest to model. The enterprise play to automate and accelerate some white collar workers is a clear target not reflected here.
by shadowgovt | 2025-11-26 16:15:38+00:00
Hackers in the '80s were taking apart phone hardware and making free long-distance calls because the phone company didn't deserve its monopoly purely for existing before they were born. Hackers in the '90s were bypassing copyright and wiping the hard drive of machines they cobbled together out of broken machines to install an open source OS on it so that Redmond, WA couldn't dictate their computing experience.

I think there's a direct through-line from hacker circles to modern skepticism of the kind of AI discussed in this article: the kind where rules you don't control determine the behavior of the machine and where most of the training and operation of the largest and most successful systems can, currently, only be accessed via the cloud portals of companies with extremely questionable ethics.

... but I don't expect hackers to be anti-AI indefinitely. I expect them to be sorting out how many old laptops with still-serviceable graphics cards you have to glue together to build a training engine that can produce a domain-specific tool that rivals ChatGPT. If that task proves impossible, then I suspect based on history this may be the one place where hackers end up looking a little 'luddite' as it were.

... because "If the machine cannot be tamed it must be destroyed" is very hacker ethos.
by mandevil | 2025-11-26 16:15:41+00:00
You misunderstand the Amazon story. Amazon did two pre-IPO funding rounds: <1m angel round and an 8m Series A led by Kleiner Perkins. That's it. In contrast, OAI has raised almost 60 billion in 10 funding rounds, and if you RtFA you can see the estimates are they have to raise hundreds of billions more.

For the IPO itself Amazon sold 3 million shares at $18, for a raise of 54m (from the IPO alone they had enough cash to pay off every investor up to that point). In July 2001, in the heart of the dotcom crash, they raised 100m by selling equity to undisclosed investors, and of course they have been using shares as part of their compensation packages for a very long time, but that's about it for Amazon's entire equity raises.

They did raise 15b in a bond issuance a few weeks ago, their first bonds issued since 2022, with the money going to several things but mostly AI. However, since bond payoffs are very different from selling equity this is a very different play from what OAI is doing. Amazon will never pay more than a fixed amount for that money, capped upside to the bond-holders.

The reason this is different is that Amazon has largely run either a small profit or a small loss, quarter after quarter, because they take their profits and instead of recording it, putting it in a bank, or dividend-ing it to shareholders they put it into building datacenters and warehouses and software and the like. But because of that enormous cash generation they have only rarely tapped outside investors, either in bonds or equity markets. OAI is not generating near enough cash to fund their operations, so they have been selling equity in absolutely enormous quantities- they have already raised more cash pre-IPO than any company in history and outside estimates like this one from HSBC call for them to blow past the amount they've already raised. This is fundamentally very very different.
by mise_en_place | 2025-11-26 16:16:22+00:00
> TRT is no longer limited to men with clinical hypogonadism. Men’s health clinics that advertise on social media, TV, and radio will prescribe to anyone who contacts them (and pays cash for the prescription and gear). In some surveys of patients on TRT, 1/4 of patients didn’t even have testosterone levels measured prior to initiation of TRT.

That's hugely problematic if true. They should be investigated and if found of wrongdoing, have their medical licenses revoked.
by phicoh | 2025-11-26 16:16:26+00:00
Systemd-resolved invents DNS records (not really something you would like to see, makes debugging DNS issues a nightmare). But worse, it populates those DNS records with IPv6 link local addresses, which really have no place in DNS.

Then, when after a nice debugging session why your application behaves so strangely, all the data in DNS is correct, why doesn't it work, you find that this issue has been reported before and was rejected as won't fix, works as intended.
by floppyd | 2025-11-26 16:16:36+00:00
> What do you think about Ukraine? Should it be a free country? What about its territorial integrity, to whom does Crimea belong?

Just wanted to let you know that asking those questions as if there can be any variation in my answers really shows you are judging russians from the outside. The Crimea question has been akin to a meme for a decade at this point. I'm obviously not saying "everyone" is thinking one way or another, because there's no "everyone", and there's also no "almost everyone". There are huge chunks of the population that are very much on the opposite ends of the spectrum, and judging one chunk by opinions and action of another one is highly disingenuous, imo.
by billy99k | 2025-11-26 16:16:37+00:00
How are unions any better than mega corps? My brother is part of a union and the leaders make millions.

He's pigenholed at the same low pay rate and can't ever get a raise, until everyone in the same role also gets a raise (which will never happen). It traps people, because many union jobs can't or won't innovate, and when they look elsewhere, are underskilled (and stuck).

You mention 'deepseek'. Are you joking? It's owned by the Chinese government..and you claim to hate fascism? Lol?

Big companies only have the power now, because the processing power to run LLMs is expensive. Once there are break throughs, anyone can have the same power in their house.

We have been in a tech slump for awhile now. Large companies will drive innovations for AI that will help everyone.
by QualiaAdvocate | 2025-11-26 16:16:49+00:00
Submission statement: Scott Alexander's mistake theory vs conflict theory distinction is one of the most useful frames for understanding political discourse. But most explanations of conflict theory are either hostile or deliberately obscure. This post attempts something different: a clear-language, analytical reconstruction of how conflict theorists actually think and why their approach makes sense in specific contexts.

Main claims: (1) Conflict theory is genuine epistemology, not just strategy - it answers "what should I believe?" with different criteria than correspondence to reality. (2) These epistemologies are adaptations to different games - cooperative vs zero-sum. (3) Most mistake theorists are strategically naive about which game they're playing.

Long read (~7k words), but if you've ever been confused about why stating true facts sometimes makes people angrier, this might help.
by jandrese | 2025-11-26 16:16:57+00:00
The problem is each relay needs its own power source so it's not going to be as light and small as you would like. Solar power doesn't work very well outside of the solar system, or even really in the outer solar system.

On the plus side your big probe could push off of the small probe to give itself a further boost, also necessary because otherwise the small probes need thrusters to slow themselves to a stop.
by agwp | 2025-11-26 16:16:57+00:00
Several ways, although I'm not sure whether the below will happen:

1. Paid ads - ChatGPT could offer paid listings at the top of its answers, just like Google does when it provides a results page. Not all people will necessarily leave Google/Gemini for future search queries, but some of the money that used to go to Google/Bing could now go to OpenAI.

2. Behavioral targeting based on past ChatGPT queries. If you have been asking about headache remedies, you might see ads for painkillers - both within ChatGPT and as display ads across the web.

3. Affiliate / commission revenue - if you've asked for product recommendations, at least some might be affiliate links.

The revenue from the above likely wouldn't cover all costs based on their current expenditure. But it would help a bit - particularly for monetizing free users.

Plus, I'm sure there will be new advertising models that emerge in time. If an advertiser could say "I can offer $30 per new customer" and let AI figure out how to get them and send a bill, that's very different to someone setting up an ad campaign - which involves everything from audience selection and creative, to bid management and conversion rate optimization.
by aishsh | 2025-11-26 16:17:04+00:00
> Given the general health benefits that are being observed with GLP1-s the only reason to get off them is costs imo

There’s also the perverse incentives wrt broader society. Enabling the average person to control their physical health is orders of magnitude better for society and orders of magnitude less profitable than the current trends.

Maybe a setup where glp drugs are nationalized and only used to further understand why we have an obesity epidemic and eventually finance changes to combat it? Ideally the drug makers would do this without requiring government intervention, but I doubt they will.
by AlexandrB | 2025-11-26 16:17:29+00:00
What I want from my tools is autonomy/control. LLMs raise the bar on being at the mercy of the vendor. Anything you can do with an LLM today can silently be removed or enshittified tomorrow, either for revenue or ideological reasons. The forums for Cursor are filled with people complaining about removed features and functional regressions.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-26 16:17:47+00:00
On the migrations... read the comments through this thread.. there are many, and none have mentioned any significant pain points at all, just hypothetical ones from people like you who aren't actually actively using it.

As to the CI/CD pipelines... I just edited my .github/workflow/* to bump the target version, and off to the races... though if you're deploying to bare metal as opposed to containers, it does take a couple extra steps.

As to the "permission to install..." that's what happens when companies don't trust the employees that already write the software that can make or break the company anyway... Defelopers should have local admin privs, or a jump box (rdp) that does... or at the very least a linux environment you can remote-develop on that, again, has local admin privs.

I'm in a locked down environment currently, for a govt agency and hasn't been an issue. Similar for past environments which include major banking institutions.
by rchaud | 2025-11-26 16:17:56+00:00
Capitalism makes more sense if it's thought about purely in terms of individual self interest as supposed to something that leads to an efficient market on aggregate.

The CEOs making big calls across the economy have already negotiated golden parachutes in the event of their failure.

The financiers and lawyers getting a chunk of each bond deal they close have every incentive to raise more than what's actually needed. Investment funds flush with ZIRP dollars have every incentive to plow it back into investments to show that "the money is at work".
by serf | 2025-11-26 16:18:02+00:00
the post office has utility even if the messages have very high latency.

also if this probe network reduces the transmission costs to normal terrestrial levels (and not requiring , say, a 400kw tx dish..) it could drastically increases the utility of the link -- and all of this without discussing how much bandwidth a link network across the stars might possess compared to our current link to Voyager..

(this is all said with the presumption of a reason to have such distance communications channels.. )
by tpurves | 2025-11-26 16:18:12+00:00
What you are describing has been proposed before, for example within context of projects like Breakthrough Starshot. In that the case the idea is to launch thousands of probes, each weighing only a few grams or less, and accelerating them to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light using solar sails and (powerful) earth-based lasers. The probes could reach alpha centauri within 20-30 years. There seems to be some debate though about whether cross-links between probes to enable relaying signals is ever practical from a power and mass perspective vs a single very large receiver on earth.
by cinntaile | 2025-11-26 16:18:26+00:00
> The group arrested and delivered to the Nazi authorities 8,000–9,000 Jews. Most of them were deported to Westerbork concentration camp and later shipped to and murdered in Sobibor and other German extermination camps.

In my opinion that is a very big difference.

Most people that are deported don't end up in a prison either, they are returned to their home countries.