MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cyphar | 2025-11-22 20:23:19+00:00
"Lots" is a relative term, but the overwhelming majority of kernel developers are employed and usually do kernel work as part of their job (usually at least ~80% but it could be argued as high as 97% depending on how you interpret the breakdown done by LWN of each release[1]).

[1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/
by shkkmo | 2025-11-22 20:23:45+00:00
> but if it operates in a free market then it has to compete

There is no such thing as an actual "free market", nor should there be. Markets need rules to operate otherwise you get fraud and "unhealthy" competition like sabotage and assassinations.

> Socialism can indeed only ends one way and that is the removal of individual freedoms.

That's like saying that capitalism only ends one way and that is slavery.

In reality, there is no inherently slippery slope in either direction. There is a spectrum of ways to aporoach market regulation and individual freedom with various tradeoffs.

Blind partisan rhetoric like yours doesn't help uncover what those tradeoffs are so we can make good decisions. Instead it spreads ignorance and division.
by boriskourt | 2025-11-22 20:23:52+00:00
By the mid 2000s open-source hardware again became a hub of activity due to the emergence of several major open-source hardware projects and companies, such as OpenCores, RepRap (3D printing), Arduino, Adafruit, SparkFun, and Open Source Ecology. In 2007, Perens reactivated the openhardware.org website, but it is currently (February 2025) inactive. [0]

I think they should have worded this better, but what they are known for, more specifically, is pushing open source hardware forward and sticking with it on principle even though it caused many business challenges.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_hardware
by Humaiblog | 2025-11-22 20:23:57+00:00
Deep dive into Google's latest drops (Nov 18, 2025):

Gemini 3 Pro/Ultra: 91.9% GPQA, 45.1% ARC-AGI-2, 1M+ token context

Veo 3: 1080p video with synced audio in one pass (no hacks)

Project Aura XR glasses: XREAL collab, 70° FoV, hand tracking, Gemini onboard

Antigravity/Jules: Agents fixing 73% of GitHub bugs autonomously

MedGemma for med imaging, SynthID watermarks, vibe coding in AI Studio

What's the killer app here - autonomous bug fixers or XR glasses that think for you?
by FireBeyond | 2025-11-22 20:24:02+00:00
So there's an element of truth to that. And there are those who can contribute enough value, have enough audience, etc., that they can "coast" on those 2 blog posts a month and make significant income...

... but that's also not, nor should it be the median. I'm not sure how the economy functions if, say 8h/mo effort generates a median living wage.
by Analemma_ | 2025-11-22 20:24:40+00:00
Brave strips out the ads that the creators put on their site, puts their own ads there, then gives the creators some of that money if and only if the creator realizes they have to sign up for Brave's cryptoshit. It's straightforwardly the kind of racket that would get your knees broken if you tried to do it to somebody in real life, but "it's ok because it's on computers". All the flak is deserved.
by tokai | 2025-11-22 20:24:46+00:00
>does not actually really respond to the allegation that it's anti-Indigenous

That's a faulty reading of my comment. I did not touch upon if this is anti-indigenous or not (it is btw). You also fundamentally misrepresent what I wrote with the "they test everyone". Misunderstanding what is actually going on here, even with righteous vitriol, is not going to help anyone.
by Nextgrid | 2025-11-22 20:24:47+00:00
Doing it via conventional card networks won't work, the fees would eat most/all of the payment.

A critical mass of publishers would need to team up and form a cooperative/etc where a user could register once, deposit some money, and then that money would be spent every time they view an article. But that requires cooperation between competitors, which is already hard enough, and the cancer that is the advertising industry wouldn't like this potential existential threat and would be more than happy to pour fuel onto the fire to ensure it never succeeds.

What's surprising is why the card networks themselves don't get in on it. They could do so in a completely backwards-compatible manner, introducing a new card number range that only works with transactions under a certain amount and have different fraud protection/chargeback rules.
by jnurmine | 2025-11-22 20:24:54+00:00
Which products are you talking about...? Duralex is not really expensive at all.

For example, Duralex drinking glass Le Picardie (as in the article), transparent, 36 cl, 18.90 EUR for 6-pack.

That is 3.15 EUR per glass.

At that price the price/quality is extremely good. Chinese products won't even come close to this.
by xpe | 2025-11-22 20:24:54+00:00
Ok, but recall the context (see above): I’m saying one can understand how firms operate without making a connection to central planning (setting production targets and investment decisions from the top-down without prices).

Economists have concepts and models for monopolies and oligopolies — and the way they operate are quite different from the practice of central planning.

I’m talking from within the frame of economic concepts, and I’m striving to use words as understood in the field. At times I value metaphorical thinking, but here in the case of economics, we don’t need to bend words when other fitting concepts are readily available and battle-tested.

An example: If someone calls corporate consolidation “central planning,” they’ve lost the ability to analyze it properly. The relevant questions for oligopolies (strategic behavior, barriers to entry, tacit collusion) are completely different from central planning questions (calculation problems, information aggregation, incentive alignment).

When technical fields have already solved a conceptual problem through careful definition and model building, importing loose metaphorical language degrades analytical clarity.

If you want to point to or propose a different model than the usual economic dogma, I’m all ears, by the way.
by dahart | 2025-11-22 20:25:13+00:00
Sure the claim that an artifact like a painting is valuable because it’s rare & famous is somewhat self-reinforcing, I agree. I also think it’s fair to call it circular in the sense that people investing and making a profit when they re-sell will cause more people to want to invest, and will drive the prices of collectibles higher. The value of a collectible is a social construct rather than a reflection of, say, skill or materials or cost to make, and so normal economics doesn’t really apply.

I’m not quite following the rest of your logic. Rare collectibles don’t often lose value after 70 years, there’s no reason I know of to suspect the ‘age-wealth point’ of the collector is particularly relevant. I’ve never heard of historicity nor seen anything collectible accrue value as a percentage of age, I don’t think markets for rare paintings work like that…? The idea of paying millions and millions for a collectible you can’t really use is foreign to most of us, so yeah it’s really weird and I can understand the feeling that it must be self-reinforcing.

I guess I’m maybe not even arguing for or against any of this, but maybe saying that given that markets for rare things exist, it does make sense that very rare+famous things bring higher prices, and that people who have money for this kind of speculation might see investment opportunity. I agree the “value” and market for these things is circular. All of the value comes from the “proof” that something is rare and collectible, purely from the story.

All this does apply a little bit to consumer goods, of course. We often have to remind ourselves that capitalist markets price things according to supply and demand, not necessarily to cost.
by Joker_vD | 2025-11-22 20:25:17+00:00
> Imagine instead we were spending trillions on floral bouquets, calligraphy, and porcelain tea sets. I would argue that would be a bad allocation of resources.

And I would argue it wouldn't. So? It's a value call.

> What matters to me is whether it solves the problems we have.

Again, what is and is not a problem is a value call. "Lacking tools to surveil and control the population" and "having population that demands its share of economic output" arguably are problems for someone which AI probably could solve. "The planet is literally on fire" is another problem (for, arguably, much bigger number of someones) and pouring terawatts of energy into chips that, coincidentally, do AI-related matrix multiplications, won't solve that problem.
by Aunche | 2025-11-22 20:25:17+00:00
> the small businesses got wiped out due to their lack of lobbying power

Small businesses have a lot if lobbying power (NFIB, US Chamber of Commerce to a certain extent) especially during the pandemic. The PPP loan forgiveness program was ridiculously generous. Despite it being marketed as a way to save jobs, only a third of the money ended up going towards jobs that were at risk.
by inglor_cz | 2025-11-22 20:25:20+00:00
Reducing the energy sector to pure business would probably work in the 1990s, but not now, when countries are afraid of strategic dependence on potentially hostile suppliers.

Uranium isn't as ubiquitous as, say, natural gas, and stockpiling it comes with a big heap of physical problems. I can definitely see countries spending on more expensive technology if it comes with more energy security.
by cubefox | 2025-11-22 20:25:47+00:00
> Now, the research team is conducting systematic studies on the key scientific issues related to adding thorium, and aims to completethe construction of a 100-megawatt TMSR demonstration project, and begin operation by 2035.

For comparison: A commercial nuclear power plant is 1 gigawatt, a 10x difference. I assume this would be the next step.
by csallen | 2025-11-22 20:26:00+00:00
Yes exactly. And this is kind of already played out with text. The printing press came out, literacy increased. Suddenly anyone could write anything and sign anybody else's name to it. There was a trust crisis. Nowadays, we've just gotten used to it and we look at where text came from instead of just what text says.

For example, I'd rather read a tweet from Paul Graham's account than read a screenshot of a Paul Graham tweet that a stranger emailed to me. In the latter case, the source makes me suspicious, so then I go to a more trusted source, e.g. a reputable news organization, or PG's actually X account.
by gfiorav | 2025-11-22 20:26:45+00:00
Agreed. Many in this thread appear confident that “everyone” comprehends that anything labeled “free” actually implies “subsidized.” However, I still believe they are mistaken.

People fail to realize that increased social programs inevitably result in reduced income for everyone. If they understood this, you would observe the polls on this issue, which already reflect the fact that most individuals are willing to assist those in need but do not support most social programs.
by dimal | 2025-11-22 20:27:20+00:00
Why? Most large corporations I’ve dealt with are highly bureaucratic and resistant to change. Good ideas get lost in silos or bogged down in bureaucracy. Whether it works or not seems entirely dependent on whether the company has a moat around their revenue stream, which allows them to be inefficient everywhere else.

For an employee owned co-op, a more anarchistic organization structure that allows for more employee control of everyday decisions could actually allow the company to adapt and change more easily. The ones making decisions have skin in the game, both as workers and owners.
by anigbrowl | 2025-11-22 20:27:28+00:00
Eighteen months ago, Marciano oversaw a staff buyout of the company, which had been placed in receivership for the fourth time in 20 years. Today, 180 of the 243 employees are “associates” in the company.

It has only been employee-owned for a short time. Some overhang from the management style of the previous 20 years is only to be expected.
by xpe | 2025-11-22 20:28:42+00:00
To make sure we’re on the same page… In economics, “central planning” refers to a system where a central authority (typically the state) makes comprehensive decisions about production, investment, and resource allocation across an entire economy, replacing market mechanisms. This is associated with command economies like the Soviet Union’s Gosplan system.

And of course I will grant firms use hierarchical coordination mechanisms internally (managers allocate resources by command rather than prices).

I suppose my angle here is to be clear that firms are typically a kind of hybrid entity: they mix various coordination mechanisms (prices and hierarchy). This makes them quite different from centrally planned economies.
by Libidinalecon | 2025-11-22 20:29:17+00:00
I use to collect baseball cards as a kid in the 80s and I can remember I would see comics at card shows.

I had seen football cards take off in value and really wanted to get into comic collecting. What I remember is the big comic books were just slightly outside the price range of a 10 year old cutting the lawn. Unlike baseball cards that cost thousands for HOF rookie cards.

I don't know how accurate it is but chatGPT gives prices that sound about right from what I remember looking at comic price guides in the 80s.

X-Men #1 $60–$150

The Incredible Hulk #1 $60–$120

Avengers #1 $80–$180

I never got to start my collection then I remember as a teenager thinking what a stupid idea it was anyway. Who the hell is ever going to be that into comic book characters?
by robrenaud | 2025-11-22 20:29:36+00:00
I worked on a similiar problem about a year ago, on large dense models.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PkeB4TLxgaNnSmddg/scaling-sp...

In both cases, the goal is to actually learn a concrete circuit inside a network that solves specific Python next-token prediction tasks. We each end up with a crisp wiring diagram saying “these are the channels/neurons/heads that implement this particular bit of Python reasoning.”

Both projects cast circuit discovery as a gradient-based selection problem over a fixed base model. We train a mask that picks out a sparse subset of computational nodes as “the circuit,” while the rest are ablated. Their work learns masks over a weight-sparse transformer; ours learns masks over SAE latents and residual channels. But in both cases, the key move is the same: use gradients to optimize which nodes are included, rather than relying purely on heuristic search or attribution patching. Both approaches also use a gradual hardening schedule (continuous masks that are annealed or sharpened over time) so that we can keep gradients useful early on, then spend extra compute to push the mask towards a discrete, minimal circuit that still reproduces the model’s behavior.

The similarities extend to how we validate and stress-test the resulting circuits. In both projects, we drill down enough to notice “bugs” or quirks in the learned mechanism and to deliberately break it: by making simple, semantically small edits to the Python source, we can systematically cause the pruned circuit to fail and those failures generalize to the unpruned network. That gives us some confidence that we’re genuinely capturing the specific mechanism the model is using.
by somenameforme | 2025-11-22 20:29:50+00:00
Yip. Oddly enough, this has a lot of economic parallels with cooking at home vs eating out. For a silly example, you can make an Egg McMuffin for a tiny fraction of what you'd pay at McDonalds for one. Yet McDonalds (franchise, not corporate) operate on single digit profit margins. Why?

Because when you buy that Egg McMuffin you're not just paying for it. You're paying for an entire building of workers, the rent on that building, their licensing fees, their advertising costs, their electric costs, and much more. When you make it at home you're paying for nothing but the ingredients.

So it creates a paradoxical scenario - you're getting charged way more for stuff than if you made it yourself, but yet somehow you're not getting ripped off.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-11-22 20:30:24+00:00
> Outside the home childcare is not 24/7.

No, but it is during our most productive, aware, and valuable daylight hours.

> Also, it's really weird to be making this argument for mothers and not fathers.

In the context of human history, it’s not weird at all.

> Having childcare available gives the opportunity for both parents to spend more quality time with their children.

How?

It reduces the time children spend with a parent, and it creates a world in which both parents have to work just to afford having children.
by btilly | 2025-11-22 20:31:10+00:00
The theory is simple. When the thought of should comes reinforced by want, desire reinforces executive control, and makes you more likely to do that thing. This causes executive control, which actually issues those shoulds, to become more effective.

Here is my understanding of the issue with the therapy based on my experience with it.

They have created a therapeutic environment with so many rules and demands that the child encounters a constant stream of shoulds. They also implement a carefully thought out set of rewards that gives constant positive feedback for those who are succeeding.

But that positive feedback loop only gets started after the child is succeeding. And therefore it is essential that children enter the program with an overwhelming desire to succeed, and in a state where every one of those shoulds will connect to that overwhelming desire. They have a carefully optimized intake process that creates this initial state. That results in a child who is absolutely emotionally committed to a two year very difficult program.

The problem that I see with people who are older is that once we enter puberty, we become more resistant to receiving constant demands from adults. This undermines that initial commitment. It also undermines the positive feedback loop that is essential to maintaining the commitment into the second year.

Even if I am wrong about why it happens, the program told me that they have an age cutoff because the therapy program doesn't work after kids hit puberty. It isn't just an abstract theory. They tried it, and concluded that it doesn't work.
by ronsor | 2025-11-22 20:31:19+00:00
> gdscript is not a serious option imo (stupid whitespace language..They need to drop it and focus on C# like Unity did years back with UnityScript.. Seriously XNA and then Unity have cemented C# as the other language of game devs alongside C++. Even KSA's custom new engine is C# for example)

I'm going to break this down:

> gdscript is not a serious option imo

Subjective, but fair enough. If this is a general argument against "scripting languages" versus more "advanced" languages, I should remind you that Lua and JS are still very popular languages in game development.

> stupid whitespace language

The only other big "whitespace language," Python, is immensely popular and widespread in server, client, AI, etc. applications. This is a question of taste, and has nothing to do with the objective quality of GDScript.

> They need to drop it and focus on C# like Unity did years back with UnityScript

The irony is that JavaScript (real JS, not a JS-like language) is almost certainly very viable in a game engine nowadays.

> Seriously XNA and then Unity have cemented C# as the other language of game devs alongside C++. Even KSA's custom new engine is C# for example

C# is popular for a variety of reasons (fast, mature ecosystem, etc.); however, "just use C# because others are using it" is by itself not a compelling argument.

Syntax and language aren't that big of a deal for professional developers.
by DoneWithAllThat | 2025-11-22 20:31:34+00:00
I don’t understand the comments here crowing about how this employee-owned company is a success story against capitalism or something. It was going to go out of business, employees bought it, they also couldn’t make it profitable and had to resort to effectively a gofundme to not collapse. And somehow this is a win against profit driven companies? Do you not see how utterly non-viable this is at scale?
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-11-22 20:31:59+00:00
> I don't think that someone that had national relevance for roughly half an election cycle, and who got less than half of one percent of the vote (at the peak of her popularity) has had any influence shaping nuclear opinions.

It's not about any one person. You still see this now, where people suggest regulatory reform for the process of building new nuclear plants in the US to lower construction costs, people appear to tell you that nuclear costs too much and should be abandoned, i.e. they use circular logic to present the existence of the problem you're trying to solve as a reason not to try to address it.

The current line of reasoning is something like "solar plus storage is cheaper than nuclear so nuclear must never be attempted", which ignores both any possibility of improving the cost efficiency of nuclear and that the cost comparison they're using is for intra-day storage whereas nuclear also reduces the need for multi-day storage which is significantly more expensive.

> I'm not even sure how you think Russia would benefit from less nuclear power plants an entire continent away

Russia is a petroleum exporting country and petroleum is a global commodity. If the US (or anyone else) uses nuclear instead of fossil fuels then global demand for fossil fuels declines, US natural gas or coal producers instead sell to foreign customers who might have bought gas from Russia, etc.

Notice that the US oil industry has the same incentive. Exxon is very much aligned with Putin on this one and they have lobbyists too.
by Y_Y | 2025-11-22 20:31:59+00:00
> The firms can coordinate by agreeing on a strategy they deem necessary for the future of the industry

As long as it doesn't fall into the "collusion" prohibitions of the relevant competition law.

> “People of the same trade seldom meet … but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-11-22 20:32:02+00:00
Yes, it would be great to have a second source but no one has the resources the government has to gatherthe data. They do a pretty good job and they try to be as accurate as possible. I can't see any another organization gathering the data without needing to be greatly compensated.

As far as trust, there have always been people that have and will criticize the results but they only have a small view of the prices which doesn't give a true view of inflation. So their criticism is invalid.

The problem with a decentralized version is that people will need to be compensated. People might get together to do it a few times but for it to be useful it needs to get done for as long as there's an American economy. It won't happen without some kind of compensation.
by gfiorav | 2025-11-22 20:32:12+00:00
I hope you were right, but I strongly suspect you are mistaken.

Most people fail to understand:

- Social welfare programs come at the expense of reducing everyone’s income.

- The extent of the social welfare overspending is significant; we have long surpassed the point of helping those in dire need and are now funding numerous programs that, if fully understood in its long-term cost, would likely not be supported.

- The top 5% of income earners contribute 90% of the welfare programs and are not “the greedy rich.”

- The actual greedy rich do not have income and fund political campaigns, which is why politicians often conflate high-earners with the rich (to obscure the influence of interest groups)

What would be a more accurate term than “free”? Subsidized. It may not be as catchy, but it provides a more precise description.