MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by __mharrison__ | 2025-12-31 23:16:03+00:00
I've published books with two publishers and many self-published books (Anthropic owes me around $60K for book theft by my calculations).

Publishers can be great, but if you want control of your book, just self-publish it.

The most valuable (IMO) service publishers provide is feedback. If you have a small online presence, it isn't hard to get feedback from others.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-12-31 23:16:25+00:00
Another daily GrapheneOS driver here. I've kept banking apps off my phone anyway, and I do banking via desktop/website (I don't understand why people need to do banking 'on the go') and just use a physical credit card for tap payments when I'm out and about.

I do have older Android devices that I have run banking apps on, that I can revert to if necessary, but there's a fair bit of inconvenience I would be happy to endure to avoid being forced into that final option.

What I would recommend is a slow transition, and just start using it at home. If you have GrapheneOS on it's most paranoid settings (exploit protections) there will be exceptions you'll need to allow for a few apps.
by smeeagain2 | 2025-12-31 23:16:39+00:00
> Bootstrapping of the rustc compiler from scratch is a very different experience than using the language as a user.

And...? I'm the distro maintainer. I'm the guy who sees all the underlying ugliness that the idiot user ignores and pretends doesn't exist. Without even using the language I can already tell you it's garbage, just by going through the bootstrap process.

When it takes an entire screen full of bizarre command line arguments to compile every single source file, on a language that's supposedly fresh and new, someone is being played for a fool and it isn't me. Not even C is that crufty, and it's ancient.

Sorry, not interested in believing in fairy tales or subjecting myself to self-abuse. I'll stick with good ole C, thanks.
by jeffbee | 2025-12-31 23:16:51+00:00
> heats up almost as fast as a toaster oven

OK now I am curious. How powerful is this drawer and how large? I just set my toaster oven to 450ºF and the thermostat clicked off in 18 seconds, at which point an infrared thermometer indicated the walls of the toaster were 355º. My full height oven would take at least 20 minutes to get there. I can see how cutting the volume in half would help but it feels like you'd need more insulation and/or more power to close that gap.
by kogepathic | 2025-12-31 23:16:54+00:00
> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery

If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?

I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?
by gamblor956 | 2025-12-31 23:17:48+00:00
Correct, for tax purposes corporate losses remain with the corporation. Microsoft and the other owners don't get the benefit of OpenAI's losses. At best, they get to write off their investment in OpenAI if the company dissolves, at which point their maximum tax write-off is their capital investment.

Note: other people seem to be confused because companies can write off investments in corporate subsidiaries before the subsidiary is dissolved or sold...for book purposes. This creates what is known in the accounting world as a book-tax difference. If you have a few weeks to spare, look up tax provisions...
by ryandrake | 2025-12-31 23:19:00+00:00
On the other hand, I've been hosting my own E-mail (exim and dovecot) on a $5 VPS for the past 15 or so years, and it's pretty much set and forget. The most maintenance I have to do is when certbot fails to renew my ssl certificates and I have to manually go in and babysit it, but that's certbot/LetsEncrypt's fault, not the E-mail software. I have maybe had deliverability problems twice in those many years.
by Cheezmeister | 2025-12-31 23:19:41+00:00
I don't know the guy, but by all indications he is even-keeled, low-stress, conscientious but come what may. Given his nationality and net-worth, I'd wager that Warren is a centenarian in waiting, unless and until he chooses to invest in the afterlife. Whichever comes first.

Respect.
by potsandpans | 2025-12-31 23:20:31+00:00
Accessing information is not a harmful substance or a dangerous activity that requires training.

The problem is that you are drawing the parallels in the first place. These are not the same things. This is precisely what a totalitarian regime espouses: information so dangerous it must be selectively distributed and access must be accounted for. Today it's pornography. Tomorrow LGBTQ materials are labeled as pornography. And soon thereafter you're putting in age verification to access non-state sponsored news, wondering "why is this required? should I be looking at this?"

I have no doubt that these are well-intentioned attempts by concerned citizens and civil servants to preserve some semblance of a decent society. The problem is that it's _always_ coopted. _Always._ Yet we can't seem to help ourselves but clamber towards more consolidation of power in the face of some new hysteria.

Your final point... _these supposed free speech advocates have supported an authoritarian, therefore they have no credibility_, _the only free speech advocates are in silicon valley_, _this is the only defense of free speech_. I have no idea what your point is.

That a few capitalists used free speech as a shield to make more money, we should throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I refuse.
by whateverboat | 2025-12-31 23:20:35+00:00
You are totally right. Going even way back, in days of TurboPascal, you could include graphics.h and get a very cool snake game going within half an hour. Today, doing anything like that is a week of advanced stuff. Someone wanted to recreated that experience today and came up with this: https://github.com/dascandy/pixel

But as you can see how much boiler plate was needed to be written for them to write this.

https://github.com/dascandy/pixel/blob/master/examples/simpl...

See the user example and then look at src for boilder plate.

In old days, you could easily write a full operating system from scratch on 8051 while use PS/2 peripherals. Today, all peripherals are USB and USB 2.0 standard is 500 pages long.

I also agree that we have left behind the idea of teaching probably or at least removed it from the mainstream.
by antinomicus | 2025-12-31 23:21:56+00:00
Hacker news moment. If you believe this, you are lost, but man. What a terrible take.

Build what? The next big ad serving platform? The next mass surveillance platform? New ways to squeeze money out of people? You’re right we all die so nothing matters, why would what you build matter more than the relationships you make, the good feelings you create? Build, but build art. Build something that will change peoples minds, make them feel good, make them want to change the world.

Do not conflate building something to make some guy richer, as just as or more important than spending time with family or creating true art.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-31 23:22:02+00:00
Not quite, and an interesting story that fits these engineering maxims better than you might think.

Huh? The SotA for dial-up modems in the 1990s was indeed 56 kbps, achieved with various encoding and compression hacks in both domains including trellis coding.

Weirdly enough, you can apparently still buy them from US Robotics: https://www.usr.com/products/56k-dial-up-modems/
by ronnier | 2025-12-31 23:22:16+00:00
I'm at that point now, debating when I'll retire. We only live once and I'm not sure if I should continue working. I've reached financial freedom at a pretty young age. It's a daily debate in my mind when to call it quits, but I've never not worked and it's difficult to make the change. What I'm missing in life is time and that's what work takes from me and is the driving force behind my desire to retire -- time to do other things in life.
by omnicognate | 2025-12-31 23:22:33+00:00
You've prompted it by giving it the learning sequence from the post you're replying to, which somebody who needs the tutorial wouldn't be able to specify, and it's replied with a bunch of bullets and lists that, as a person with general programming knowledge but almost no experience writing raytracing algorithms (i.e. presumably the target audience here) look like they have zero value to me in learning the subject.
by exsomet | 2025-12-31 23:22:44+00:00
I’m not an expert by any means, but one of the major impediments I would imagine to flying taxis carrying people is safety; there’s a _lot_ that has to be done before people board an airplane in terms of checks, paperwork, planning, etc.

The dream of “order a flying taxi on your phone and it takes you wherever you want in five minutes” isn’t really compatible with aviation safety culture (at least at the pilot level in the US). That’s not to say it can’t be done, but you probably need a lot of really good PR people to figure out how to say “we want to remove the safety controls from this so we can make money with it” and have people buy it.
by i80and | 2025-12-31 23:22:47+00:00
It's hard to pick just one reason, but off the top of my head:

* Any failure tends to turn flying things into unguided missiles

* Noise is extremely hard to control -- I did an FAA helicopter discovery lesson, and oof

* Cities tend to have difficult to manage wind currents and hit-or-miss visibility. I was in a skyscraper across from one hit by a helicopter trying and failing to land in 2019 -- there's reasons for city no-fly zones

* Limited landing sites makes them highly situational in the first place, unless you want your streets to be helipads, which you don't

These are all fairly intrinsic and not mitigable. I can think of more issues more in the sticks, but you get the idea.
by crazygringo | 2025-12-31 23:23:53+00:00
Honest answer - making more art.

Think about how much cloud computing and open sourced changed it so you could launch a startup with 3 engineers instead of 20. What happened? An explosion of startups, since there were so many more engineers to go around. The engineers weren't delivering pizzas instead.

Same thing is happening with anything that needs more art -- the potential for video games here is extraordinary. A trained artist is way more effective leveraging AI and handling 10x the output, as the tools mature. Now you get 10x more video games, or 10x more complex/larger worlds, or whatever it is that the market ends up wanting.
by axiolite | 2025-12-31 23:24:14+00:00
Work life is quite a lot different for a working-stiff than it is for a CEO. In large part, their company is an extension of themselves. Work whatever hours you want to. Private plane to take you wherever you want to go for free, if you can come up with a work-related excuse to go there (with no need to justify not coming back for weeks). Multiple folks acting more-or-less as your personal assistants. An office bigger than your house, filled with anything you want in it, on the company's dime. A big pool of cash you can order the company to throw at whatever interests you. etc.
by lapcat | 2025-12-31 23:24:50+00:00
The old-style popup windows have a specific API window.open() that can be blocked. What the author calls popups are mostly just HTML <div> elements, perhaps using CSS properties such as position and/or z-index, so there's no generic way to block them. It's extremely difficult to block the "bad" ones while allowing the "good" ones. If this were a problem that could be solved generically, then browser extensions would have solved it long ago. Instead, the browser extensions are forced to keep extremely long lists of mostly site-specific elements to block. I'm not sure how the web browser vendors themselves could it it any differently, without completely redesigning HTML.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-12-31 23:25:12+00:00
Yes, browser can do that. A browser starts with GET and gets new HTTP 1xx or 3xx response with “Age-Verification: required <age>” header. Browser calls your AVP (defined once in preferences) and gets short-lived certificate of age (expires in 30 seconds), then passes it to website in “Age: <age> <certificate>” header. The website uses known public keys to verify “at least certain age” claim in certificate. AVP public keys can be published in some registry and cached by websites.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-31 23:25:27+00:00
That’s the point. It used to be something almost everyone bought. Now it’s relegated to high-end luxury. The craft still exists, and you can still do well, but it’s much diminished.

It’s not that nobody needs cabinets or doors. It’s that automation, transportation, and economies of scale have made it much cheaper to produce those things with machines in a factory.
by didibus | 2025-12-31 23:25:45+00:00
> In the 1950s and early 1960s, Japanese households reveled in the chance to have washing machines, televisions, and refrigerators; in the following decade, it was cars, air conditioners, and color TVs. In the 2020s and 2030s, the next set of “sacred treasures” could be futuristic gadgets like electric cars, AI assistants, heat pumps, battery-powered appliances, or personal care robots. They could be simple things like bigger houses, cheaper elder care and child care, and more comfortable sofas. Or they could be something that hasn’t even been invented yet.

This next batch of "sacred treasures" really seems crappy in comparison to the previous batch.

I'm not sure I see how the "simple things" would come, since those have only gotten less accessible since the 50s even in countries like the US whose economy grew year over year and didn't stagnate.

So everything is really hindging on "not yet invented". I do think we're all hopeful for true AGI, full humanoid robots that can replace all home labor, fully self driving cars that are not constrained by terrain, weather, or location. And so on...
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-12-31 23:25:58+00:00
Good news, because part of the original post was that engineers should soon be able to handle a million lines of code a month. So 60 engineers to birth an OS in a month.

… Our strategy is to combine AI *and* Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases. Our North Star is “1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code,” Galen Hunt, who is a top-level Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, wrote in a now-edited LinkedIn post.…

Maybe he did not say Windows, but it is not a leap to imagine it falls under the umbrella of “largest codebases”
by hirsin | 2025-12-31 23:26:19+00:00
You've got an extra actor in the mix that makes for a different argument and actually supports the idea that it's racist, I think.

Namely - I think most agree that it's racist to mindlessly assume race and poverty are correlated. The argument here is that the AI companies made that assumption - in other words, they're being called racists.

I don't think it's racist to speculate that a corporation, that made choices that specifically impact black neighborhoods, is racist.
by joatmon-snoo | 2025-12-31 23:26:20+00:00
The argument for not using electric sharpeners is that they (1) cut down the lifetime of your knife substantially and (2) they do a mediocre job of sharpening.

Mechanically, it's just high-abrasive motorized spinning discs at preset angles. So rather than getting a good edge by taking a few microns of material off by doing it manually, you get an OK edge by taking 0.2mm off at a time. (If 0.2mm doesn't sound like a lot, think about how many mm wide your knife is.)

---

I'm personally 50-50 on this advice: most people don't sharpen their knives at all, and I think people are better off getting 10 OK years out of a knife than 50 terrible years out of it.

I'm also not willing to learn how to use a whetstone, so I landed in the middle on this: https://worksharptools.com/products/precision-adjust-knife-s...
by ibizaman | 2025-12-31 23:26:52+00:00
I agree. Keeping your data private is just not a big enough motivation. For me though the big issue is making sure one keeps access to their data forever. It’s so easy these days to use everything from one vendor and then get access shut off with no recourse. That is IMO the biggest fear everyone should have these days.

Yes, the only solution is self-hosting and yes it requires being your own sysadmin and it’s hard and not convenient. That’s why I’m building https://github.com/ibizaman/selfhostblocks. It’s a NixOS collection of modules that sets up services that fit well together and have declarative setup for LDAP and SSO. They have integrated backups, https and other features required for self-hosting. Also, the LDAP and SSO setup is tested with e2e NixOS VM tests that use playwright to make sure users can login if they have access.

I’m hoping to lower the bar to self-hosting significantly.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-12-31 23:27:32+00:00
You are putting forward a false equivalence between social networks and accessing information.

Meanwhile actual studies on the topic show that social network actually creates addiction - who could have guessed when they were literally engineered for engagement - and have deleterious effects on health especially for teenagers.

This is not a free speech issue. This is a public health issue. This is the digital equivalent of the tobacco industry we are talking about, not a library.
by tyre | 2025-12-31 23:28:10+00:00
Ain’t no way you want flying taxis in Manhattan. If two collide or one fails, you could kill dozens of people.

Maaaaybe instead of the tunnels and bridges, to increase throughput during rush hours, but even then we’re trying to have fewer vehicles in Manhattan, not more.

Also, I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through an intersection during the winter. You would be hit with a wall of cross-cutting wind tunneling down 50 blocks that no airborne device is going to handle well. Absolute nightmare.
by dzonga | 2025-12-31 23:28:41+00:00
the rather uninformed question I had: but answered in comments below

was why not solar ? Yeah Hydrocarbons have no competition if you have to deploy power quickly

1.2GW is a small turbine - compared to the land & battery needed for Solar.

how about Gas ? if you're building in the middle of nowhere ? & there's no gas lines ?
by observationist | 2025-12-31 23:29:06+00:00
Manning makes sense - all the details fit, and there aren't that many. Publishing is a stupid business that makes less and less sense every passing day. Self publishing and going through an outlet, marketing for yourself, or contracting out the relevant tasks, will save you a ton of money for anything publishers can offer anymore. They survive more and more often on grift and network effects that are increasingly irrelevant and often run counter to the interests of a given author or work.

Glad the author got out relatively unscathed.

Self publish - especially with AI available to get you through the stuff where you just need superficial or process knowledge, like which firms to hire and how to market a self-published work, what boilerplate legal protections you need. You'll get 99% of the value of a big publishing firm at a small fraction of the cost, and you won't have to put up with someone else taking a cut just because they know a few things that they don't want to tell you in order to justify taking your money.
Axion One OS
by yigrem | 2025-12-31 23:29:06+00:00
The AXION One OS architecture represents the convergence of software engineering and cognitive science. By rigorously defining the mechanisms of Global Workspace Synchronization, Internal Reality Awareness, and Consciousness Metrics, we move beyond the "Black Box" of current AI.
We are proposing a transparent, measurable, and self-regulating "Glass Box"—a machine that knows it is a machine, understands its world, and seeks to optimize its existence within it. This is not just intelligent automation; it is the genesis of Machine Consciousness.

For just to know little my axion One OS that have:
“ The "Conscious" Cybersecurity Agent cybersecurity in AXION One of:
1. Perception: The Network Agent sees a spike in traffic (Input). It binds this to a vector: V_{spike}.
2. Competition: V_{spike} competes for the Global Workspace. Because it represents a potential threat (High Free Energy/Surprise), it wins the spotlight.
3. Broadcast: V_{spike} is ignited. The Security Agent, User Agent, and World Model all receive it.
4. Internal Simulation (Endocortex):
• The World Model simulates: "If this is a DDoS, server goes down."
• The Security Agent simulates: "If I block port 80, user loses access."
5. Synergy (\Omega < 0): The agents combine outputs. They realize the traffic is coming from a known partner IP but at an unusual rate.
6. Action: The system decides to throttle rather than block.
7. Narrative: The Self-Model records: "I felt anxious about the traffic spike, but realized it was a partner, so I gently slowed them down."
8. Metric: During this event, \Phi spikes (high integration), and H shifts to 0.75 (high complexity).”

I have seen your invitation on LinkedIn that for your stated difficulty to have such multi agent OS I believe the architecture system design I have developed that in prototype locally I am running my AXION one OS will be the most position multi agent OS, I have joined (yigrem tamiru yugrem130591@gmail.com)Y Combinator co-founder matching I am keep looking but I couldn’t find hard tech co-founder that truly hacker level can co-found AXION One OS. I look forward to discuss more further.

Thanks
by WorkerBee28474 | 2025-12-31 23:29:19+00:00
Berkshire had a pivot where, decades back, Munger convinced Buffett to switch from investing in bad companies at a great price to good companies at a good price. Their new strategy is still active.

That said, the turnaround 'mission' you mention about still happens, but is more associated with private equity than Berkshire.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-12-31 23:29:35+00:00
>Better nothing be done than keep inventing new ways to oppress humanity

Well, you are correct. But you see people want to have a sense of control, so they think that doing SOMETHING is better that nothing, not realizing that often in some situations,s inaction is the best course of action. Among other examples where I think inaction is good are free markets and many cancer treatments.
by jimbo808 | 2025-12-31 23:29:56+00:00
Honestly, I respect the commitment. It's almost certainly a bad decision, but a founder that can turn down a 9 figure exit at the tail end of a tech bubble he's right in the middle of, has a good chance at having the right mindset to build a great company and survive the collapse. There's a good chance he regrets this for the rest of his life, but you can't argue that he wasn't a true believer or is a sellout.
by dsr_ | 2025-12-31 23:29:57+00:00
"Historically black" is a euphemism -- that's a term that makes people feel better about something awful -- which refers to the fact that for the majority of the last three hundred years people have been systematically, governmentally, socially and personally discriminated against because of the color of their skin, and that racism led to massive inequity reflected in wealth, income, education and standards of living.

The facts of history show this. It is not a subtle statistical effect.

People who argue the way that you have been are either woefully ignorant of this matter or are playing games trying to justify the status quo, or are just racist trolls. This isn't a FAQ on HN because it's a FAQ in real life.