MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sfink | 2025-12-02 20:40:07+00:00
> Technological advancement is what has pulled billions of people out of poverty.

I agree with this. Perhaps that's what is driving the current billionaire class to say "never again!" and making sure that they capture all the value instead of letting any of it slip away and make it into the unwashed undeserving hands of lesser beings.

Chatbots actually can bring a lot of benefit to society at large. As in, they have the raw capability to. (I can't speak to whether it's worth the cost.) But that's not going to improve poverty this time around, because it's magnifying the disparities in wealth distribution and the haves aren't showing any brand new willingness to give anything up in order to even things out.

> Giving handouts to layabouts isn't an ideal allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization.

I agree with this too. Neither is giving handouts to billionaires (or the not quite as eye-wateringly wealthy class). However, giving handouts to struggling people who will improve their circumstances is a very good allocation of resources if we want to progress as a civilization. We haven't figured out any foolproof way of ensuring such money doesn't fall into the hands of layabouts or billionaires, but that's not an adequate reason to not do it at all. Perfect is the enemy of the good.

Some of those "layabouts" physically cannot do anything with it other than spending it on drugs, and that's an example of a set of people who we should endeavor to not give handouts to. (At least, not ones that can be easily exchanged for drugs.) Some of those billionaires similarly have no mental ability of ever using that money in a way that benefits anyone. (Including themselves; they're past the point that the numbers in their bank accounts have any effect on their lives.) That hasn't seemed to stop us from allowing things to continue in a way that funnels massive quantities of money to them.

It is a choice. If people en masse were really and truly bothered by this, we have more than enough mechanisms to change things. Those mechanisms are being rapidly dismantled, but we are nowhere near the point where figurative pitchforks and torches are ineffective.
by bluecalm | 2025-12-02 20:40:36+00:00
When I was playing poker for living there was a spreadsheet meme. There was always some guy who was losing consistently but declared everything will change from tomorrow because he now made a spreadsheet with an exact plan going forward. The spreadsheet usually contained general things like 8 hours of sleep, healthy food, "be disciplined", "study the game for 2 hours a day" etc.

Of course it never worked because if he knew what he should be doing he would be doing it already instead of hoping for spreadsheet magic to change the course.

>>There will be a daily call for those tasked with improving the chatbot, the memo said, and Altman encouraged temporary team transfers to speed up development.

Sam Altman clearly didn't get the memo.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-02 20:40:38+00:00
Look what happened in Austin, TX, which has much less housing regulation tamping down construction than CA (despite a good deal of local NIMBYism).

Prices spiked during the pandemic, and in response a shit ton of housing was built, much of it multifamily residential. Rents went down significantly and home prices are down 20% since the peak.
by ralferoo | 2025-12-02 20:41:35+00:00
Yeah, I have all my _acme_challenge as their own zone so that BIND can auto increment the serial number without going through the pain of locking/unlocking the entire domain and hoping you don't end up with stale data that stops syncing.

That said, I like that the current system proves that you have control of the domain at the time of renewal, and I'm not sure how setting a one-off token would achieve the same.
by viraptor | 2025-12-02 20:41:55+00:00
More hassle than being blocked from spending thousands, hanging on multiple calls, debugging support APIs, chasing docs, repeatedly posting feedback, posting for help in HN? Sorry, but this doesn't compute.

You don't need to change your phone to get a new account. And you don't have to change your personal email. And definitely don't need to change the physical device.
by gloosx | 2025-12-02 20:41:58+00:00
If LLMs truly "understood architecture" in the engineering sense, they would not hallucinate, contradict themselves, or miss edge cases that even a mid-level engineer catches instinctively.

They are powerful tools but they are not engineers.

And its not about legal responsibility at all. Developers dont go to jail for mistakes, but they are responsible within the engineering hierarchy. A pilot is not legally liable for Boeing's corporate decisions, and the plane can mostly fly on the autopilot, but you still need a pilot in the cockpit.

AI cannot replace the human whose technical judgment is required to supervise, validate, and interpret AI-generated systems.
by kouteiheika | 2025-12-02 20:42:35+00:00
> Is there any evidence that we're getting some crappy lobotomized models while the companies keep the best for themselves? It seems fairly obvious that they're tripping over each other in a race to give the market the highest intelligence at the lowest price.

Yes? All of those models are behind an API, which can be taken away at any time, for any reason.

Also, have you followed the release of gpt-oss, which the overlords at OpenAI graciously gave us (and only because Chinese open-weight releases lit a fire under them)? It was so heavily censored and lobotomized that it has become a meme in the local LLM community. Even when people forcibly abliterate it to remove the censorship it still wastes a ton of tokens when thinking to check whether the query is "compliant with policy".

Do not be fooled. The whole "safety" talk isn't actually about making anything safe. It's just a smoke screen. It's about control. Remember back in the GPT-3 days how OpenAI was saying that they won't release the model because it would be terribly, terribly unsafe? And yet nowadays we have open weight model orders of magnitude more intelligent than GPT-3, and yet the sky hasn't fallen over.

It never was about safety. It never will be. It's about control.
by ceejayoz | 2025-12-02 20:42:43+00:00
Article buries the lede a little:

> Elon Musk’s charitable foundation grew larger than ever in 2024. But, for the fourth year in a row, the huge charity failed to give away the minimum amount required by law — and the donations it did make went largely to charities closely tied to Mr. Musk himself.

> The Musk Foundation gave away that remainder in 2024, largely by shifting money to the other nonprofits in his orbit. But it still fell $393 million short of the minimum required giving for 2024 itself. This pattern can repeat indefinitely: Mr. Musk’s foundation now has until the end of 2025 to give away the donations it failed to give in 2024.

And the usual Musk honesty:

> In the same interview, Mr. Musk said, “I have a large foundation, but I don’t put my name on it.” Mr. Musk’s charitable foundation has been called the Musk Foundation since he founded it with his younger brother, Kimbal, in 2001.
by dlgeek | 2025-12-02 20:42:50+00:00
You want those people specifically. To get them, you need to hire them for a lot more money than you pay your current folks. That causes a lot of resentment with folks and messes up things like salary bands, etc.

But since they own equity in the current company, you can give them a ton of money by buying out that equity/paying acquisition bonuses that are conditional on staying for specific amounts of time, etc. And your current staff doesn't feel left out because "it's an acquisition" the way they would if you just paid some engineers 10x or 100x what you pay them.
by logsr | 2025-12-02 20:43:09+00:00
JS/TS has a fundamental advantage, because there is more open source JS/TS than any other language, so LLMs training on JS/TS have more to work with. Combine that with having the largest developer community, which means you have more people using LLMs to write JS/TS than any other language, and people use it more because it works better, then the advantage compounds as you retrain on usage data.
by pscanf | 2025-12-02 20:43:11+00:00
Hey German. Congrats on shipping the project!

Reading the "Why another CRDT / OT library?" I like that you seem to have taken a "Pareto approach": going for a simpler solution, even if not theoretically perfect. In the past few months I've been building a local-first app, and I've been a bit overwhelmed by the complexity of CRDTs.

The goal that I have with my app is to allow syncing between devices via Dropbox / Google Drive / iCloud or any another file-syncing server that the user is already using. I don't want to host a sync server for my users, and I don't want my users to need to self-host either.

Do you think it would be possible to use Dropbox as the sync "transport" for DocNode documents? I'm thinking: since a server is needed, one device could be designated as the server, and the others as clients. (Assuming a trusted environment with no rogue clients.)
by KaiserPro | 2025-12-02 20:43:33+00:00
Yeah this was the thing.

Basically there are four tribes in meta: Product, Advertising, Infra & other.

Facebook had the most comprehensive onboarding I've ever had at a place, literally 5 weeks of learning. We had actual lessons on data laws, rules that facebook has and why they are there. Lots of talk about how to speak up for the user and that kind of stuff. Loads of do the right thing, if in doubt choose the user, long term growth over short term gain, that sort of shit.

And where I worked, that was kinda the experience, We had reasonable debates about user experience and the like. The data storage system is setup so that you don't really need to think about storing data securely or privately because thats the default.

But

I was in the "other" tribe so I didn't have the same pressure. My "impact" that I had to deliver wasn't to do with moving metrics, or making money.

The real problem is that to get promoted, you need to, every 6 months, deliver something that has impact. And a good way to get impact is to move a metric, or get more cash.

combine that with naivety, and you get the scandals that we see.

Instgram kids USP was basically that it would an app that was tailored to kids, and there would be some parent tools to help shame the algorithm. There wasn't any budget to spend on proper moderation, so there would be loads of content that was be designed to warp/groom/fuckup young minds. I think the main concession was that DMs would be turned off. It would have been a walled garden, but with no real controls. Perhaps there might have been algorithm tweaks to avoid promoting certain topics.

That was the rumour at least.

Anyway, it would have been a shit show, so there was a concerted effort to leak it to the press, because the "product council" were like "fuck yeah, tiktok does it, lets do it too, we're fucking gods who made reels a thing, what the fuck do you know?"

but the real sketchy shit is in advertising, and where it crosses into product. They know that some of these metric boosting changes are bad, but because they make money, they allow it. Thats where the rules are deliberately bent or broken. The rest of the time is just naivety, by idealistic shelters young colleges types.

Lastly, Facebook can't really do new products. So if your app or thing cant easily be added to instagram/facebook, and needs its own standalone app/site, you're probably fine.
by AndyKelley | 2025-12-02 20:43:39+00:00
A deadlock.

For example, the function is called immediately, rather than being run in a separate thread, causing it to block forever on accept(), because the connect() is after the call to async().

If concurrent() is used instead, the I/O implementation will spawn a new thread for the function, so that the accept() is handled by the new thread, or it will return error.ConcurrencyUnavailable.

async() is infallible. concurrent() is fallible.
by jaketoronto | 2025-12-02 20:43:41+00:00
Are you limiting your # of connections to postgres to 8? Is this unnecessarily throttling your throughput? This seems like quite the bottleneck... connection pools are good when your app is overwhelming your db.. but in this case, you really should be trying to put more load on Postgres... I'm concerned that this whole experiment is tainted by this choke point. I would love to see this tested again with a much larger connection pool. (Also, might be nice for you to share what the CPU and thread usage on the Postgres side was during this). (Side note: I'm a big fan of sqlite.. but I've run into lots of performance bottlenecks caused by arbitrarily low connection pools and the like)
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-02 20:43:51+00:00
It's not just OpenAI's fuckup with the specific training method - although yes, training on raw user feedback is spectacularly dumb, and it's something even the teams at CharacterAI learned the hard way at least a year before OpenAI shoot its foot off with the same genius idea.

It's also a bit of a failure to understand that many LLM behaviors are self-reinforcing across context, and keep tabs on that.

When the AI sees its past behavior, that shapes its future behavior. If an AI sees "I'm doing X", it may also see that as "I should be doing X more". And at long enough contexts, this can drastically change AI behavior. Small random deviations can build up to crushing behavioral differences.

And if AI has a strong innate bias - like a sycophancy bias? Oh boy.

This applies to many things, some of which we care about (errors, hallucinations, unsafe behavior) and some of which we don't (specific formatting, message length, terminology and word choices).
by atmavatar | 2025-12-02 20:44:21+00:00
The US federal budget in 2024 had outlays of 6.8 trillion dollars [1].

nVidia's current market cap (nearly all AI investment) is currently 4.4 trillion dollars [2][3].

While that's hardly an exact or exhaustive accounting of AI spending, I believe it does demonstrate that AI investment is clearly in the same order of magnitude as government spending, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually surpassed government spending for a full year, let alone half of one.

1. https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61181

2. https://www.google.com/finance/quote/NVDA:NASDAQ

3. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/nvidias-market-cap-tops-4poi...
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-02 20:44:47+00:00
> Nobody pisses off the execs...

This is pretty laughably false. Sure, the CEO has a lot of power and I've certainly seen companies relocate so they are basically within walking distance from the CEO's house.

But "execs" covers a lot of people, and nobody gives a shit where the CIO or VP of engineering lives. If anything, these folks are more career driven and are expected to up and move at the drop of a hat if business conditions warrant.
by bblaylock | 2025-12-02 20:45:18+00:00
This reads more like Anthropic wanted to hire Jarred and Jarred wants to work with AI rather than build a Saas product around bun. I doubt it has anything to do with what is best for bun the project. Considering bun always seemed to value performance more than all else, the only real way for them to continue pursuing that value would be to move into the actual js engine design. This seems like a good pivot for Jarred personally and likely a loss for bun.
by jmonty900 | 2025-12-02 20:45:29+00:00
> Apple's iOS powered an estimated 4.5% of 735 million smartphones in India by mid-2025, with the rest using Android, Counterpoint Research says.

Sounds like Google should be the one leading the charge against this. Will be interesting to see what they do.

> The app is mainly designed to help users block and track lost or stolen smartphones across all telecom networks, using a central registry.

It's an app. That's all it does now (presumably). Once installed, it can be changed in the future to do all kinds of terrible things. This is big brother.
by QuercusMax | 2025-12-02 20:45:36+00:00
In our local schools, they don't make *teachers* responsible for enforcing the bans. Students have to keep their phones in a Yondr pouch. If they're caught with their phone it will be confiscated (and require a parent to pick it up), and the administration will give also give additional consequences such as being banned from extracurriculars or school activities like Prom.

My student tells me that in practice many students don't keep their phone in the pouch, but they are very careful about how and when they use them. Many teachers have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy - if I don't see you using the phone, and it's not disruptive, then they don't care.
by pjdesno | 2025-12-02 20:45:49+00:00
To expand on rahimnathwani's comment below - the big capital costs of a data center are land, the building itself, the power distribution and the cooling.

You can get a lot of land for a million bucks, and it doesn't cost all that much to build what's basically a big 2-story warehouse, so the primary capital costs are power and cooling. (in fact, in some older estimates, the capital to build that power+cooling cost more per year than the electricity itself)

My understanding is that although power and cooling infrastructure are long-lived compared to computers, they still depreciate faster than the building, so they dominate costs even more than the raw price would indicate.

The state of the art in power and cooling is basically defined by the cost to feed X MW of computing, where that cost includes both capital and operation, and of course lower is better. That means that at a particular SOTA, and at an appropriate scale for that technology, the cost of the facility is a constant overhead on top of the cost of the equipment it houses. To a rough approximation, of course.
by simonw | 2025-12-02 20:46:10+00:00
I've seen a bunch of other estimates / claims of a %50-60 margin for Anthropic on serving. This was just the first one I found a credible-looking link I could drop into this discussion.

The best one is from the Information, but they're behind a paywall so not useful to link to. https://www.theinformation.com/articles/anthropic-projects-7...
by nitwit005 | 2025-12-02 20:46:37+00:00
They still want you to write in an academic style, even if that style is fairly different.

I was once asked to write to then governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to sway him on some political issue. That's certainly a practical assignment, but I chatted with some classmates about it, and none of us thought the professor would give a good grade to something that might genuinely sway the man.
by panick21_ | 2025-12-02 20:47:01+00:00
The framing of X or Y are job creators is idiotic. Its literally the most basic fact of economics that you need producers and consumers, otherwise you don't have an economy.

The more economically correct way to express this would be that entrepreneurs and companies who innovated increase productivity and that makes the overall economy more efficient allowing your country to grow.

> Or maybe it was trickle down economics. Trickle up economics still end up with the rich getting the money since we all buy things from companies they own, it just goes through everyone else first. Trickle down cuts out the middleman, which unfortunately is all of us.

This just sounds like quarter baked economics ideas you have made up yourself. Neither 'trickle down' nor 'trickle up' are concepts economist use. And that you confidently assert anything about the social outcomes of these 'concepts' is ridiculous.
by more_corn | 2025-12-02 20:47:04+00:00
As far as I’ve been able to gather, the image of the house was posted BY SOMEONE ELSE. The image of the firearm was posted from a country where firearms are legal. There was no threatening language in his post of the firearm. All charges were ultimately dropped (though he was arrested and spent time in jail over the post)

The thing you fail to understand is how afraid of guns British people can be.

There was an article a few years ago about a British man, ex army. The story goes someone threw a bag of shotguns over his fence. He found them. Brought them inside for safekeeping overnight, brought them to the police station first thing in the morning. Arrested and charged for possession.

As far as I can tell he posted a picture containing a gun. This scared someone who reported it. The police arrested him. No further evidence of a crime was found and he was not charged.
by ardata | 2025-12-02 20:47:08+00:00
Ran clean for me:

=== Prima Veritas OSS — Hash Check (iris) ===

normalized → MATCH Expected: EF28EA082C882A3F9379A57E05C929D76E98899E151A6746B07D8D899644372F Actual: EF28EA082C882A3F9379A57E05C929D76E98899E151A6746B07D8D899644372F

kmeans → MATCH Expected: DA96D0505BCB1A5A2B826CEB1AA7C34073CB88CB29AE1236006FA4B0F0D74C46 Actual: DA96D0505BCB1A5A2B826CEB1AA7C34073CB88CB29AE1236006FA4B0F0D74C46

Hashcheck PASSED — outputs match golden hashes.

---------

Next step is probably benchmarking this against sklearn? Accuracy comparison and performance hit from all the rounding operations. Anyone here working in maritime auditing, medical data, or other regulated stuff - would you actually use something like this? Trying to figure out if crypto- verifiable analytics is solving a real problem or just a cool technical exercise.
by cachius | 2025-12-02 20:47:22+00:00
Also one of LBW, LINE or LOW?

LBW is a Linux system call translator for Windows. It allows you to run unmodified Linux applications on top of Windows.

It is not virtualisation; only one operating system is running, which is Windows. It is not emulation; Linux applications run directly on the processor, resulting in (theoretically) full native performance.

Consider it as being like WINE, but in reverse.

https://cowlark.com/lbw/index.html https://github.com/davidgiven/LBW

LINE Is Not an Emulator. LINE executes unmodified Linux applications on Windows 98/2000 by intercepting Linux system calls. The Linux applications themselves are not emulated. They run directly on the CPU like all other Windows applications.

LINE runs best on Windows 2000

https://web.archive.org/web/20010803130404/http://line.sourc...

Call me crazy, but I've wanted to run a linux binary natively under windows for a while now; kinda like wine, but in reverse.

Well, the other day I was browsing through the MSDN docs (as you do) and discovered that it is possible to install a "vectored" exception handler. A quick bit of test code later, and I discovered that I can trap "int 0x80" instructions using this technique--those are used by linux binaries to initiate syscalls

https://web.archive.org/web/20100409222341/http://netevil.or...
by BeetleB | 2025-12-02 20:47:25+00:00
> But importantly the ChatGPT app experience at least for iPhone/Mac users is drastically superior vs Google which feels very Google still. So Gemini would have to be drastically better answer wise than ChatGPT to lure users from a better UI/UX experience to Gemini.

Yes, the ChatGPT experience is much better. No, Gemini doesn't need to make a better product to take market share.

I've never had the ChatGPT app. But my Android phone has the Gemini app. For free, I can do a lot with it. Granted, on my PC I do a lot more with all the models via paid API access - but on the phone the Gemini app is fine enough. I have nothing to gain by installing the ChatGPT app, even if it is objectively superior. Who wants to create another account?

And that'll be the case for most Android users. As a general hint: If someone uses ChatGPT but has no idea about gpt-4o vs gpt-5 vs gpt-5.1 etc, they'll do just fine with the Gemini app.

Now the Gemini app actually sucks in so many ways (it doesn't seem to save my chats). Google will fix all these issues, but can overtake ChatGPT even if they remain an inferior product.

It's Slack vs Teams all over again. Teams one by a large margin. And Teams still sucks!