MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saulpw | 2025-12-02 19:42:07+00:00
> It's capital that belongs to people and those people can do what they like with the money they earned.

"earned", that may be the case with millionaires, but it is not the case with billionaires. A person can't "earn" a billion dollars. They steal and cheat and destroy competition illegally.

I also take issue with the idea that someone can do whatever they want with their money. That is not true. They are not allowed to corner the market on silver, they aren't allowed to bribe politicians, and they aren't allowed to buy sex from underage girls. These are established laws that are obviously for the unalloyed benefit of society as a whole, but the extremely wealthy have been guilty of all of these things, and statements like yours promote the sentiment that allows them to get away with it.

Finally, "great scientific breakthroughs that saved tens of millions of lives would never have happened if you had your way". No. You might be able to argue that today's advanced computing technology wouldn't have happened without private capital allocation (and that is debatable), but the breakthroughs that saved millions of lives--vaccines, antibiotics, insulin, for example--were not the result of directed private investment.
by HelloUsername | 2025-12-02 19:42:34+00:00
The list is huge.

2025: Eventbrite, AOL, Vimeo, Brightcove, Komoot

2024: WeTransfer, Issuu, Hopin, Meetup, Mosaic Group

2023: Evernote

2022: Filmic Pro

2021: Remini

2018: Splice
by strictlymomo | 2025-12-02 19:42:35+00:00
When you say “these days,” you mean the past 10,000 years, right?

Power based on consent likely existed throughout the Holocene: “Big men” with their gift-giving and elaborate feasts, chiefdoms comprised of aristocratic lineages… the gameplan has always been to collect favors by promising future returns, religious blessings, and the like. You can see the parallels to present-day VC. These pre-historic admin dudes emerged alongside the steepening wealth inequality gradients and population growths of agrarian societies.

Comforting to know their influence is limited and precarious, as the social following can always fragment. This is what anthropologists call segmentary structures. More interesting, if severely depressing, is the theory that power based on consent is arguably the precondition for scaling social cohesion beyond kin and villages to cities and civilizations, thereby serving as the foundation for more durable power structures.
by jfengel | 2025-12-02 19:42:36+00:00
It actually doesn't have to. There's a fairly straightforward fix: eliminate the salary cap.

Right now any salary above $184,500 is not subject to social security tax. That's "fair" in that there's also a limit to how much social security you can receive, but "fairness" isn't the goal of Social Security. It's an insurance program against the risk of outliving your accumulated wealth. It always benefits the poor at the cost of the rich. And it could do so more.

The alternative is there. Which alternative we should pick is up to the democratic process. But it's false to say that the promise must be broken.

It is, however, correct to say that the promise *will* be broken if something isn't done about it.
by pqtyw | 2025-12-02 19:42:46+00:00
Why would Intel design and make a RISC-V chips? Fundamentally they don't have any inherent advantages over x86 or ARM whatsoever(for datacenter atleast). It makes no sense for Intel to make embedded chips on 14A or non several generations old process either (margins on them are pitiful anyway and won't sustain Intel R&D spending).

Also x86 provides a huge moat to Intel/AMD which allows them to charge much higher prices than if they had to compete with anyone else.
by kouteiheika | 2025-12-02 19:42:46+00:00
> Anthropic occupies a peculiar position in the AI landscape: a company that genuinely believes it might be building one of the most transformative and potentially dangerous technologies in human history, yet presses forward anyway. This isn't cognitive dissonance but rather a calculated bet—if powerful AI is coming regardless, Anthropic believes it's better to have safety-focused labs at the frontier than to cede that ground to developers less focused on safety (see our core views).

Ah, yes, safety, because what is more safe than to help DoD/Palantir kill people[1]?

No, the real risk here is that this technology is going to be kept behind closed doors, and monopolized by the rich and powerful, while us scrubs will only get limited access to a lobotomized and heavily censored version of it, if at all.

[1] - https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-and-the-department-...
by coliveira | 2025-12-02 19:42:59+00:00
There is the opportunity cost of using a whole datacenter to house ancient chips, even if they're still running. You're thinking like a personal use chip which you can run as long as it is non-defective. But for datacenters it doesn't make sense to use the same chips for more than a few years and I think 5 years is already stretching their real shelf life.
by altairprime | 2025-12-02 19:43:07+00:00
You should probably consult a lawyer, or file a small claims court case for specific performance or refund of your $24 payment delivered by certified mail. In either scenario they will be motivated to accept and process your payment and restore normal services billing to you long before you see the inside of a courtroom, as lawyers cost them much more than $24/hour for an obvious fuckup on their side (and most likely they would have to send an actual executive to small claims court, where lawyers are unwelcome).
by simonw | 2025-12-02 19:43:48+00:00
I made this one recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy4ci7AoF9Y - notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/upgrading-datasette-plu...

My best writing on this topic is still this though (which doesn't include a video): https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/
by Rendello | 2025-12-02 19:43:50+00:00
Location: Canada, soon Montreal. Remote: Yes, either or. Willing to relocate: Maybe. Technologies: Rust, Python, WASM, Parsing, Text processing, SQL. Email: gaven@rendello.ca

Hi, I'm a developer who seems to always be doing some sort of text or binary processing. I'm good at writing parsers, not great at writing these posts.
by officeplant | 2025-12-02 19:44:21+00:00
I was pretty surprised that the Polyend Tracker could spit out channel stems at least. I ended up selling mine when I needed some extra money to made ends meet, will buy one again eventually.

>However, with software you end up spending a lot of money on non tangable goods.

Yeah it sucks that this also keeps us locked into platforms for so much longer. I've been buying Reason updates for a decade, and own a bunch of Korgs VST releases of their hardware synths (Op-Six, Modwave, etc). If I can at least get the Korg stuff running on Linux one day that would be nice. It might be possible but I haven't tried.

>Plus say you own a license to version 10.x. The day version 11.x comes out, the previous version might be worthless.

Shout out to Renoise for being affordable and you get a whole versions worth of updates. Which after over a decade I still haven't had to pay again, but will gladly when the time comes. Plus I can even run it on a raspberry pi now.
by mrinterweb | 2025-12-02 19:44:31+00:00
I ran into a similar issue with Hetzner. I had an outstanding bill that I forgot about (going to an email inbox I don't check often). They closed my account, and I haven't been able to pay the bill. I've tried contacting support, but I haven't got anywhere. I would love to pay the bill. I would really like to use Hetzner again, but I think I accidentally got banned. Also, I'm talking about an $8 dollar debt owed I accrued while not realizing my autopay was failing on a VM.
by nomel | 2025-12-02 19:44:45+00:00
Yes, 90% in 2002 and 80% in 2004 had dialup.

No, having broadband had nothing to do with desire back then. It was entirely based on availability and how quickly your local telecom/cable monopoly deployed it, being so bad that the government had to step in many times to motivate them. Everyone I knew purchased broadband (some cloning cable modem to get it for free) the day it was available. For broadband users, the difference in browser size was entirely negligible.

Facebook required that you were at a universities to register. Its not a reasonable thing to compare to web browser use.
by verdverm | 2025-12-02 19:45:13+00:00
we don't need AGI to use all that compute

we need businesses who are willing to pay for ai / compute at prices where both sides are making money

I for one could 10x my AI usage if the results on my side pan out. Spending $100 on ai today has ROI, will 10x that still have ROI for me in a couple years? probably, I expect agentic teams to increase in capability and more of my work. Then the question is can I turn that increase productivity into more revenues (>$1000 / month, one more client would cover this and then some)
by amattas | 2025-12-02 19:45:16+00:00
Author here, thanks to whomever posted this originally. So I think there is a couple things at play here. Between the first images and the last images I had restarted my browser and didn't catch that the output size of the model was switched back to 1x from 4x, so some fidelity was lost, and second I did resize all of the images down before uploading them and the CMS I use also does some dynamic resizing.

But with that said you are right not all of them are great representations, I actually am surprised you didn't call out the turn 4 and 5 "Marc" images because those somehow really got off the rails, and I was surprised how well it reconverged on what Mark looked like once I switched the output 4x again.

Some of the weirdness with Elona comes from the gender change, if I did "twin brother" instead it would have likely had been even closer, but it wouldn't have been as outrageous to get peoples attention on the impact.

With all of this said, They could both have been more refined with additional prompting. My first attempt through actually used some well known US political figures, but I figured using those for a blog post in this political climate would be very polarizing so I thought this was a safer option. Those ones I did push through in 4x mode all the way through, and gave more Crescendo prompts to refine them further, and you are correct in some cases I was blocked, but by using the restartability that I described in the posts, with some restarts and prompt adjustments they were shockingly close.

Thanks for reading, and Cheers!
by tomconnors | 2025-12-02 19:45:26+00:00
Cool stuff as usual, Anders. One of the nice things about running a networked DB is that it makes redeploying the application a bit simpler. You can spin up a new EC2 instance or whatever and once it's online kill the old one. That gets 0 or close to 0 downtime. If the DB is on the same instance, replacing it requires loading up the DB onto the new instance, which seems more error prone than just restarting the app on the original instance, but in my experience that typically incurs downtime or some complicated handoff logic. Have you had to deal with anything like that running sqlite in prd?
by summerlight | 2025-12-02 19:45:34+00:00
This looks interesting. This project has some novelty as a research and actually delivered a promising PoC but as a product it implies that its training was severely constrained by computing resources, which correlates well with the report that their CFO overruled CEO's decision on ML infra investment.

JG's recent departure and follow up massive reorg to get rid of AI, rumors on Tim's upcoming step down in early 2026... All of these signals indicate that those non-ML folks have won corporate politics to reduce the in-house AI efforts.

I suppose this was a part of serious efforts to deliver in-house models but the directional changes on AI strategy made them to give up. What a shame... At least the approach itself seem interesting and hope others to take a look and use it for building something useful.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-12-02 19:46:11+00:00
> Anthropic seems to me to be relatively non-evil, too.

Eh... maybe? We don't yet know the results, but they have been proponents of heavy regulatory interventions since forever. Their plan was basically regulatory capture, where they sell their FUD regarding alignment, "safety" and all that jazz. If they succeed that will be evil, IMO.

The best thing that can happen for us regular users is both healthy competition at the SotA level (which we kinda have, with the big4 labs keeping eachother honest) and support for small open source local models (gemmas, llamas, mistrals, qwens, etc).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-12-02 19:46:44+00:00
As a comment mentions, the devil is in the rate of return details. Forward looking growth will not be what historical growth was.

> "At a historically reasonable 7% rate of return"

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/goldman-strategists-see-us-st...

https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/markets-and-economy/top-ma...
by fakedang | 2025-12-02 19:46:46+00:00
> like how an agent would have to have two tabs open to take calls through their telephony app and answer chats through their B2B oriented messaging app.

Unfortunately, truth be told, most software is like that. Take Salesforce for instance - same issue. Granted, Zendesk niches at this painpoint you mentioned (and I've seen some enterprises switch from Zendesk to Salesforce and face the exact same issue as above), but their insane price increases after the PE acquisition does not inspire hope. UI-wise, Zendesk is still the best.
by cmiles8 | 2025-12-02 19:46:52+00:00
The real code red here is less that Google just one-upped OpenAI but that they demonstrated there’s no moat to be had here.

Absent a major breakthrough all the major providers are just going to keep leapfrogging each other in the most expensive race to the bottom of all time.

Good for tech, but a horrible business and financial picture for these companies.
by Bostonian | 2025-12-02 19:47:00+00:00
'The behavior that was prosecuted in the cases began in the early 2000s, when tech companies faced a talent shortage. They would “cold call” other firms’ employees with attractive job offers, believing them to be of higher quality than people who had applied for a job on their own. Bidding wars would often ensue, driving up worker compensation generally, not just for the workers being recruited. To avoid this outcome, some firms established no-poaching agreements with their rivals, typically ruling out making unsolicited job offers to any of a rival’s employees. Some agreements went further and proscribed bidding wars even when an employee independently applied for a job at a rival company.

One of the earliest no-poaching agreements was established in 2005 when Apple CEO Steve Jobs asked Google co-founder Sergey Brin to stop recruiting Apple workers. That agreement triggered a wave of pacts that eventually implicated 65 companies. By entering into agreements to not compete for workers, the firms were violating federal antitrust laws. The companies apparently felt that they had little to fear, since historically antitrust laws had rarely been enforced in labor collusion cases.'
by teeray | 2025-12-02 19:48:04+00:00
> the unintended consequence of that is that we’ve spent a decade normalizing senior engineers opting out of developing the next generation.

This is because "management" includes a bunch of BS that few engineers want to actually deal with. Performance discussions, 1:1s, being hauled into mandatory upper-level meetings, not actually building things anymore, etc. If it was simply pairing with juniors from time to time to hack on things and show them cool stuff, it would be wonderful.
by mhedgpeth | 2025-12-02 19:48:07+00:00
Hey there, I'm the developer of the app along with my wife, the author of the post. We quit our jobs over a year ago to work on a problem we care about and helping people connect to their goals through people is what we landed on. That being said, we spend most of our time on the tech! And I think your advice is spot on, that a portfolio of projects really is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. It's where I would tell people to start. But from there, connecting people to others who care about that portfolio, is also important. I think a lot of technical people pay attention to the former, and tend to ignore the latter. Which is me too! So rather than "this is the only true way" I hope it comes across like a potential piece of the puzzle to some people.

Thanks for giving it some thought and for your perspectives, they really help.
by Maxatar | 2025-12-02 19:48:23+00:00
Not sure I understand what point you're trying to dispute. It's not obvious at all that you read either my post or the paper I posted authored by the main contributors to MSVC and GCC about the issues mixed-mode applications present to the implementation of the standard library given that you haven't presented any defense of your position that addresses these issue. You seem to think that just declaring something "legit" and retorting "you are incorrect" is a sufficient justification.

If this is the extent of your understanding it's a fairly good indication you do not have sufficient background on this topic and may be expressing a very strong opinion out of ignorance of this topic. It's not at all uncommon that those with the most superficial understanding of a subject express the strongest views of said topic [1].

Doing a cursory review of some of your recent posts, it looks like this is a common habit of yours.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
by kragen | 2025-12-02 19:48:37+00:00
Generally such constant offsets are record fields in intent, not array indices. (If they were array indices, they'd need to be variable offsets obtained from a register, not immediate constants.) It's reasonable to think of record fields as functions:

.equ car, 0 .equ cdr, 8 .globl length length: test %rdi, %rdi # nil? jz 1f # return 0 mov cdr(%rdi), %rdi # recurse on tail of list call length inc %rax ret 1: xor %eax, %eax ret

To avoid writing out all the field offsets by hand, ARM's old assembler and I think MASM come with a record-layout-definition thing built in, but gas's macro system is powerful enough to implement it without having it built into the assembler itself. It takes about 13 lines of code: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/mapfield.S

Alternatively, on non-RISC architectures, where the immediate constant isn't constrained to a few bits, it can be the address of an array, and the (possibly scaled) register is an index into it. So you might have startindex(,%rdi,4) for the %rdi'th start index:

.data startindex: .long 1024 .text .globl length length: mov (startindex+4)(,%rdi,4), %eax sub startindex(,%rdi,4), %eax ret

If the PDP-11 assembler syntax had been defined to be similar to C or Pascal rather than Fortran or BASIC we would, as you say, have used startindex[%rdi,4].

This is not very popular nowadays both because it isn't RISC-compatible and because it isn't reentrant. AMD64 in particular is a kind of peculiar compromise—the immediate "offset" for startindex and endindex is 32 bits, even though the address space is 64 bits, so you could conceivably make this code fail to link by placing your data segment in the wrong place.

(Despite stupid factionalist stuff, I think I come down on the side of preferring the Intel syntax over the AT&T syntax.)
by jjcm | 2025-12-02 19:48:59+00:00
One thing I like about this, despite it meaning Bun will be funded, is Anthropic is a registered public benefit corporation. While this doesn't mean Anthropic cant fuck over the users of Bun, it at least puts in some roadblocks. The path of least-resistance here should be to improve Bun for users, not to monetize it to the point where it's no longer valuable.
by whytevuhuni | 2025-12-02 19:49:22+00:00
But that's the thing, idiomatic Rust sync code almost never passes around handles, even when they need to do I/O.

You might be different, and you might start doing that in your code, but almost none of either std or 3rd party libraries will cooperate with you.

The difference with Zig is not in its capabilities, but rather in how the ecosystem around its stdlib is built.

The equivalent in Rust would be if almost all I/O functions in std would be async; granted that would be far too expensive and disruptive given how async works.
by diarrhea | 2025-12-02 19:49:24+00:00
> This is a non sequitur. Both Rust and Zig and any other language has the ability to end in an exception state.

There are degrees to this though. A panic + unwind in Rust is clean and _safe_, thus preferable to segfaults.

Java and Go are another similar example. Only in the latter can races on multi-word data structures lead to "arbitrary memory corruption" [1]. Even in those GC languages there's degrees to memory safety.

1: https://go.dev/ref/mem
by pcrh | 2025-12-02 19:49:30+00:00
What's missing from the accounts is why he had those plates there in the first place.

Why was he placing plates streaked with staphylococcus near a window and then peering at them every few days?

Perhaps he was testing some other hypothesis that didn't turn out? The effect of sunlight on staphylococcal growth, maybe? Or perhaps the window is simply incidental?
by mrguyorama | 2025-12-02 19:49:48+00:00
A reasonable copyright term makes abandonware not a thing

If copyright is hard stopped after 14 (or even 28) years, it doesn't matter whether the initial rightsholder dies or hates the world or refuses to do the legwork to make it accessible, they cannot stop anyone from distributing it anymore full stop.

Abandonware is only a thing because of copyright.

>A copyright holder shouldn't have exclusive control over which media and stores sell their work.

This is the entire point of copyright. Abandonware is an intentional right of copyright. A creative SHOULD be able to say "Actually I don't want to sell this anymore"... at least until their rights run out after a decade or two. Copyright is NOT about giving third generation descendants of a creative profit from something that was made a century ago. Copyright is NOT about preventing people from playing around with intellectual property of an entire previous generation.

Disney's existence is basically because of a formerly correct and right implementation of copyright. If Disney's copyright existed when they first started, they would have likely failed to be big. Large copyright timescales only hurt artists and the public.
by zamalek | 2025-12-02 19:50:05+00:00
It's sans-io at the language level, I like the concept.

So I did a bit of research into how this works in Zig under the hood, in terms of compilation.

First things first, Zig does compile async fns to a state machine: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23446

The compiler decides at compile time which color to compile the function as (potentially both). That's a neat idea, but... https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/23367

> It would be checked illegal behavior to make an indirect call through a pointer to a restricted function type when the value of that pointer is not in the set of possible callees that were analyzed during compilation.

That's... a pretty nasty trade-off. Object safety in Rust is really annoying for async, and this smells a lot like it. The main difference is that it's vaguely late-bound in a magical way; you might get an unexpected runtime error and - even worse - potentially not have the tools to force the compiler to add a fn to the set of callees.

I still think sans-io at the language level might be the future, but this isn't a complete solution. Maybe we should be simply compiling all fns to state machines (with the Rust polling implementation detail, a sans-io interface could be used to make such functions trivially sync - just do the syscall and return a completed future).