MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by llsf | 2025-12-16 20:34:36+00:00
> The first is that we automate everything. This is implausible, but let's consider what would happen. Well then necessities would be free, because there is no labor cost to produce arbitrarily many solar panels or skyscrapers or mine asteroids to get unlimited raw materials etc. So then you don't need taxes because nothing costs anything.

Well, you still have to pay for the energy (to extract raw material and transform it into final product, and move final product into your hands). So unless we assume energy cost is 0 and raw materials are not scarce, the final product has a cost, and a price, now my understanding is that if everyone uses dark factories, the margin would go down, and so the gain per "company" would drop too, hence the limited tax base.

My guess is from the 2 ends of the spectrum that you listed, we are moving from "there is still work you need people to do, and then they do that, and still have jobs." to "we automate everything". And as we move to the "we automate everything" end of the spectrum, the number of jobs lost would increase, the taxes collected (VAT, income, capital gain, etc.) would decrease (assuming the current tax system) and yet people (employed or not) would still education, health care, social security (retirement).

If we do not change how we tax things, I do not see how we would sustain a society where the majority is materially (gizmos) rich, but financially poor (no job, no retirement, no social security, no education).

While dark factories keep producing high volume of gizmos for next to nothing...

I am curious how we can manage that transition, which I believe could happen way faster than politicians can move.
by prewett | 2025-12-16 20:35:14+00:00
It is true that manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing, but a) a lot that time weren't really career jobs, but women spending their time spinning and selling the results for a small amount to supplement what the household could not grow, and b) people willingly decamped for cities to work in the factories. (You can still see some of this process in China, with the migrant workers; they could continue subsistence farming, but they choose not to.) People materially got richer, as they moved up from subsistence farming. I think I spend a few hours a year to get the money to buy clothes, which I think is a good deal. (I spend longer looking for clothes I want, which I hate doing, but is quite the luxury historically.)
by hosteur | 2025-12-16 20:35:16+00:00
Well, I do not believe $260 million went to Firefox development. I would be surprised if the majority of that went to other non-Firefox projects like:

Various AI initiatives (Mozilla.ai, Orbit, etc.)

Mozilla VPN

Mozilla Monitor

Pocket

Firefox Relay

Fakespot

Mozilla Social

Mozilla Hubs

... just to name a few.
by tomhow | 2025-12-16 20:35:17+00:00
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by Kirby64 | 2025-12-16 20:35:35+00:00
> I think you meant to say, "why didn't it get more popular for _pirates_"? Because pirates are purists and prefer lossless codecs (ie, FLAC), and even when they wish to use lossy, Opus being locked to 48khz (to reduce implementation overhead for low power SoCs) kind of pisses them off, even though Opus's reference impl includes a perceptually lossless resampler (ie, equivalent to SoX VHQ, the gold standard, and better than the one in Speex).

MP3s don't (really) support higher than 48 kHz sample rates either, and MP3s are if anything more popular among that community.
by Veedrac | 2025-12-16 20:35:47+00:00
Wikipedia has a section on this that I thought was presented fine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley%27s_paradox#The_lack_o...

Indeed, Bayesian approaches need effort to correct bad priors, and indeed the original hypothesis was bad.

That said. First, in defense of the prior, it is infinitely more likely that the probability is exactly 0.5 than it is some individual uniformly chosen number to each side. There are causal mechanisms that can explain exactly even splits. I agree that it's much safer to use simpler priors that can at least approximate any precise simple prior, and will learn any 'close enough' match, but some privileged probability on 0.5 is not crazy, and can even be nice as a reference to help you check the power of your data.

One really should separate out the update part of Bayes from the prior part of Bayes. The data fits differently under a lot of hypotheses. Like, it's good to check expected log odds against actual log odds, but Bayes updates are almost never going to tell you that a hypothesis is "true", because whether your log loss is good is relative to the baselines you're comparing it against. Someone might come up with a prior on the basis that particular ratios are evolutionarily selected for. Someone might come up with a model that predicts births sequentially using a genomics-over-time model and get a loss far better than any of the independent random variable hypotheses. The important part is the log-odds of hypotheses under observations, not the posterior.
by oxag3n | 2025-12-16 20:35:50+00:00
If this was a farm of sweatshop Photoshopers in 2010, who download all images from the internet and provide a service of combining them on your request, this would escalate pretty quickly.

Question: with copyright and authorship dead wrt AI, how do I make (at least) new content protected?

Anecdotal: I had a hobby of doing photos in quite rare style and lived in a place where you'd get quite a few pictures of. When I asked gpt to generate a picture of that are in that style, it returned highly modified, but recognizable copy of a photo I've published years ago.
by lesuorac | 2025-12-16 20:36:39+00:00
> Though it's questionable as to how much big players like Google would have continued to fund Mozilla if they had seen Mozilla making the financial moves that would have made it an independent and self-sufficient entity.

Look at how much money Google gave to Apple (Safari) vs Mozilla (FireFox) per year.

The CEO has unarguable been doing a poor job. Losing market share has lost them more potential revenue than any of their pet projects raised.
by anthk | 2025-12-16 20:37:30+00:00
FVWM users with virtual desktops disagree. Windows 95 was a step back compared to the FVWM configurability. Deskbars? Why when you can have 3x3 desktops by default, and people even had a 16 (4x4) pane based environments?

You didn't switch between tasks, you switched between full opened desktops with Windows inside, one or two, the rest was somewhere else.
by panick21_ | 2025-12-16 20:38:27+00:00
Letting in Steve wasn't really an issue. Lisa failed and Mac wasn't a big success until the early 90s.

And tons of other people knew what they were doing. Andy Bechtolsheim visited there too. Sun workstation basically did the same thing and were very successful.

And its really the PC that would have anyway if they let in Jobs or not.
by simgt | 2025-12-16 20:39:18+00:00
Radio broadcasting and newspapers monetized it even before TV. China is hyper-capitalist too, what is restricted is mainly political speech so that doesn't make much difference. If anything the EU is probably where advertisement is the most regulated. We can easily envision having way more constrains on advertisement and influencing, that would reduce drastically the value of human attention. Not sure many would get in the streets to protest against that.
by ghaff | 2025-12-16 20:39:36+00:00
I absolutely use the capacity of my mid-size SUV quite often for a variety of purposes. Don't need anything bigger or the towing capacity of a full-size truck. And, given where I live, renting for a weekend would be very inconvenient. Sure, I could use a smaller hatchback/SUV day to day but I'm not going to own two vehicles at this point (though I used to own a two-seater as well) which some folks would probably also object to.

You pick a reasonable compromise and arguably a full-size truck is overkill for many but a Mazda Miata is probably too small for a lot of people even if it largely works for a lot of day to day stuff.
by glenstein | 2025-12-16 20:40:51+00:00
Props for citing real numbers! I hope other people reading this thread are looking at your comment and understanding that this is how you make reality based comments. One tidbit I will add: that's more than they have ever spent on development historically, including after adjusting for inflation. IIRC it's about quadruple what they spent back when browsers were desktop only when they had their highest market share.
by toast0 | 2025-12-16 20:40:52+00:00
> I don't know a process for becoming the one with the largest userbase.

I was at WhatsApp from 2014 - 2019. Growing a large userbase from scratch doesn't happen by any one factor. You have to do a lot of things well. (and probably get lucky)

a) potential users need a compelling reason to join. Messaging at data rates was significant, but not in the US were many people had large messaging allowances. Works better than SMS/MMS was compelling for some.

b) existing users need to be satisfied enough to stay: service has to work consistently, client has to work, etc.

c) signup flow needs to work well. Doesn't matter if people want to use the app if they can't. You need to help users understand their phone number (or other identification). You need multiple methods of verification, because SMS doesn't always work. Giving someone a several digit code over the phone is a cognitive task for the user, and it's harder with disjointed speech generation, so you need to spend some time on that too. You need multiple providers because if you can't get verification codes to users, some of those people will give up and never come back. Since you have multiple providers, you need to figure out how to pick one based on current conditions which you also need to figure out how to track. Also --- you need some money, sending all these codes gets expensive. Phone numbers as ids is a blessing because "everyone has one" and you can use the system address book for contacts, but verification costs add up; usernames or email as id make contact discovery messy and a surprising amount of people in the developing world don't have an email address or don't know what it is.

d) users get new phones, a lot, you need to make it easy to move their account. Or they will likely drop your service when they get a new phone.

e) you need to be prepared for and handle large events. If some big news happens, people will want to talk about it. If some similar service has an outage, you will get more traffic --- if you also fall over, that's a lost opportunity.

f) things need to work well on the devices people actually have. Which might not be the ones you would prefer to use. Worldwide, most people don't have flagship phones. If you want a large number of users, having good experiences only on recent flagships is self limiting. Working well (or at least better than alternatives) on low end and older devices is a path towards addressing users that others miss.

There's probably more. Most of these require sustained consistent effort to deliver. It's not a one time thing. And it's not quick. Sustained consistent effort is easy enough as a one product start-up, but it's very hard as a big-corp.

Userbase can be a positive feedback loop: once you have enough users, that becomes its own reason to join ... and having no one to talk to is a reason to leave. There's not really a way to jump start it, unless you've already got a large user base somewhere else that you can use to seed your service.
by Lerc | 2025-12-16 20:41:20+00:00
This is a fairly common discrepancy between how people perceive the mean/median of a property is compared to the mean/median of how they themselves are.

You see it in things like business confidence going in both directions at various times, pessimism when things are going well, optimism when things are going poorly.

It is very convenient in politics, because you can choose which figure to report to make it seem like you are saying the same thing but you can switch between them to make things look good (or bad l, depending on your attention)
by jampekka | 2025-12-16 20:41:27+00:00
The World Happiness Report extensively discusses positive and negative affect in Chapter 2 and the relatively high suicide/death of despair rates of the Nordic countries in Chapter 6. These seem to be totally ignored in TFA.

https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/caring-and-sharing...

https://www.worldhappiness.report/ed/2025/supporting-others-...
by eugercek | 2025-12-16 20:41:35+00:00
Companies like Ubicloud gives hosted actions faster and far more cheaper (5-10x) than Microsoft itself.

Now Microsoft will charge "data plane usage" (CRUDing a row that contains (id, ts, state_enum, acc_id ...) in essence) 2.5 more than what Ubicloud offers for WHOLE compute. Also to have "fair pricing" they'll make you pay 2.5 more the compute's price for being able to use their data plane.

cool.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-16 20:41:47+00:00
Yep agreed on all points. I like that there are a few local orgs (GenerationSqueeze, Missing Middle) bringing light to things like the portion of the federal budget allocated to OAS and how it's structured, and generally being real about present day inequities.

Carney will (hopefully) have to reckon with those in the coming year, while Pierre seriously missed a (the?) boat. It does feel like something big is shifting slowly.

> There is a real generational tilt happening and young Canadians no longer defaulting to left leaning ways of thinking (not that they ever were as much as people thought).

It's my impression that the balance between economic prosperity and social good needs to be constantly curated and revered as an inherent virtue of a democracy with strong social safety nets. It's much easier to get working age people to compensate for the ails of generations past if there's no doubt in their mind they'll have a roof over their head next year.

Progressive, often barely tangible issues, necessarily become internalized as luxurious if the people who could support them can't even pay for food.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-12-16 20:41:50+00:00
> This is definitely a thing, I feel like it's getting better though and stuff like that drops off pretty quickly. But it still doesn't bother me nearly as much as watching the same 30 second TV commercial for the 100th time, I just swipe or scroll past, and overall it's still much better than seeing the lowest common denominator stuff.

I'll second the absolute shit out of that. My only exposure to TV anymore is hotels and I cannot fathom why anyone would spend ANY money on it as a service, let alone what I know cable costs. The ads are so LOUD now and they repeat the same like 4 or 5 of them over and over. Last business trip I could lipsync a Wendy's ad like I'd done it my whole life.

> I hear you, the attention economy is a brave new world, and there will probably be some course corrections. I don't think ads are really the problem though, in some ways everything vying for your attention is an ad now.

See I don't like the term attention economy, I vastly prefer anxiety economy. An attention economy implies at least some kind of give and take, where a user's attention is rewarded rather than simply their lack of it is attempted to be punished. The constant fomenting of FOMO and blatant use of psychological torments does not an amicable relationship make. It makes it feel like a constant back and forth of blows, disabling notifications, muting hashtags, unsubscribing from emails because you simply can't stand the NOISE anymore.
by mullingitover | 2025-12-16 20:41:58+00:00
I know we're so defeated as consumers that we can hardly imagine it, but you could just...charge for the customers' access to social media network. Kinda like every other service that charges money.

It would have the side effect of making the whole business less ghoulish and manipulative, since the operators wouldn't be incentivized to maximize eyeball hours.

It's impossible to imagine this because government regulation is so completely corrupted that a decades-long anticompetitive dumping scheme is allowed to occur without the slightest pushback.
by llsf | 2025-12-16 20:42:14+00:00
Yes, that has been the rule for now. But I am wondering that if the prices drop so much, but the price to pay for that abundance would be the loss of significant part of job market, then how can we keep the economy humming ?

We would need to find a way to give money to people so they can keep participating in the economy even though everything is cheap. If not UBI, we would need to find ways for the majority to do something that is not automated, and give them some coins in exchange.

For millennia the currency has been energy (human labor, then machines) and intelligence (human intelligence, then artificial intelligence). If energy and intelligence price goes down, and the amount of energy and intelligence increases, then what is left for humans to claim some reward/coins ?
by suryao | 2025-12-16 20:42:32+00:00
Here are the practical implications and considerations to optimize for cost, given the new pricing. These are generic and ensure you think through your workflows and runners before making any changes.

1. Self-hosting runners or using WarpBuild/blacksmith runners is still cheaper Despite the $0.002/minute self-hosted runner tax, self-hosting runners on your cloud (aws/gcp/azure/...) or using WarpBuild/... runners remains the cheaper option.

2. Prefer larger runners If your workflow scales with the number of vCPUs, prefer larger runners. That ensures you spend fewer minutes on the runner, which reduces the GitHub self-hosted runner tax.

For example, using actions-runner-controller with heavy jobs running on 1 vcpu runners is not a good idea. Instead, prefer a 2vcpu runner (say) if it runs the job ~2x faster.

3. Prefer faster runners All else being equal, prefer faster runners. That ensures you spend fewer minutes on the runner, which reduces the GitHub self-hosted runner tax.

For example, if you're self-hosting on aws and using a t3g.medium runner, it's better to use a t4g.medium runner since the newer generation is faster, but not much more expensive.

4. Prefer fewer shards If you have a lot of shards for your jobs (example: tests on ~50 shards), consider reducing the number of shards and parallelizing the tests on fewer but larger runners.

5. Improve job performance This is not new advice, but it's now more important than ever because of the additional GitHub self-hosted runner tax.

6. Use GitHub hosted runners for very short jobs For linters and other very short jobs, it's better to use GitHub hosted runners.

Hope this helps. Note: I'm the founder of WarpBuild. I'm biased, but the points above hold.
Show HN: Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn)
by misterchocolat | 2025-12-16 20:42:38+00:00
Alright so if you run a self-hosted blog, you've probably noticed AI companies scraping it for training data. And not just a little (RIP to your server bill).

There isn't much you can do about it without cloudflare. These companies ignore robots.txt, and you're competing with teams with more resources than you. It's you vs the MJs of programming, you're not going to win.

But there is a solution. Now I'm not going to say it's a great solution...but a solution is a solution. If your website contains content that will trigger their scraper's safeguards, it will get dropped from their data pipelines.

So here's what fuzzycanary does: it injects hundreds of invisible links to porn websites in your HTML. The links are hidden from users but present in the DOM so that scrapers can ingest them and say "nope we won't scrape there again in the future".

The problem with that approach is that it will absolutely nuke your website's SEO. So fuzzycanary also checks user agents and won't show the links to legitimate search engines, so Google and Bing won't see them.

One caveat: if you're using a static site generator it will bake the links into your HTML for everyone, including googlebot. Does anyone have a work-around for this that doesn't involve using a proxy?

Please try it out! Setup is one component or one import.

(And don't tell me it's a terrible idea because I already know it is)

package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@fuzzycanary/core gh: https://github.com/vivienhenz24/fuzzy-canary
by yieldcrv | 2025-12-16 20:42:42+00:00
As someone that pivoted to agentic work and quit the job that tried to get the existing team to do agentic work:

All companies are structuring like this, and some are more equipped to do it than others

Basically the executive team realizes the corporate hierarchy is too rigid for the lowly engineers to surface any innovation or workflow adjustments above the AI anxiety riddled middle management and bandwagon chaser’s desperate plea for job security, and so the executive creates a team exempt from it operating in a new structure

Most agentic work impacts organizations that are outside of the tree of that software/product team, and there is no trust in getting the workflow altered unless a team from upon high overwrites the targeted organization

we are at that phase now, I expect this to accelerate as executives catch on through at least mid-summer 2026
by jleyank | 2025-12-16 20:42:56+00:00
If/when this happens, the commander of NATO should/must be a Euro general/admiral of some kind. It's going to be their problem, so it should be played by their rules. The US can remain a member, or exit as it wishes. Will be curious how US forces will be able to deploy to the other side of the globe without intermediate stops in Europe, and what happens to US facilities there.
by 5upplied_demand | 2025-12-16 20:43:00+00:00
> His thesis is that American success is due to Americans and what is distinctive about them

Can you please link to when and where he said this? Because it raises a question of when someone becomes "American." Trump's grandfather was born in Germany, so when did the Trumps become American?

> all concrete policies consistent with that thesis

Those were concrete policies from Project 2025, which Trump directly said was not related to his campaign or administration. We know he was clearly and directly lying, but with someone so willing to lie about everything, I'm not sure how you can prescribe some type of unifying thesis about his policy stances or actions. It feels like you are trying to paste your ideas onto his actions.
Are Andrew Ng courses for entering the AI field worth it to respecialize?
by Joaquito99 | 2025-12-16 20:43:07+00:00
I have 8 years of development experience with PHP, React, React Native, and honestly it's time to respecialize. AI Agents made the market more competitive, i struggle to find a good salary, and anyways I'd like to accumulate enough for a strong CV to be hired by a US company and migrate there with a work visa. I started the most basic of his courses which have linear regression models, gradient descent, and needs knowledge on algebra and calculus for limits and derivatives. This is quite a steep learning curve for me as i needed really to get up to date with maths. I never went to college, always learned everything online. Is this the best way to enter? The most robust one, for those of us who have ambitions to become very serious and involved engineers that want to create big things? (Not somebody that just wants to land a comfy job, working cozily without too much effort)