MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by intalentive | 2025-12-29 23:54:20+00:00
The text does not really support the title. It argues: “The Internet is not necessarily good for democracy, as optimists claim. It’s more likely to be a mixed bag that presents new challenges.”

This is a good early example of the “populism is bad for democracy” genre of Ivy League handwringing, with titles like “The People Vs. Democracy”. It’s almost amusing to see how uncomfortable the ruling class is with peer-to-peer discourse unmediated by Fact Checkers, Debunkers, and other Adults In The Room.
by dnw | 2025-12-29 23:54:26+00:00
Fair question. It is "imperative" for two reasons. The first, despite having rough edges now, I find these tools be actually useful so they are here to stay. The second, I think most developers will use them and make them part of their toolchain. So, if one wants to be in parity with their peers then it stands to reason they adopt these tools as well.

In terms of bubbles: Bubbles are economic concepts and they will burst but the underlying technology find its market. There are plenty of good open source models and open source projects like OpenCode/Toad that support them. We can use those without contributing (too much) to the bubble.
by paxys | 2025-12-29 23:54:46+00:00
Layoffs are a symptom of our shit economy and rising interest rates. Companies have been doing constant rounds of layoffs since at least 2021. The only thing that has changed in the last ~year is that leadership now includes "replaced with AI" in the announcement so investors reward them for their "innovation" rather than penalize them for overhiring and missing targets. The work is still being passed on to existing employees like always, and that $20/mo Copilot subscription is being immediately ignored.
by imoverclocked | 2025-12-29 23:54:50+00:00
> It was clearly put together by somebody who thought first and foremost about privacy.

Except that they worked for a company that clearly wants all of your data. Privacy and Google are often at odds with each other… and for the folks that understood privacy at the time, it was a hard sell unless they worked at Google.

Privacy to me means that even Google doesn’t get to peek in whenever they feel like it.
by nospice | 2025-12-29 23:54:53+00:00
That sounds evasive. I share the parent's view that the article appears to be largely LLM-written. Given that you cite "your AI assistant", I'm guessing you did lean on an LLM here, perhaps without realizing that it imparted a very distinctive tone.

And honestly, it just cracks me up that it's usually the authors writing about AI lean on the tech. Including the critics...
by xdotli | 2025-12-29 23:55:38+00:00
It says:
"Our top priority is ensuring that this change won't be disruptive for our customers. We will continue to sell and operate our product subscription service through our app and website. The company will continue to operate from Singapore."

But I suppose they won't try as hard as before to make the product better. It's such a shame. I've been using it since it launched the video by begging everyone I knew and got an invite code. And I've been on the higher end of subscription ever since.

Curious how much Meta paid them.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-29 23:56:04+00:00
I think we'll see a lot more of this in the next months. A similar recent example was Anthropic buying bun. Also undisclosed value.

Anthropic and Bun shared a major investor. Looking at this it's not clear of Meta actually invested in Manus. But they clearly aren't showing much signs of turning into a unicorn meaning that its investors would have been looking for some kind of exit. An acquisition by Meta counts as a win. Meta has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies in terms of investors. Big companies like that helping out friendly investors is quite common. They all need each other in different contexts.

The reason I'm expecting more of this is that investors have been sinking a lot of money into all sorts of AI startups in the past few years. Most of those are most likely not stay independent or get to an IPO. Short of letting them fail, acquisitions with undisclosed amounts are a nice way out for investors and founders to liquidate their investments and save some face in the process.

Meta gets some fresh talent and tech; investors get some return on investment and can claim some kind of exit happened. I doubt a lot of cash changed hands here. Share swaps are a common tool here.

It will be interesting to see what Meta does with Manus. I don't expect they'll do a lot with it. Just speculating but I just don't see a great fit here for Meta. Unless it is to breathe some life into their Llama strategy.
by doganugurlu | 2025-12-29 23:56:24+00:00
I am guessing everyday you are getting a chance to make a friend, but somehow it doesn’t work out.

So let’s invert it: what prevents/kills friendships?

- lying (for whatever reason)
- talking too much about yourself
- not asking people about their lives
- being too private
- being too judgmental
- not empathizing - e.g. someone tells you about something hard they’re experiencing and you change the subject
- not caring to help (also showing you don’t care about others that aren’t in your friend-zone)
- not offering help
- not being kind
- not smiling (more like makes it hard for people to approach you)

Most of us want/need friends. Most of us want/need to talk to others about our lives. Someone just moved to where you live. They need a friend. They will strike a conversation w anyone.

Even people in your past probably wanted to be your friend (either coz they thought you were cool or they just needed a friend) - you can still be friends with them. I’ve become friends w people I met long after meeting them.

Asking someone how they are is not so much about the other person. It’s mostly a social ritual. But if no one is asking you how you are, they might also be intimidated by you.

As Aaron Burr would say: talk less, smile more - jk, do more of both.
by BoorishBears | 2025-12-29 23:56:41+00:00
They literally conclude by quoting Gemini 3:

> As my AI assistant gemini-3-flash-preview put it so blindly today:

So I can excuse someone for jumping to the conclusion the rest of it was LLM assisted too.

I read it and while I didn't think it was LLM writing (until the literal LLM writing), it's an incredibly grating style of writing that would earn ridicule before LLMs.

Obnoxiously building up straw men in section headers then knocking them down with "Reality:" is just not a way to have a useful conversation about a topic. Yuck.
by yongjik | 2025-12-29 23:56:44+00:00
I think UB doesn't have much to do with this bug after all.

The original code defined a struct with two bools that were not initialized. Therefore, when you instantiate one, the initial values of the two bools could be anything. In particular, they could be both true.

This is a bit like defining a local int and getting surprised that its initial value is not always zero. (Even if the compiler did nothing funny with UB, its initial value could be anything.)
by austinbaggio | 2025-12-29 23:56:46+00:00
It feels like Claude is taking more of the Android approach of a less opinionated, but more open stack, so people are bending it to the shape they want to match their workflow. I think of the amnesia problem as pretty agent-agnostic, though, knowing what happens while you're delivering product is more of an agent execution layer problem than a tool problem, and it gets bigger when you have swarms coordinating - Jaya wrote a pretty good article about this https://x.com/AustinBaggio/status/2004599657520123933?s=20
by frumplestlatz | 2025-12-29 23:56:52+00:00
> what do you need to see, or what gets you comfortable sending proprietary code to other external services?

Honestly? It just has to be local.

At work, we have contracts with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google with isolated/private hosting requirements, coupled with internal, custom, private API endpoints that enforce our enterprise constraints. Those endpoints perform extensive logging of everything, and reject calls that contain even small portions of code if it's identified as belonging to a secret/critical project.

There's just no way we're going to negotiate, pay for, and build something like that for every possible small AI tooling vendor.

And at home, I feed AI a ton of personal/private information, even when just writing software for my own use. I also give the AI relatively wide latitude to vibe-code and execute things. The level of trust I need in external services that insert themselves in that loop is very high. I'm just not going to insert a hard dependency on an external service like this -- and that's putting aside the whole "could disappear / raise prices / enshittify at any time" aspect of relying on a cloud provider.
by falcor84 | 2025-12-29 23:57:20+00:00
But history shows that it is inevitable. Can you give me an example of a single useful technology that humans ever stopped developing because of its negative externalities?

> "We didn't have a choice! It was INEVITABLE!"

There is no "we". You can call it the tragedy of the commons, or Moloch, or whatever you want, but I don't see how you can convince every single developer and financial sponsor on the planet to stop using and developing this (clearly very useful) tech. And as long as you can't, it's socially inevitable.

If you want a practice run, see if you can stop everyone in the world from smoking tobacco, which is so much more clearly detrimental. If you manage that, you might have a small chance at stopping implementation of AI.
by dizlexic | 2025-12-29 23:57:21+00:00
As someone who was blown away when I started my own online business and underestimated what I would be responsible for with taxes I could go full libertarian and yell "TAXATION IS THEFT" from the rafters, but I'll refrain.

It was still a shock though. I thought our system / goal was to encourage individuals to pursue their dreams and be self-sufficient. If that is actually the case, then our system is broken.

Skipping the details I made enough to support myself and my wife. The government wanted around 20%-25% of that, and they do NOT like to take "I can't afford that" as an answer. Fast forward to today and with poor accounting and lack of foresight I now am working a fulltime corporate soul sucking dev job to pay back the government for the years I tried to make it work on my own.

It's the most disillusioned I've ever been with my life. I've never felt as trapped and depressed as I do right now. All because I owe the IRS a large amount of money. On the plus side we have some amazing bombers/jet fighters, and someone is getting their healthcare subsidized.
by emodendroket | 2025-12-29 23:57:38+00:00
The brief period where I could check Facebook and reliably find someone's name I forgot or figure out how to contact people or invite them to a gathering was pretty nice. Now everyone's on fifty apps I don't use, or installed but never remember to check. Oh well. Sorry, too stimulating for me to join your Discord and get hundreds of notifications, most of which don't concern me at all.
by BloondAndDoom | 2025-12-29 23:57:41+00:00
Payroll taxes are the worst for small companies followed by strong labor law. Strong Labor laws are good if the company has 500-1000+ people but not able to fire someone within the month with reason is just dumb (I’m looking at Europe). It indeed causes many startups to hire 50% less people than they can.

I honestly don’t understand taxing anyone making less than something like 500K.

Don’t tax anyone earns less than this, focus all tax collection to top 1% and all big corps that makes more than 5M a year. With all those resource if this can be collected and obvious loopholes patched that’s it.

This would not only bring more tax, but also would fuel massive growth on the bottom line in terms startups and tons of innovation on the medium sized companies.
by pixl97 | 2025-12-29 23:57:56+00:00
>good-enough AI on your phone to carry everywhere you go

Eh, if Google/Apple allows you to put it on your phone, which is highly doubtful at this point. Google would outright directly ban that kind of competition in the name of security. Apple would just ban an AI like that in the name of security even though it doesn't actually compete with them.
by hmokiguess | 2025-12-29 23:58:03+00:00
Appreciate your input but I don't understand what you mean here.

You had use cases before in which you wanted more than 2 worktrees at once in the past and needed to juggle between them at the speed of "practical"?

What were you doing back then (a few years back and before agents as you implied) that required this and that your solution now solves?

What poor usability are you referring to here? Is the rate of utilizing git-worktrees a metric you are measuring? That does not make sense to me.

I also watched the demo video, and I don't understand the value here. Perhaps I am not your target demographic, but I am trying to understand who is. Is this for vibe-coding side projects only? Would be nice if you had a more practical/real stakes example. The demo video did not land for me.
by majormajor | 2025-12-29 23:58:20+00:00
In the US this is likely a wildly high overestimate because a huge percentage of the population plays video games at least casually and it has a very large mindshare (if not necessarily daily use for everyone) in that domain.

Moving into things like sports and what we would've called the "general blogosphere" in 2010 quite rapidly too.

I kinda hate it since it's hard to discover, but at least Google can't direct a million bots to it either that easily yet...
by FloorEgg | 2025-12-29 23:58:37+00:00
I've been studying astrophysics as a hobby for years and am going to riff off your framing because it seems compatible with the way I've been thinking about some of the issues with lamda CDM.

Speed of light = speed of causality = computational constraint of the simulation

Wave function = preference

Point Particles = choice

Gravity = computational lag

During interactions when preference -> choice if one dimension of interaction takes longer to compute than another, instead of waiting the simulation favors the delayed dimension. (If this could be formalized it could integrate GR with quantum)

Dark matter = hidden (emergent) complexity (instead of massive non-baryonic matter)

This assumes that emergent complexity with higher coupling degrees of preferences is harder to compute than decoupled wave functions. I've been trying to imagine an experiment that could falsify this.
by nowittyusername | 2025-12-29 23:58:51+00:00
Most people have not fully grasped how LLM's work and how to properly utilize agentic coding solutions. That is the reason for issues when it comes to vibe coders having low quality code. But that is not the limitation of technology but the user (at this stage). Basically think of it this way everyone is the grandma that has been handed a palm pilot to use to get things done. Grandma needs an iPhone not a palm pilot but the problem is that we are not in that territory yet. So now consider the people who were able to use the palm pilot very successfully and well, they were few and they were the exception, but they existed. Same here. I have been using coding agent for over 7 months now and have written zero lines of code, in fact I don't know how to code at all. But i have been able to architect very complex software projects from scratch. Text to speech , automated llm benchmarking systems for testing all possible llama.cpp sampling parameters and more, and now im building my own agentic framework from scratch. All of these things are possible and more without writing one line of code yourself. But it does require understanding how to use the technology well to get this done.
by dleslie | 2025-12-29 23:58:54+00:00
At this point I think it's incumbent on those who defend the American system to provide evidence that the justice system is not pliable with wealth, that it is a meaningful threat to business and not simply an acceptable accounting risk.

How much do pardons go for these days? One to six million?

As Carney put it, the first and most important difference between the USA and Canada is that Canada enjoys the rule of law.
by saubeidl | 2025-12-29 23:59:10+00:00
I believe cryptocurrencies are an in-vitro experiment on free market ideologies and that's why people are so split on them.

I think of them as primarily an ideological technology, designed to establish the primacy of free market capitalism over any sovereign law.

I think that is why people still hold onto them, despite nothing but scams coming out of them so far.

As somebody who doesn't think unrestrained free markets are a good idea, it feels like the capitalist monkey paw: Finally, there's completely unrestrained uncensorable money. Unfortunately, the result of that is what every advocate of regulation would've told you: Nothing but scams.

Ironically, the phrase capitalists use to describe why socialism can't work - "doesn't account for human nature" - has been proven to apply to their preferred ideology.

They got what they wanted and turns out it sucks. The technology that was supposed to establish the primacy of their world view ended up disproving it instead, plunging them into ideological crisis.

They have no choice but to double down despite ever more evidence of free market failure. There's a certain ideological cost sunk fallacy going on - to admit error and change ones ideological framework completely would be too painful, so they keep waiting for redemption.

Just my grain of salt as a socialist.
by azakai | 2025-12-29 23:59:46+00:00
This is certainly possible: Break up large functions, and then the bounded maximum function size can be your O(1) chunk size, to be processed in a streaming manner without dynamic allocation.

However, breaking up huge functions (or skipping optimizations on them) will lead to missed opportunities. And LTO-style optimizations, where the entire program is taken into account, can be very important as well (as a concrete example, we see huge benefits from doing that in wasm-opt for Wasm GC).

Still, it's a nice idea, and maybe it can make 80% of compiler passes a lot faster!
by quantified | 2025-12-29 23:59:48+00:00
> Capitalists have means to produce, feudalists just collect and own.

I think I get your distinction, but I think reality doesn't sort itself that way. Strictly, the means to produce is the factory, the land, something tangible that effects transformation, while money is just "finance". Capitalists are owners, though, and capitalism is ownerism. "Capital" is conventionally just money.
by runevault | 2025-12-30 00:00:34+00:00
I'd caveat this slightly as "it depends"

For mathy stuff, 100% c# is going to be better. But if you need to round trip to the engine a lot getting stuff in and out of the dotnet heap can actually hurt performance. You also have to be _really_ careful because there are a lot of cases you generate accidental garbage (biggest one is when you use strings that are getting implicitly converted to StringNames every time you run a function, you can avoid this by pre-generating them as consts but I've run into a fair few people who never ran dotmemory or the like to see the issues).
by kakapo5672 | 2025-12-30 00:00:52+00:00
Recently I needed to summarize about a thousand lengthy documents, and then translate those summaries into Mandarin.

I spent about a minute composing the prompt for this task, and then went for a cup of coffee. When I got back the task was done. I spot-checked the summaries and they were excellent.

I thought this was amazing and magical at the time. Am I wrong? Or is it simply the AI making me think this result was amazing and magical?
by pigpop | 2025-12-30 00:01:08+00:00
You don't need all that, just have Claude write the same documentation you would (should) write for any project. I find it best to record things chronologically and then have Claude do periodic reviews of the docs and update key design documents and roadmap milestones. The best part is you get a written record of everything that you can review when you need to remember when and why something changed. They also come in handy for plan mode since they act as a guide to the existing code.

The PMs were right all along!
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-30 00:01:16+00:00
That's a completely dishonest framing of their argument. There's nothing logically inconsistent in believing AI tools causes developers' skills to atrophy and that the tools also fail to deliver on the hype.

You're inserting "destroy humanity" when OP is clearly suggesting the problem is offloading all thinking to an unreliable tool (I don't 100% agree with their position but it's coherent and defensible).
by didgetmaster | 2025-12-30 00:01:22+00:00
What if AI can greatly reduce the amount of money (i.e. tax receipts) that the government needs to function properly? What if AI can quickly determine who really qualifies for government assistance, and cuts off all the fraudsters without needing an army of bureaucrats?

We could even cut out a ton of middle-men and return congress to a part-time job. One can only dream, right?
by blueboo | 2025-12-30 00:03:01+00:00
The recent Acquired ep on “Alphabet Inc” put it aptly: social media moved into Google’s space, video (reels, “pivot to video”), and social media for socialising moved to message groups, iMessage/Whatsapp/Discord.

Revenue-wise, video ads have always been the sun to print ads peanut m&m.

Look where the pucks going then:

Implication: ChatGPT as a realtime video avatar will hit the jackpot with ads, but not before. Count on the ChatGPT device having a screen for that reason
by emodendroket | 2025-12-30 00:03:45+00:00
> 3. Post history being public meant that you could get banned/brigaded for your comments on a totally different subreddit (i.e. bots autobanning you on one subreddit for posting on another subreddit).

You can make it private now. Personally I think this is a bit of a misfeature since it ends up helping all the low-activity users showing up to post political agitprop in local subreddits, thinly-veiled advertisers, etc., but they changed it.
by lapcat | 2025-12-30 00:03:46+00:00
I'm confused by your argument. The proposed wealth tax is on billionaires. That's fewer than 200 people in California. You're obviously not one of them, and never were one of them, so it wouldn't raise your taxes. And it sounds like you left San Francisco not because of taxes but because of the cost of housing.

San Francisco used to be a city where normal people could afford to live. The current insane price of housing was caused primarily by the growth of the tech industry. It's true that the tech industry in California created a vast amount of wealth, but that wealth is concentrated into relatively few hands, especially the billionaires. The wealth did not trickle down to normal people; what did trickle down was housing inflation and gentrification.

If the tech industry left Silicon Valley—and there's no inherent reason why it needs to be concentrated in Silicon Valley, given the technology to work from anywhere—perhaps San Francisco would be better off in general and return to normalcy.
by jondiggsit | 2025-12-30 00:04:17+00:00
Isn’t it just AIs that have an agenda? That lie to you? That use a directive to persuade you to do / purchase something under the guise of authority?

ChatGPT, etc. right now is the early web where everything was free and everyone wondered how it would make money.

Soak it up because it won’t last long.
by flumpcakes | 2025-12-30 00:04:23+00:00
I can think of a few things that could happen to sink "it's the slowest and worst it'll ever be". Even ignoring things that could happen, I think in general we're hitting a ceiling with LLMs. All the annoyances and bugs and frankly incompetence with the current models are not going away soon, despite $tn of investments. At this point it is now just about propping up this bubble so the USA doesn't have another big recession.