MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dangus | 2025-12-10 04:26:22+00:00
I'm confused at what you're trying to say here. Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically similar to a brick and mortar store?

Apple's services revenue is larger than Macs and iPads combined, with a 75% profit margin, compared to under 40% for products (hardware).

Yeah, they serve as a middleman...an incredibly dominant middleman in a duopoly. 80% of teenagers in the US say they have an iPhone. Guess what, all that 15-30% app store revenue is going to Apple. That's pretty much the definition of a service juggernaut.

I also don't agree with you about the lack of selling Apple services to non-Apple users. TV+ is a top-tier streaming service with huge subscriber numbers, and their app is on every crappy off-brand smart TV and streaming stick out there. Yes, there really are Android users who subscribe to Apple Music - 100 million+ downloads on the Google Play store, #4 top grossing app in the music category.
by Fnoord | 2025-12-10 04:27:15+00:00
Get distracted? I mean, are you American? Have you ever looked around you in traffic? Look at all these billboards and bullshit and tell me about distraction. If you are on a mission you do not open your social media. People do so due to boredom, I guess. The sensible thing to do is... stop using social media.

Aside from that, let us assume you won't stop with that (after all, it is free!). Smartphones have a driving mode which you can set, setting them on DnD. I take my smartphone out of my pocket when I wait before a traffic light, and that works, but I only do so when I need to and what I certainly do not need to do at that point is have a look at Facebook or Twitter. I also don't have Bluetooth on 24/7 on my smartphone (one reason being tracking concerns). On a Pebble watch, I can put this off. Sadly a software killswitch, but better than nothing.
by flakiness | 2025-12-10 04:29:22+00:00
It is not a spiral. The connection from "Engagement drops even further" to "AI gets better, harder to detect" doesn't make sense. It's not related.

I agree that AI drags down the education, but it doesn't have to be (and it is not) a spiral. To be credible and prevent false slop smell, please use proper narrative frameworks.
by mannykannot | 2025-12-10 04:29:31+00:00
That is right (if rather exaggerated, and I will note that it was you who originally picked the figure of two percent), and in practice, we accept a certain risk that we will not always have all the capacity we want, even though (or because) we cannot precisely predict how big or often these events will be. There is no particular reason to think this specific case is any different.
by lrkerhn2 | 2025-12-10 04:29:52+00:00
Same here. Never heard of them before. But the more you look around on their site, feels more and more like some parody company. They seem to be into everything - bitcoin, blockchain, decentralized this, decentralized that, something called TBD, then Web5 (what even is that?)

https://blog.identity.foundation/block-contributes-to-dif/

https://tbd.website/

This company seems to be mocking itself.
by dangus | 2025-12-10 04:29:53+00:00
And how much did that cost? You can get around Tokyo on the subway system for $5 for an entire day, and it's a profitable system that largely does not rely on taxpayer subsidy.

And how fast would it be if Tokyo and Taipei's trains weren't handling 80% and 40% of trips, respectively?

If you reduce Tokyo's 80% trip usage rate down to 5% like many American cities, that means for every other car on the road in Tokyo you'd now see 5 cars instead. How's that Uber ride looking now?
by barfoure | 2025-12-10 04:31:05+00:00
Here’s a few more:

1) in addition to Kali, people played War2 on MSN Gaming Zone. It was available under the TCP/IP section.

2) before war2bne, you could use a program to change the color of your in game name, and use non-ASCII characters. So people went wild in multiplayer games.

3) I think MPlayer also supported War2? I don’t think anyone played it there.

4) StarCraft modding community was tight knit. Lots of great maps with tools available only to friends of the modders. We see the tail end of this when mappers finally get so good their maps are used by KeSPA and are not possible with stock editor.

5) Warcraft 3 alpha comes around. Warforge server is the first and only private server. The first map editor is leaked, janky but works for alpha. the first tower defense map ever for Warcraft 3 is made by a fellow called Mr123 on Warforge. The rest is history.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-10 04:32:09+00:00
Yes, agree. Some stuff is obvious. I don't need Google to tell me what to do for the flu or a cut, and I've never searched for that.

If I had some weird symptoms that I didn't understand, or even well known warning signs for something, I'd go to a doctor. What is Google going to tell me that I can trust or even evaluate? I don't know anything about internal medicine, I'll ask someone who studied it for 8 years and works in the field professionally.
by nickv | 2025-12-10 04:32:47+00:00
I get it, remember the congestion zone isn't the entire borough of Manhattan. It's just below 59th street. And, if you were driving down there, good luck finding parking in the literal densest place on planet earth during work hours (187k people/sqm). Driving in the congestion relief zone is not a right.

(Also, this thread's root was "regressive tax affecting the poor" which I assert again, is just a silly mischaracterization)
by serf | 2025-12-10 04:33:14+00:00
whenever I imagine immortality en masse I imagine the hobbies that people started experimenting with after exposure to the concept of deathlessness in the short story 'The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect'.

that story is flawed for a lot of reasons, but it's interesting to explore what happens if death is essentially conquered.

it's hard to judge whether or not society as depicted in that story stagnated.. but it was wholly different.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-10 04:33:59+00:00
I think the best analogy for this are scams. Once a scammer finds a mark they'll pay, there's a desire to soak them for as much as they'll bear.

EVs are not a scam per-se, but they also don't add any value. 80% of the world already figured that out, do by definition if you are asking you are in the bottom 20%.

Now I get you were in the process of migration, but that's an edge case. In a normal case if you go around asking to buy a wildcard EV, you basically have a sign saying "fleece me".

So yeah, there's still a market for people wanting to throw money at CAs, even in these comments you'll see some. And management types are especially prone to "sounds expensive, must be good" logic when spending other people's money.
by akst | 2025-12-10 04:34:07+00:00
It sounds like his main gripe of vibe coding is it robs you of the satisfaction as a programmer in solving the problem. I don't disagree, but the preferences of programmers are not necessarily the main driving force here behind these changes. In many cases it's their boss and their boss doesn't really care.

It's one thing to program as a hobby or to do programming in an institutional environment free of economic pressures like academia (like this educator), it's another thing to exist as a programmer outside that.

My partner was telling me her company is now making all their software engineers use ChatGPT Codex. This isn't a company with a great software engineer culture, but it's probably representative of the median enterprise/non SV/non tech start employer than people realise.
by jcranmer | 2025-12-10 04:35:31+00:00
There is a set of languages which are essentially required to be available on any viable system. At present, these are probably C, C++, Perl, Python, Java, and Bash (with a degree of asterisks on the last two). Rust I don't think has made it through that door yet, but on current trends, it's at the threshold and will almost certainly step through. Leaving this set of mandatory languages is difficult (I think Fortran, and BASIC-with-an-asterisk, are the only languages to really have done so), and Perl is the only one I would risk money on departing in my lifetime.

I do firmly expect that we're less than a decade out from seeing some reference algorithm be implemented in Rust rather than C, probably a cryptographic algorithm or a media codec. Although you might argue that the egg library for e-graphs already qualifies.
by casey2 | 2025-12-10 04:35:42+00:00
The author makes 2 fundamental errors in reasoning. The first is saying that the language model can program, it can't, it can generate code, maybe researchers at top labs can get it to create some trivial programs but I digress.

The second and more important point is that what makes coding simpler for humans is the ability of the language to facilitate communication so you don't have to translate, now LLMs are good at translation, but it's still work. Imagine you have an implementation of a program and you want to see what it does, for any non-trival program you must scan millions of tokens, are current LLMs even physcially capable of attending to that? nonono we need names.

Besides how can you even vibecode if you aren't (just) using names.
by trimethylpurine | 2025-12-10 04:36:20+00:00
If it wasn't necessary it wouldn't have been selected for, having nothing to do with the philosophical or spiritual significance. Those species that didn't age became extinct because their genetic pools were too slow and stagnant to adapt to environmental circumstances or non-adaptive altogether. Both of which are terminal at the species level. Evolution doesn't favor the survival of the fittest individual. It favors the continuation of life, generally.

That's been my concern; that solving mortality for individuals might be a death sentence for the species.
by BobbyJo | 2025-12-10 04:36:26+00:00
I have a hard time blaming parents as well to be honest. Think about it this way, if you truly believe parents are disciplining children less, and doing a worse job of controlling their kids on average, why is that?

Is it because people just "aren't as good" now? Obviously not. I think the same environmental factors are at play on the parent's side as on the children's. We can throw our hands up and say "they should know better", but the fact remains that the incentives in our society are changing things for the worse.
by MobiusHorizons | 2025-12-10 04:37:31+00:00
It's mostly embedded / microcontroller stuff. Things that you would use something like SDCC or a vendor toolchain for. Things like the 8051, stm8, PIC or oddball things like the 4 cent Padauk micros everyone was raving about a few years ago. 8051 especially still seems to come up from time to time in things like the ch554 usb controller, or some NRF 2.4ghz wireless chips.
by aaravchen | 2025-12-10 04:39:16+00:00
Replying to myself: Apparently I was mixing up the new Furilabs FLX1s and new Jolla phone. The FLX1s that's a major downgrade from the prior FLX1 and some people were reporting are based on a design that's really cheap on Aliexpress and using very old hardware but with a custom spin to add some physical switches to it.

The new Jolla actually does look really good compared to all the other avaiaobale Linix phone hardware options.
by jcranmer | 2025-12-10 04:39:52+00:00
CHERI has 64-bit object size but 128-bit pointers (because the pointer values also carry pointer provenance metadata in addition to an address). I know some of the pointer types on GPUs (e.g., texture pointers) also have wildly different sizes for the address size versus the pointer size. Far pointers on segmented i386 would be 16-bit object and index size but 32-bit address and pointer size.

There was one accelerator architecture we were working that discussed making the entire datapath be 32-bit (taking less space) and having a 32-bit index type with a 64-bit pointer size, but this was eventually rejected as too hard to get working.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-10 04:40:50+00:00
> A difference between 8 and 12 PM 2.5 levels won't change that

Yes, it will, and that's the point I was making.

There are some things that have no harmful affects below certain concentrations, in that they are not toxic at low levels. PM 2.5 particles are not one of those - they are toxic at all levels. It's quite similar, in this context, to ionizing radiation. There is no safe level of ionizing radiation - every X-ray you get will slightly increase your chance of getting cancer. Of course, in the risk/benefit analysis, the risk is low and the benefits for medical X-rays are high.

It's the same with PM 2.5 pollution - every percentage reduction results in fewer health effects and related deaths. It's fine to argue that some level of pollution is worth it to get the benefits of industrialization, but it's simply false to say a reduction from 12 to 8 PM 2.5 levels won't reduce related deaths.
by RossBencina | 2025-12-10 04:41:19+00:00
Interesting. The post is about whether a license prohibiting SaaS competitors is "open source" and whether it might work out as a good way to ensure project sustainability. In this context "source available" means that you have the source code but you can't use it to compete with the project owner. [Kinda puts Omarchy in a different light don't you think?]

There is another, I think different, form of "source available" that I've seen a bit lately, similarly from corporate/commercial sponsors: the source code is released under an OSI approved license (e.g. BSD, GPL licence) and the owner maintains and develops the code in an ongoing fashion, but there is no way to easily interface with the developers, contribute changes back to the project, nor is there any public facing bug tracker or developer/user community. To me this is just as much "not open source" as a specific no-compete with the primary project sponsor.
by dent9 | 2025-12-10 04:41:46+00:00
Agentic AI is a pretty huge scam. Every organization worth it's salt has so many IAM protections in place that an AI developer is useless because you can't give it SSO and OIDC credentials to access the company resources. And no IT team will ever let it. So all these folks trying to convince us that AI will ever deploy anything useful are lying their butts off; IT won't even let their own developers deploy anything why would an AI be treated any differently?
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-10 04:43:08+00:00
That LLC is going to have to pay property taxes or the sheriff will seize and auction off the property. And there won't be a mortgage or homestead exemption so they will be at the top tax rate. They'll probably want insurance on that property, which is more expensive for an investment property especially if it's sitting vacant, and they'll need to have electric and gas hooked up and paid so it can be temperature controlled. It will need lawn and landscaping care during the summer, and snow removal during the winter. If it's a condo then they'll need to pay association dues instead. All together that's easily well into 5 figures a year, every year, on a 200k-500k house.

They can offset this and maybe even get some cash flow by hiring a management company to rent it out, but then it's not sitting vacant, which was the original complaint.
by vikramkr | 2025-12-10 04:43:30+00:00
The difference is that the worker you hire would be a human being and not a large matrix multiplication that had parameters optimized by a a gradient descent process and embeds concepts in a higher dimensional vector space that results in all sorts of weird things like subliminal learning (https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/).

It's not a human intelligence - it's a totally different thing, so why would the same test that you use to evaluate human abilities apply here?

Also more directly the "all sorts of other things" we want llms to be good at often involve writing code/spatial reasoning/world understanding which creating an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle very very directly evaluates so it's not even that surprising?
by phire | 2025-12-10 04:43:37+00:00
There aren't really any "systems programming" platforms anywhere near production that doesn't have a workable rust target.

It's "embedded programming" where you often start to run into weird platforms (or sub-platforms) that only have a c compiler, or the rust compiler that does exist is somewhat borderline. We are sometimes talking about devices which don't even have a gcc port (or the port is based on a very old version of gcc). Which is a shame, because IMO, rust actually excels as an embedded programming language.

Linux is a bit marginal, as it crosses the boundary and is often used as a kernel for embedded devices (especially ones that need to do networking). The 68k people have been hit quite hard by this, linux on 68k is still a semi-common usecase, and while there is a prototype rust back end, it's still not production ready.
by dsego | 2025-12-10 04:45:26+00:00
I think it's because the normal atan receives one argument, eg atan(y/x) and then sometimes you can't divide by zero, and it can’t distinguish quadrants (because we loose info on the sign of Y-coordinate and the X-coordinate). atan2 takes 2 params and knows the signs so it can understand the quadrants and also handle divide by zero. I now realize that the name atan2 probably refers to 2 parameters.
by ezst | 2025-12-10 04:45:30+00:00
> That means the server ops become these little lords over little fiefdoms and a server just dying takes your identity with it.

Or that means that everyone can be their own little lord reigning over their own little server, to the point that it doesn't matter, because effectively, network nodes don't need to be "big" to be relevant in a federated ecosystem. I'm not so much into ActivityPub, but I run an XMPP server for my family. I'm not saying that this is for everyone, but close-enough.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-12-10 04:46:00+00:00
I'd love to hear a good argument for optimism if you've got one. I suppose the pendulum thing works sometimes on certain timescales, but for a physical analogy "shit rolling downhill" might be more accurate. Typically doesn't roll back up and momentum builds. Just as "rich get richer" and inequality accelerates, so "bullshit makes bullshit" and things begin to spiral if truth / earnest effort is not even neutral, but now arguably a disadvantage as mentioned in TFA. Small course-corrections seem pretty rare in history or in nature without revolutions or catastrophe
by HDThoreaun | 2025-12-10 04:46:40+00:00
Every rule has exceptions. Usually its because of some quirk of the market. The most obvious example is adtech, which is able to sustain massive margins because the consumers get the product for free so see no reason to switch and the advertisers are forced to follow the consumers. Tech in general has high margins but I expect them to fall as the offerings mature. Companies will always try to lock in their users like aws/oracle do but thats just a sign of an uncompetitive market imo.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-10 04:46:43+00:00
> That is, it took 25 to 30 years after mass production of automobiles was started by Ford for 50% of "horsepower" to be replaced

I just googled "average horse lifespan", and the answer that came back was, exactly, "25-30 years". There's a clue in that number for you.
by bruce511 | 2025-12-10 04:46:49+00:00
I'd also argue, very necessary.

A lot of thd new APIs have to do with accessing hardware. Camera, Microphone, Serial ports (currently experimental) etc.

Given how easy a MITM attack to injection JavaScript or HTML into insecure pages is, a world where insecure pages had access to hardware makes that hardware very vulnerable.

Even though all you'd be doing is reading some random blog etc.

To those who still think serving HTTP is some sort of principled stand, just be aware that injecting malware onto your page at delivery time is pretty trivial. Quite honestly, and I mean this in a constructive way, it doesn't signal "principles" it signals "incompetence".
by mcphage | 2025-12-10 04:47:43+00:00
> If the people don't care enough about it, using AI to create more volumes of data on it is just wild.

They do care about it—they cared about it enough to get it, store it, preserve it. But they’re not good at storing the context around it—it’s like they care about it, but don’t care about why they care about it?

> Curation nowadays is about the purge, the filter.

I agree there’s value in that, but there’s also value in understanding the meaning behind what we keep.
by Cadwhisker | 2025-12-10 04:48:23+00:00
I can't see Bruno's site and I assume it's because of the HN hug of death, but an impressive 3D website that always comes to mind is acko.net, with its 3D rendered tubular logo. He even describes how it was done in a blog post.

https://acko.net/blog/zero-to-sixty-in-one-second/
by pyuser583 | 2025-12-10 04:49:30+00:00
I don’t think this is obvious - I have kids and this is a constant battle. If you take the devices away they are along and isolated and it’s so much worse.

Some schools have these rules, but unless they are practically enforced, kids get around it.

I worry these laws will result in the worse of both worlds.

We need really well moderated forums for kids, along with practical bans for everything else.

I’m not sure how that happens.
by kbolino | 2025-12-10 04:49:33+00:00
I'm genuinely surprised that usize <=> pointer convertibility exists. Even Go has different types for pointer-width integers (uintptr) and sizes of things (int/uint). I can only guess that Rust's choice was seen as a harmless simplification at the time. Is it something that can be fixed with editions? My guess is no, or at least not easily.
by BobbyJo | 2025-12-10 04:49:35+00:00
Real wages are effectively unchanged since 1970 [0]. So, either technology hasn't advanced enough to make people more productive, or technology hasn't increased the value of labor. One of the two has to be true.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...

Note on the above, be weary of data that starts ~1980 since that was a deeply recessionary period. Lots of information likes to use that period as the origin since it makes it look like real wages have increased. During 1970 to 1980 there was a steep decline in real wages.
by mardifoufs | 2025-12-10 04:49:55+00:00
American IT Mafia? That provides free certificates? You'd think setting up renewal would be less of a hassle than dealing and paying CAs even if it's once every 3 years, so that would be a rather benevolent mafia. Which of those CAs went out of business by the way?

Do you think Let's encrypt is less popular outside the US?
by metaphor | 2025-12-10 04:49:57+00:00
> I am astonished that NIST does not have multiple clocks over multiple distributed sites with robust ability to detect and bypass individual failures.

They may not operate redundant clocks at a single site, but ITS redundancy posture[1] doesn't look bad at all:

>> Servers at the Boulder and WWV/Ft. Collins campuses are independent and unaffected.

[1] https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/servers.cgi