MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by red-iron-pine | 2025-12-16 20:16:17+00:00
> why, in free market land, is a buyer of services and medication, not allowed to negotiate prices?

Because W Bush decided to forbid that while simultaneously forcing the fed'gov to pay for it

"we need to pay face value because big companies need the money for their R&D" was the discussion years ago IIRC. it's BS, but that was the narrative.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-16 20:16:21+00:00
Yes, it's noted in the poll I linked (which is the same one as your first link) that the highest satisfaction is with government run insurance.

Not enough people are on ACA with subsidies to move the poll results that much, and Medicaid cuts aren't going to make people less satisfied with their private insurance.

I have no idea why you and so many other people seem to be taking my explanation as to why the US doesn't adopt universal socialized medicine as some sort of endorsement of the status quo.
by mindcrash | 2025-12-16 20:16:29+00:00
Big Tech never had to. In fact, they can pretty much make their own: "Terms and conditions may apply" (also the name of a great classic documentary on the subject by the way).

Also the fact that they have millions to bribe (or in friendlier terms "donate") their way out of anything, and have a network of very powerful friends and allies does not help at all.

Regulation should have started when the likes of Microsoft and Google started to become omnipotent and the big players in the Valley were not as powerful and influential as they are today. Now it's probably way too late.
by some_furry | 2025-12-16 20:16:36+00:00
From https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

"Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

We are on step 2: then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.
by hexage1814 | 2025-12-16 20:16:37+00:00
If memory serves me, Nano Banana allows generating/editing photos of children. But anything that could be misinterpreted, gets blocked, even absolutely benign and innocent things (especially if you are asking to modify a photo that you upload there). So they allow, but they turn on the guardrails to a point that might not be useful in many situations.
by nivafy | 2025-12-16 20:16:39+00:00
That “The model is overloaded” message is literally Gemini returning HTTP 503 (status: UNAVAILABLE) because the backend serving that specific model is out of capacity (or temporarily unhealthy) at that moment — even if your RPM/TPM quota is fine. Google folks / product experts have acknowledged this can happen during high demand and with higher-latency models (notably some 2.5 variants).
by LocalH | 2025-12-16 20:16:44+00:00
I didn't flame at all in my comment. I just recounted the history, as it's known to have happened.

Windows 95 didn't bring that much to the table over Windows 3.1, in terms of basic window management. The taskbar is really about it.

GEM died when DRI lost their stalwart status, as well as when Apple sued them. Amiga died when Commodore refused to innovate in the hardware space, but the engineers always had top-notch innovative OS ideas.
by tetha | 2025-12-16 20:17:17+00:00
This kinda change also has some different gears turning in my head. At $0.002 / build-minute, some of our large software integration tests would cost us around 15 - 20 cents. Some of our ansible integration tests would be 5 - 10 cents - and we run like 50 - 100 of those per day. Some deployments might cost us a cent or two.

Apples to oranges, naturally, but like this, our infra-jenkins master would pay for itself in hosting in a week of ansible integration testing compared to what GHA would cost. Sure, maintenance is a thing, but honestly, flinging java, docker and a few other things onto a build agent isn't the time-consuming part of maintaining CI infrastructure.

And I mean sure, everything is kinda janky on Jenkins, but everything falls into an expectable corridor of jank you get used to.
by nosianu | 2025-12-16 20:17:19+00:00
> Evidence I can give in support of the article:

I only want to point out that evidence of less hiring is not evidence for AI-anything.

As others have pointed out, here and previously, things like outsourcing to India, or for Europe Eastern Europe, is also going strong. That's another explanation for less jobs "here", but they are not gone, they just moved to cheaper places. As has been going on for decades, it just continues unevenly.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/11/big-tech-microsoft-amazon-go...

> Over $50 billion in under 24 hours: Why Big Tech is doubling down on investing in India

https://news.microsoft.com/source/asia/2025/12/09/microsoft-...

> Microsoft invests US$17.5 billion in India to drive AI diffusion at population scale
by pjmlp | 2025-12-16 20:17:27+00:00
DirectX documentation is on a bad state currently, you have the Frank Lunas's books, which don't cover the latest improvements, and then is hunting through Learn, Github samples and reference docs.

Vulkan is another mess, even if there was a 2.0, how are devs supposed to actually use it, especially on Android, the biggest consumer Vulkan platform?
by rurban | 2025-12-16 20:17:52+00:00
Tomatoes are actually easy to pick by robots. The AI part is using the red part of RGB imaging, moving the arm to the fruit and suck it in.

Harder parts are the watering, because that's the part which is always broken. Dutch company.

And detecting diseases. Which is the harder AI part my company is doing.

Moving the heavy robot around is also not that easy, esp. with the cheap dutch robots.
by binsquare | 2025-12-16 20:18:22+00:00
The same way you learn to trust other dev's to do work.

I see ai as a tool, not a peer. I trust a peer when we aligned on the requirements of the project and where we want to go.

So the answer to how we get confidence in a workflow of agents to develop, to review and test without a human verifying the implementation?

I personally don't see me getting there.
by rodrigodlu | 2025-12-16 20:18:30+00:00
As an introvert living in Rio de Janeiro, I can tell you that a lot of being happier in a hot climate with a lot of people around is just a social mask.

When I start deep questions about financial safety, the future and so on, just by asking I can be labelled as a pessimist. And I'm far from that.

I'm a fairly resolved and confident introvert, but I know many timid people that feel ashamed that they don't feel "happy" in these large group of people, that are extremely agitated and yelling around to grab some piece of attention they need.

And what is being shown in social media, documentaries and etc is just one pov.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-12-16 20:18:50+00:00
Re: privacy. That same system for violating privacy works on iOS. Just run a local web server, and there you go.

The big difference is in what Apple won't let you do, like get your GPS location without telling Apple or install an app without telling Apple. It looks like Apple finally allowed changing the default navigation app this year, but only in Europe: https://www.androidpolice.com/make-google-maps-app-default-i.... If you want to change the default voice assistant, you still can't do that.
by fcpk | 2025-12-16 20:18:53+00:00
this post is quite detailed and accurate, but also very sanctimonious and oblivious that what people consider a decent life has vastly degraded in perception, mostly because the goal posts are not matching reality.and it is easy to take absolutes and compare them, it doesn't mean they match societal expectations. 100 year ago eating foods that would be considered mostly inedible/unacceptable today was the norm. there is a very difficult exercise there in understanding perception vs pure numbers.
by g_sch | 2025-12-16 20:19:37+00:00
These cameras may have been originally sold to municipalities as a way to find stolen cars, but from one year to the next, federal agencies have (1) decided that their main goal is finding arbitrary noncitizens to deport, and (2) that they're entitled to the ALPR data collected by municipalities in order to accomplish this goal. The technology isn't any different, but as a result of the way it was deployed (on Flock's centralized platform), it was trivial to flip a switch and turn it into a mass surveillance network.
by foresto | 2025-12-16 20:20:14+00:00
I'm pretty happy with codeberg.org as a free host.

Alternatively, Forgejo, Gitea, or (based on praise I've seen from other people) maybe sourcehut.org.

I find GitLab's interface intolerable. Heavy reliance on javascript even for read-only access, nonintuitive organization, common operations hidden behind menus, mystifying icons... Every time I seek out a project's home and discover a GitLab instance, I find myself pausing to reconsider whether contributing to the project will really be rewarding enough to outweigh the unpleasant experience I'm about to have.

What does VCM stand for?
by ashton314 | 2025-12-16 20:20:37+00:00
This is written by Matthew Butterick—a lawyer, typographer, and programmer. He's got another online book called Practical Typography that will help you appreciate (and make!) good typography: https://practicaltypography.com/

The site is really fun: at the bottom you can change the body text from Valkyrie to Equity, Concourse, etc. (these are all fonts that he made).

His books are made with a Racket-based publishing system called Pollen. I've used it a little bit and it's nice: it's incredibly flexible, so you have to do a lot of work to get what you want out of it, but it also doesn't confine you.

He's made some gorgeous typefaces: https://mbtype.com/ His license is far and away the most permissive non-OFL license I've encountered: buy the font once for the lowest price I've seen in a professional font, and then you can use it pretty much everywhere indefinitely. So nice.

I use two of his typefaces (Valkyrie, similar to Palatino, and Hermes Maia, a sans-serif based off of a German typeface) on my blog so you can see it in action: https://lambdaland.org/
by lombarovic | 2025-12-16 20:20:44+00:00
Thank you! I really appreciate the kind words regarding performance.

Yes, it is fully self-sustaining. In fact, for the last 5 years, it has been my main full-time source of income, running entirely as a bootstrapped project from Croatia.

The revenue comes primarily from ads, plus a smaller portion from Premium ad-free subscriptions. Since I focus heavily on keeping infrastructure costs low (optimized .NET code + moving storage from S3 to Wasabi), the margins are healthy enough to be a very viable, bootstrapped full-time business.
by marginalia_nu | 2025-12-16 20:20:50+00:00
I think (as a fellow Swede) that there is a culturally sense of guilt involved in having a comparatively comfortable life and not being happy about it, compounded by a sense of guilt that a comfortable life is somehow undeserved.

Saying you are unhappy is in a sense saying you need a better quality of life, or deserve more happiness, both of which are kind of taboo under the Law of Jante.
by haroldp | 2025-12-16 20:21:07+00:00
> I was talking about the issues with comparing it to singular inventions like the cotton gin or jacquard loom

Ok, appreciate the clarification. But in that time frame there have been a number of really tectonic inventions that changed pretty much everything: steam power, ICE power, electrification, refrigeration, computing and the internet, just to name a few off the top of my head.

> There's plenty of space to think it just won't happen (where I'm personally at, at least on the current LLM driven versions)

Same. I am both optimistic about human ability to find new jobs, and skeptical that "AI" is going to make that necessary in the new future.
by apercu | 2025-12-16 20:21:09+00:00
Meta prints money as an ad company but clearly resents being one.

VR was a ~$100B+ attempt to buy pivot, and it’s generated ~single-digit billions in revenue. The tech worked maybe, but the vibe sucked, and the problem was that people don’t want to live or work there. Also, Meta leadership personalities are toxic to a lot of people.

Now they’re doing the same thing with AI e.g., throw money at it, overpay new talent, and force an identity shift from the top. Longterm employees are still well paid, just not AI gold rush paid which is gunna create fractures.

The irony is Meta already had what most AI companies don’t in distribution, data, and monetization. AI could have been integrated into revenue products instead of treated as a second escape from ads.

You can’t typically buy your way out of your business model. Especially with a clear lack of vision. Yes, dood got lucky in a couple acquisitions, but so would you if you were throwing billions around.
by mohamedattahri | 2025-12-16 20:21:20+00:00
I'm not discounting her founder status. My point is that it's orthogonal to one's ability to run a company. Founders don't automatically make good CEOs. Plenty of founders step aside for professional management, and plenty stay on and struggle.

Questioning whether someone was the right fit for a role isn't an attack on their legitimacy or their earlier contributions, no matter how pivotal they were. Steve Ballmer at Microsoft had a quasi-founder status, and he received the exact same backlash and hate throughout his tenure because he was perceived as someone who "didn't get it".

If the argument is that any skepticism of a female CEO's performance must be sexist, that shuts down legitimate discussion. I'd rather focus on outcomes rather than on trying to divine each other's motives.

Lastly, Your "pause and do better" is exactly what I'm objecting to: framing disagreement as moral failure. Question Baker? Sexist. Disagree with me? You're not doing enough for the cause.
by nathan_compton | 2025-12-16 20:21:23+00:00
I guess, but there are significant differences between the laws of physics and a game theoretic description of human behavior. Fundamentally, you cannot game theoretically predict the future without a model of the participants and, as you perhaps have noticed, there is no single model for the behavior of human beings because, fundamentally, human beings are an abstraction which covers ~9 billion distinct globs of cells with different genes, gene expressions, culture, personal experiences, etc.

As a physicist I think people are more sure about what an electron is, for example, than they should be, given that there is no axiomatic formulation of quantum field theory that isn't trivial, but at least there we are in spitting distance of having something to talk about such that (in very limited situations, mind you) we can speak of the inevitable. But the OP rather casually suggested, implicitly, if not explicitly, that the submitted article was wrong because "game theory," which is both glib and just like technically not a conclusion one could reasonably come to with an honest appraisal of the limitations of these sorts of ways of thinking about the world.
by jsheard | 2025-12-16 20:21:24+00:00
There's plenty of blame to go around, but if any one faction is responsible for the Vulkan mess it's the mobile GPU vendors and Khronos' willingness to compromise for their sake at every turn. Huge amounts of API surface was dedicated to accommodating limitations that only existed on mobile architectures, and earlier versions of Vulkan insisted on doing things the mobile way even if you knew your software was only ever going to run on desktop.

Thankfully later versions have added escape hatches which bypass much of that unnecessary bureaucracy, but it was grim for a while, and all that early API cruft is still there to confuse newcomers.
by kortex | 2025-12-16 20:21:39+00:00
I'm probably not doing a great job of getting my point across, and most of that is on me. Let me try to clarify.

Every aspect of cybernetics (whether it be engineering, society/politics, biology) involves deliberate tradeoffs. In metaphor, we have a big knob with "liberty/crime" on one side and "surveillance/safety" on the other. It's highly nonlinear and there are diminishing returns at both extrema. Everyone (subconsciously) has some ideal point where they think that crime-o-stat should be set.

I'm saying don't turn it up to 11, and it's already set pretty high. It's increasingly technologically possible, and I think it's a bad thing to chase the long tail. I'm pretty happy with where we are at the present, but corporations keep marketing we need more cameras, more detection, more ALPRs, more algos, more predictive policing, more safety, who doesn't want to be more safe? I think it's very precarious.

I reiterate: it's uncomfortable, but I don't want to live in a world with zero crimes because everyone has probably committed crimes without even knowing it. The costs, both fiscal and in terms of civil liberties, of chasing ever-decreasing-crime are far higher than finding some stable setpoint that balances privacy and liberty with measures that justly deter crime. Let us not let the cure become worse than the disease.
by eob | 2025-12-16 20:22:10+00:00
I build coding agents for a living, and I'm struggling to map this onto the set of things I do at work.

In general, interoperability and user choice are really important for us to get right as the community of people building AI platforms...

Have others reading this document been able to map it onto their work?

As a specific example:

> ai://bank/service/payments?amount=10&currency=USD

I'm not sure what this is representing here. Is it a way to encode a clickable link to chat with `bank` about `service/payments` with a few additional args attached?
by zamalek | 2025-12-16 20:22:24+00:00
Github runners are slow. We're using WarpBuild and they are still cheaper per-minute, even with all the changes Github has made. Then there's the fact that the machines are faster, so we are using fewer minutes.

There are multiple competitors in this space. If you are (or were) paying for Github runners for any reason, you really shouldn't be.
by Bjartr | 2025-12-16 20:22:43+00:00
> charging for it should help make sure it continues to work

It's there a particular reason you're extending the benefit of the doubt here? This seems like the classic playbook of making something free, waiting for people to depend on it, then charging for it, all in order to maximize revenue. Where does the idea that they're really doing this in order to deliver a more valuable service come from?
by credit_guy | 2025-12-16 20:23:35+00:00
> Then you just make sure you have enough spent fuel that when you're ready for that part, you can get 3+ cores' worth in a hurry.

Lots of things about nuclear weapons are classified, but we can use some declassified numbers from the Manhattan project. The ratio of uranium fuel to plutonium end result was about 4000 to 1 [1].

> Approximately 4000 pounds (1814.36 kg) of uranium were needed to produce 1 pound (0.45 kg) of plutonium.

At 6.2 kg per core, 3 cores would require 74 tons of uranium. That's about 50% more than what a plant like the Maanshan nuclear power plant (the one we are talking about here) would burn in one year. Except, or course, that commercial reactors burn uranium to a high degree, so the spent fuel is exactly worthless for weapons purposes. You need to burn the fuel 10 times less to have a chance to extract weapons grade Plutonium. So, that dash for 3 bombs would take 15 years, if by some miracle you could use the reactors 100% of the time only for the purpose of creating spent fuel for the plutonium production. Of course, the problem is that you'd need to buy that fuel from some suppliers, and the suppliers are going to ask questions why you are burning 10 times more fuel then you should (they are most likely legally obligated to report you if they suspect anything non-kosher is going on).

[1]https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/manhattan-project-science-a...
by asveikau | 2025-12-16 20:23:35+00:00
About 5 years ago I got qvwm working on a modern system and put it on github: https://github.com/asveikau/qvwm

I don't recall what was broken, but it was a few random things. I also added xrender image scaling on the window decorations, because they were hardcoded to a size that was tiny on modern DPI.
by StarterPro | 2025-12-16 20:23:36+00:00
In the image they showed for the new one, the mechanic was checking a dipstick...that was still in the vehicle.

I really hope everyone is starting to get disillusioned with OpenAI. They're just charging you more and more for what? Shitty images that are easy to sniff out?

In that case, I have a startup for you to invest in. Its a bridge-selling app.
by rdiddly | 2025-12-16 20:23:51+00:00
There are about 800 unique weekly committers to the Chromium project, so that's a start at gauging the number for that project. A little harder to find that same figure for Firefox, but Wikipedia says Mozilla Corp had about 750 employees as of 2020.

Anyway, if you have $50M, you can afford 500 people at $100k, or 250 people at $200k. So you simply declare, this is how many people it takes to make a browser, and set your goals and timetables accordingly. I feel like the goals and direction might be more important than the number of bodies you throw at it, but maybe that's naïve. But when the product is mature like Firefox (or Chrome for that matter) you do have some flexibility on the headcount.
by OptionOfT | 2025-12-16 20:24:14+00:00
If you do this on your personal stuff, eh, I wouldn't do it, but you do you.

But we're seeing that this becomes OK in the workplace, and I don't believe it is.

If you propose these changes that would've normally taken you 2 weeks as your own in a PR, then I, as the reviewer, don't know where your knowledge ends and the AI's hallucinations begin.

Do you need to do all of these things? Or is it because the most commonly forked template of this piece of code has this in its boilerplate? I don't know. Do you?

How can you make sure the code works in all situations if you aren't even familiar with the language, let alone the framework / API and protocol?

* Do you know that in Java you have to do string.Equals instead of == for equality? * Do you know in Python that you assigning a new value to a function default persists beyond the function? * And in JavaScript it does not? * Do you know that the C# && does not translate to VB.NET's And?
by p_ing | 2025-12-16 20:24:34+00:00
> then how do we enforce laws?

We don't! I mean, the police don't do so today. No tabs? OK! Expired tabs? OK, too! No license plates? Who gives a shit? Not the police.

And that dives into more impactful crimes such as property theft which when reported to police nothing comes from it.

Hell, I have dashcam of a cop going home roughly at 11 pm going 80+ on a 60mph highway in his cop Ford SUV. But everyone routinely speeds, 7+ over post-COVID. The legislature is trying to do something about it, but no one really cares.

State Patrol is likely the only ones performing any real traffic enforcement anymore.
by Avalaxy | 2025-12-16 20:24:45+00:00
Absolutely ridiculously unambitious plan. I thought the 2035 deadline was already void of any ambition or urgency. Imho it should have been 2030 or earlier... Every single year counts, we are past several tipping points already. We don't have the luxury to sit on our hands for another 10+ years, as much as people would love to close theirs eyes and pretend that all of this isn't really happening...
by tptacek | 2025-12-16 20:24:52+00:00
Maybe, but I don't think there's much evidence that cameras with sharing disabled were getting pulled by DHS, and I think, because of how the cameras work, it would be a big deal if they had. Flock also has extreme incentives not to let that happen. We'll see, I guess: contra the takes on threads like this, I don't think the cameras are going anywhere any time soon. I think small progressive and libertarian enclaves will get rid of their cameras while remaining landlocked in a sea of municipalities expanding theirs.