MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 8organicbits | 2026-01-18 15:59:58+00:00
The stats I see for Facebook are $70 per US/Canadian user in ad revenue. I'm not sure how much people would be willing to pay for an ad free Facebook, but it must be below $70 on average. And as the parent comment said, the users who would pay that are likely worth much more than the average user to the advertisers.

For the users who refuse to see ads, they'd either use a different platform or run an ad blocker (especially using the website vs the app).
by traceroute66 | 2026-01-18 16:00:08+00:00
> Urgh hyperoptic is dog shit as well

Sounds like they haven't changed !

I recall helping out a friend to review a Hyperoptic proposal for their development.

Hyperoptic's idea of "optic" was fibre to a switch in the basement and then unshielded CAT5e to the users premises.

If that wasn't bad enough, even to the untrained eye, you did not need a measuring tape to see they would have exceeded the CAT length limit by quite some margin for many of the users.

And that's before their claims of owning the external fibre when in reality they were just contracting an ethernet service from BT.

So yeah, I would not touch Hyperoptic with a bargepole. I suspect the other altnets are no better .... "sell, build, disappear off to the sunset" was the impression I got.

Reading some of the reviews on the internet about post-sales support I'm not surprised in the slightest that users often struggle to get support once the salesdroid has long departed their doorstep.
by yunwal | 2026-01-18 16:00:18+00:00
I’m not sure where you’re getting this notion that a paid service introducing ads is a bad business model. It’s been proven time and time again that it’s not. Spotify, Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, the list goes on, all introduced ads and none of them saw any real backlash. Netflix cracked down on password-sharing and introduced ads in the same year and lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately people just really don’t realize how harmful ads are.
by VirusNewbie | 2026-01-18 16:00:29+00:00
How are billionaires “hoarders”? They may be a lot of things, but to use hoarders is a gross misunderstanding of wealth, billionaires, how equities work and more.

Bezos does not have a castle filled with a scrooge mcduck moneypool. There are not castles filled with grain that could otherwise be used to feed the starving peasants.
by alexfoo | 2026-01-18 16:00:35+00:00
As a generalisation: OpenReach prioritise areas that have no fibre.

If Hyperoptic (or someone else like Community Fibre or The 4th Utility, etc) are in an area then OpenReach will put that area nearer to the bottom of their todo list.

It's better if they concentrate on putting fibre into areas that still have 7Mbps wet string DSL than competing in an area that already has one or more Gbps fibre options.

Even then, OpenReach tend to do FTTC first. Then it's case of what the last mile is formed of:

If it's via telephone poles then they get the fibre concentrators installed on the poles and then they're ready for the individual fibre runs to each property as and when they want to be connected.

You can see the differences in Google Streetview images in a residential road like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/RK8J8TXZUY6iF3pTA where the the June 2024 images show the fibre concentrators at the top of the pole, and then going back to the 2015 images or before where they aren't present.

If the last mile is underground then the fibre concentrators have to be installed in the service ducts and the last 5-50 yards to the actual premises is an absolute lottery, especially as many house redevelopments bury existing underground cables under concrete and other structures and twist/kink things in a way that copper is fine to deal with but there's little chance you can run anything else through whatever conduit is there, let alone something without corners too tight for fibre.

Compare the above overhead wiring fun with a street such as: https://maps.app.goo.gl/oDchjxtaoxPD5Pe86 where there are no telephone poles.
Show HN: Redact PDF 100% Locally. No Cloud Upload
by teroknor92 | 2026-01-18 16:00:36+00:00
Redact PDFs fully locally.
Truly remove the redacted text, image.
Draw black bars over words just by clicking on it instead of drawing boxes and dragging cursors, saving significant time.
Can Edit Text to any dummy values as an alternate redaction method.
No Subscription Fatigue. Own the App forever.
by deeg | 2026-01-18 16:00:59+00:00
As others have noted, breakdown by model probably isn't accurate since Tesla has so few models. I did some shallow searching and it appears Tesla sales were down 8% in 2025 [0] while global EV sales were up 20% [1]. It's a crude comparison but probably more accurate than models.

0 - https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/02/tesla-tsla-q4-2025-vehicle-d...

1 - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/global...
by whimsicalism | 2026-01-18 16:01:27+00:00
It’s funny reading this parallel world that some portion of people have constructed for themselves.

It has been three years and these tools can do a considerable portion of my day to day work. Salvage the wreckage? Unfortunately I think that many people’s jobs are essentially in the “Coyote running off a cliff but not realizing it yet” phase or soon to be.
by ranger_danger | 2026-01-18 16:01:38+00:00
I would say the issue itself is almost irrelevant... I think it's mainly your dogmatism. Speaking in absolutes as if you always know everything, that there can seemingly only be one right answer and there can be no other valid perspectives or opinions. To me it just screams low emotional intelligence and a lack of critical thinking, humility and empathy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_(psychology)
Show HN: Available.dev – Craigslist for Developer Availability
by skridlevsky | 2026-01-18 16:01:50+00:00
Hey HN,

Craigslist for developer availability. You're either in the room or you're not.

How it works: GitHub OAuth → one-liner → pick skills → you're visible. Employers browse freely, reach out directly.

Design choices:

- Most recently active at top (browsing keeps you visible)

- Days cap at "30+" (no one needs to see "day 47")

- No resumes, no applications

54 devs in the room. Supply side works. Testing demand.

Question for HN: Would you actually browse this when hiring? What's missing?
by epistasis | 2026-01-18 16:02:02+00:00
Buy a used Nissan Leaf, then?

The sunk cost fallacy applies not only to dollars, but also to any quantitative phenomenon. The important thing to evaluate is the cost going forward. When you look at the cost of that new Nissan Leaf, you need to amortize the initial carbon cost over the rest of its lifetime, not just the few years you have it!
by Mountain_Skies | 2026-01-18 16:02:14+00:00
If the means of production are taken from the billionaires and given to the government, how long would their wealth last? Not sure handing the means of production to a government would be a viable solution as politicians and bureaucrats are humans and often very terrible humans at that, but I don't see how billionaires could continue to last very long once they no longer have control over anything other than a declining number of currency units.
by marginalia_nu | 2026-01-18 16:02:30+00:00
Doubt we'll see that in the short term. Long term, possibly, especially if you add a financial crisis.

Truth is most larger software development organizations could have even before LLMs downsized significantly and not lost much productivity.

The X formerly known as Twitter did this and has been chugging along on a fraction on its original staff count. It's had some brand problems since its acquisition, but those are more due to Mr Musk's eccentricities and political ventures than the engineering team.

The reason this hasn't happened to any wider degree is quarterly capitalism and institutional inertia. Looks weird to the investors if the organization claims to be doing well but is also slashing its employee count by 90%. Even if you bring a new CEO in that has these ideas, the org chart will fight it with tooth and nail as managers would lose reportees and clout.

Consultancies in particular are incredibly inefficient by design since they make more money if they take more time and bring a larger headcount to the task: They don't sell productivity, but man hours. Hence horrors like SAFe.
by rimbo789 | 2026-01-18 16:02:32+00:00
We need to massive restrict when and where ads can be shown in all aspects of our society. No ads in ai at all. Ever. No targeted ads, no unskipable ads, limit ratio of ads to content in video, no roadside billboards, reign in the size of ads on buildings.

Ads are a blight on our society and purging them from many areas will greatly improve quality of life.
by dzink | 2026-01-18 16:02:34+00:00
Annoying was a thing of the past. Look at the evolution of ads and content placement. With social media advertising being pushed to trigger massive anxiety and societal schizophrenia on some topics, imagine what can be done with personalized AI (especially if the buyers are well funded politicians, or state-backed malicious actors vying for territory, real estate, or natural resources where you live - the highest margin opportunities).

At first, In retail you had billboards and shelf space. The lowest quality ingredients your product has (example syrup bottled with soda water), the higher your margin was, the more you could afford to buy out shelf space in retail chains and keep any higher quality competition out. Then you would use some extra profits to buy out national ads and you’d become a top holding for the biggest investors. That was the low-tech flywheel.

In the Search Engine world - the billboards weee the Margin-eating auction-based ads prices and the shelf space became SEO on increasingly diluted and dis-informative content to fill the shelf-space side. In Video advertising, rage-bait and conspiracy theories try to eat up the time available for top users.

AI advertising if done right can be useful, but the industry that asks for it intentionally asks for obtrusive and attention hogging, not for useful. The goal is always to push people to generate demand, not sit there when they need something. Thus the repetition, psychological experiments, emotional warfare (surfacing or creating perceived deficiencies, then selling the cure). Now if you understand that the parties funding AI expansion are not Procter and Gamble- level commercial entities but state and sovereign investors, you can forecast what the main use cases may be and how those will be approached. Especially if natural resources are becoming more profitable than consumer demand.
by sgarland | 2026-01-18 16:02:37+00:00
Disagree, though in practice it depends on the query, cardinality of the various columns across table, indices, and RDBMS implementation (so, everything).

A simple equijoin with high cardinality and indexed columns will usually be extremely fast. The same join in a 1:M might be fast, or it might result in a massive fanout. In the case of the latter, if your RDBMS uses a clustering index, and if you’ve designed your schemata to exploit this fact (e.g. a table called UserPurchase that has a PK of (user_id, purchase_id)) can still be quite fast.

Aggregations often imply large amounts of data being retrieved, though this is not necessarily true.
by cratermoon | 2026-01-18 16:03:06+00:00
"If the problem were primarily mechanical—too much typing, too complex syntax, too many steps—we would have solved it by now"

And yet we see management and the AI boosters still talk about productivity in terms of lines of code written,
or proxies for that metric, likes number of features shipped.

We definitely have solved the mechanical problem,
and we did so decades ago when wizards
and IDEs able to auto-generate boilerplate stubs came along.

Still we see the process discussed and boosted in terms of sheer quantity of "stuff",
even as we are drowning in accidental complexity and tech debt.
Adding yet more code generated by a synthetic text extruder is not solving any problem of consequence,
but is in fact making things worse. "AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society" https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful...
by bastawhiz | 2026-01-18 16:03:23+00:00
The ads are a problem (or will be, when the temptation to add them to paid plans becomes too great), but the bigger problem in my opinion is going to be the "SEO" that companies will do to make their ads appear in places that they don't belong.

"The sieve of Eratosthenes is an ancient algorithm for finding all prime numbers up to any given limit. But if you're looking to have fluffier baked goods, consider this flour sieve by DONUIBO to achieve the perfect texture in your muffins, cookies, and more. Want me to add one to your shopping list or order one for a loved one?"
by Pikamander2 | 2026-01-18 16:04:42+00:00
It seems to work fine on a scaled down desktop browser though, and the existing game UI should be suitable enough to fit on a standard phone screen, even if the text is a bit hard to read.

I think OP just made a small mistake with some of the CSS/JS that handles resizing the game window on mobile viewports. In some cases the buttons are outside of the game, and in some cases the game window isn't using up the full screen real estate.
Show HN: I made a tool to rewrite your posts in any creator's style
by exos-xyz | 2026-01-18 16:04:49+00:00
Building is easy now. Writing about what you built is the bottleneck.

I can ship features in hours. But writing a tweet about it?

I'd stare at a blank screen for 20 minutes.

So I built PostLike. Paste your rough idea, pick a creator's style, get something you'd actually post.

Not copying. Learning structure from people who figured it out.

Stack: Next.js, Supabase, Vercel.

Does the output sound human or generated?
Curious what HN thinks.
Show HN: Built a visual time planner for ADHD time blindness
by Kavolis_ | 2026-01-18 16:05:17+00:00
Hey HN,
I built DayZen after years of lying to my calendar. I'd cram 10 hours of tasks into 6-hour days, wonder why I never finished anything, then feel terrible about it.
The core idea: Show your day as a 24-hour radial clock. Tasks become colored arcs around the circle. When the circle fills up, it's full. No more pretending.
How it works:

Drag tasks onto the clock face and resize them with your finger
Overlapping tasks glow red immediately (no more finding conflicts at 11 PM)
Two-way calendar sync keeps everything in one place
Widgets show your current task and what's next

What makes it different: Most planners ask "what should I do?" DayZen asks "what actually fits?" It's not about motivation, it's about physics. You can't fit 10 pounds into a 5-pound bag.
I originally made this for my ADHD brain, which has zero time awareness. Turns out the visual approach helps anyone who thinks spatially or chronically overschedulules.
Tech stack: Native iOS (Swift/SwiftUI), local-first with optional iCloud sync, zero tracking or accounts required.
Pricing: Free tier with 10 tasks to try it out. Premium is $2.99/month, $19.99/year, or $24.99 lifetime (early supporter pricing).
The app is live on the App Store now. I'd love your feedback—especially from fellow overcommitters or anyone who's tried to build time awareness into their workflow.
Happy to answer questions about the approach, technical choices, or why I thought a radial interface would work when every other planner uses lists.
by mchaver | 2026-01-18 16:05:21+00:00
I think images and representations of no longer used artifacts still live on in our cultural knowledge. They don't necessarily have to be a part of everyday lives. Think of children's stories and fairy tales. I don't see swords and shields in every day life very often but I can recognize them easily. I've never seen a komodo dragon in person but could recognize one if walked down my street.
by echelon | 2026-01-18 16:05:23+00:00
Two things can be true:

- You can have a horrible CEO that doesn't value their employees and is trying to devalue labor.

- AI coding tools can be incredible exoskeletons in the hands of skilled engineers and enable them to get much more work done.

Perhaps the real "SaaS-killer" is innovation capital [1] realizing it can take advantage of the various forms of arbitrage and changing of the guards happening now, raise venture capital, and take on the old and slow management-driven businesses.

If you've ever had the itch to fire your boss, now's the time. It's a hard path, there are way more hats to wear, but the dry powder is out there waiting to be deployed.

[1] ICs in both senses of the acronym.
by elphard | 2026-01-18 16:05:34+00:00
I like that you are treating peephole as a strict fallback after IR optimizations, with a tiny window and single pass. In a lot of compilers this stage turns into a junk drawer of pattern matches that quietly grow until no one remembers why half of them exist.

The opt_trace! hook is the underrated bit here. Once you start rewriting instruction sequences, knowing which patterns fire and how often on real programs is usually more valuable than another synthetic benchmark. Keeping it behind -O1 is a nice way to make sure you only pay for that complexity when users actually opt in.
by pornel | 2026-01-18 16:05:48+00:00
Apple was never keen on customization, and instead they wanted to offer a good experience out of the box as a package (take it or leave it).

The problem is that Apple has lost good taste and judgement. And their App Store obsession turned "we've made it so simple you don't need to customize it" into "you're not allowed to touch our precious OS, you additional-service-revenue-dodging bastards".
by fweimer | 2026-01-18 16:07:18+00:00
It's nice for a C simulator to avoid condition codes. It's not so nice if you want consistent overflow checks (e.g., for automatically overflowing from fixnums to bignums).

Even with XNOR (which isn't even part of RVA23, if I recall correctly), the sequence for doing an overflow check is quite messy. On AArch64 and x86-64, it's just the operation followed by a conditional jump: https://godbolt.org/z/968Eb1dh1
by kuerbel | 2026-01-18 16:07:46+00:00
I think this comment is reacting to a different argument than the one the article is actually making.

The piece isn’t claiming that AI tools are useless or that they don’t materially improve day-to-day work. In fact, it more or less assumes the opposite. The critique is about the economic and organizational story being told around AI, not about whether an individual developer can ship faster today.

Saying “these tools now do a considerable portion of my work” operates on the micro level of personal productivity. Doctorow is operating on the macro level: how firms reframe human labor as “automation,” push humans into oversight and liability roles, and use exaggerated autonomy claims to justify valuations, layoffs, and cost-cutting.

Ironically, the “Wile E. Coyote running off a cliff” metaphor aligns more with the article than against it. The whole “reverse centaur” idea is that jobs don’t disappear instantly; they degrade first. People keep running because the system still sort of works, until the ground is gone and the responsibility snaps back onto humans.

So there’s no contradiction between “this saves me hours a day” and “this is being oversold in ways that will destabilize jobs and business models.” Those two things can be true at the same time. The comment seems to rebut “AI doesn’t work,” which isn’t really the claim being made.
by spwa4 | 2026-01-18 16:08:03+00:00
You ignore human nature. I used to say "the brain is a transformer", not in the sense of how the current batch of AI transformers work, but in the sense of an mathematical transormation. The input gets transformed into human behavior. Human behavior is not something that exists independently of our environment and stimuli. And specifically: if nothing comes in, nothing comes back out (if you actually take away inputs, right up to the point that the brain stops controlling the body and you die, but you don't have to drive it nearly that far to just make sure nothing happens anymore).

Perhaps surprisingly, humans don't object to that. Our human intelligence works by subtracting what we can predict from the inputs and then focusing on the portion that remains.

So if AI either prevents interactions with humans or makes them more predictable, then human minds just ... stop. Literally. Humans won't do anything anymore.

UBI will either fail, or it will succeed and humans will just stop.
by camel-cdr | 2026-01-18 16:08:43+00:00
> On the other hand, even RVA23 is quite poor at signed overflow checking

When I tried to measure the impact of -ftrapv in RVA23 and armv9, it was roughly the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46228597#46250569

reminder:

unsigned 64-bit:
add: RV: add+bltu Arm: adds+bcc
sub: RV: sub+bltu Arm: subs+bcs
mul: RV: mulhu+mul+beqz Arm: umulh+mul+cbz

unsigned 32-bit:
add: RV: addw+bgeu Arm: adds+bcc
sub: RV: subw+bgeu Arm: subs+bcs
mul: RV: mul+slli+beqz Arm: umul+cmp lsr 32

signed 64-bit:
add: RV: add+slt+slti+beq Arm: adds+bcc
sub: RV: sub+slt+slti+beq Arm: subs+bcs
mul: RV: mulh+mul+srai+beq Arm: smulh+mul+cmp asr 63

signed 32-bit:
add: RV: addw+add+beq Arm: adds+bvc
sub: RV: subw+sub+beq Arm: subs+bvs
mul: RV: mul+sext.w+bew Arm: smul+asr+cmp asr 31
by kalkin | 2026-01-18 16:08:50+00:00
> AI is a statistical inference engine. All it can do is predict what word will come next based on all the words that have been typed in the past.

If we keep saying this hard enough over and over, maybe model capabilities will stop advancing.

Hey, there's even a causal story here! A million variations of this cope enter the pretraining data, the model decides the assistant character it's supposed to be playing really is dumb, human triumph follows. It's not _crazier_ than Roko's Basilisk.
by glenstein | 2026-01-18 16:08:51+00:00
Just to throw in another one, string theory was practically nothing but a basic research/pure research program unearthing new mathematical objects which drove physics research and vice versa. And unfortunately for the haters, string theory has borne real fruit with holography, producing tools for important predictions in plasma physics and black hole physics among other things. I feel like culture hasn't caught up to the fact that holography is now the gold rush frontier that has everyone excited that it might be our next big conceptual revolution in physics.
by nfw2 | 2026-01-18 16:08:52+00:00
In order to sell anything, people need to know about it. Google and Meta provide a way to make this possible. If they didn't exist, you wouldn't somehow have a more affordable way to get people to know about your product. However frustrating the current situation is, it is still more accessible than needing access to the airwaves or print media to try to sell anything new.
by mrweasel | 2026-01-18 16:09:12+00:00
Never thought of ChatGPT as being just one of the GPTs that could exist, but it make a lot of sense. In a world where OpenAI where better managed, more focused on actually delivering actual value, ChatGPT would be the show case AI product, while the value is generated by the custom solutions delivered to other companies to embed in their products.
by Teever | 2026-01-18 16:09:27+00:00
We could just start to enforce the laws as they're written.

If I was to follow a stranger as closely as an entitty like Facebook or Google does and compiled a dossier on that stranger in many countries that would be considered stalking and would be illegal.

Incorporating and doing the same thing to society en masse doesn't somehow make it legal despite it somehow makes people disinclined to prosecute.
by steveBK123 | 2026-01-18 16:09:27+00:00
My favorite Tech Bro "AI is gonna make money worthless" cognitive dissonance is how Musk keeps saying exactly this. He has been quoted that people won't need to save anymore due to abundance, while also extracting a potential $1T pay package for himself...

https://fortune.com/2026/01/12/elon-musk-retirement-savings-...