MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-15 19:50:57+00:00
>Consensus seems to be that the labs are profitable on inference. They are only losing money on training and free users.

That sounds like “we’re profitable if you ignore our biggest expenses.” If they could be profitable now, we’d see at least a few companies just be profitable and stop the heavy expenses. My guess is it’s simply not the case or everyone’s trapped in a cycle where they are all required to keep spending too much to keep up and nobody wants to be the first to stop. Either way the outcome is the same.
by dragonwriter | 2026-01-15 19:51:13+00:00
The Federalist papers were campaign ads for ratification of the base Constitution from a faction opposed to adding a Bill of Rights (an opposition explicitly stated in the Federalist Papers; it was, in fact, the central theme of Federalist #84.)

They are neither a reliable summary of the motivations for the provisions they support nor any kind of argument for the provisions in the Bill of Rights.
by bri3d | 2026-01-15 19:51:33+00:00
How is Palantir a loophole?

I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corporate shenanigan at play; my understanding is that they send engineers to the customer to build a product that the customer owns and operates under the customer's identity as the customer. I certainly see how businesses like Flock are a "loophole;" they collect data which is unrestricted due to its "public" nature and provide a giant trove of tools to process it which are controlled only by what amounts to their own internal goodwill. But this isn't my understanding of how Palantir works; as far as I know they never take ownership of the data so it isn't "laundered" from its original form, and is still subject to whatever (possibly inadequate) controls or restrictions were already present on this data.
by didibus | 2026-01-15 19:51:35+00:00
I think there is a hype around it becoming revolutionary and so on, but I also think investors would get an decent ROI even if it just ends up that 50+ million of users pay 20$ a month, on top of some enterprise contracts and API fees and so on. Or the inevitable Ad-supported access.

In my opinion, it's already useful enough, given the use-cases I described, to reach that level.
by fsflover | 2026-01-15 19:51:52+00:00
>> Apart from the fact that this is extremely rare,

> So are bubblewrap escapes, which is the sandbox flatpak uses.

Not only they are much more frequent, including possibly kernel privilege escalations, not affecting Qubes, - the bubblewrap repository itself says that you have to be really careful to stay secure with it, even in the lack of vulnerabilities. This is not what people should seriously rely on. Again, my secrets in vault VM are safe since the introduction of VT-d in Qubes 4.0 in ~2021. There is no comparably secure OS in the world.

I don't understand your unsubstantiated attack on Qubes.

> and being able to obtain information from other VMs defeats much of the point of isolation

It does not. Even if a VM becomes hostile and starts reading the RAM, it will not get any privileges in any other VM. Also, it can be easily cleaned. Also, you can just stop all VMs when performing a secure operation. Tell me how you protect yourself in such case with Flatpak.
by MakersF | 2026-01-15 19:52:04+00:00
It's an auction, it's called marginal pricing. Every producer bids for x KWh at a certain price (for each time slot), and the cheapest y KWh to cover all demand are taken, and all are paid at the price of the most expensive KWh bought. There is plenty of economic research on auctions and why this system is optimal: this system incentives to bid at the actual marginal cost of producing electricity, and thus allows to discover the optimal price. EU has been discussing about changing it, but there hasn't been a better system proposed yet.
If you change to pay at the bid price, you'll have companies build teams of analysts to predict the market price and bit at that, they're not just going to accept being paid much less of what they could.

Instead of focusing on this, here a few more impactful things that would help: 1. Zonal pricing, so that there is an aligned incentive to build production where demand is (connection to the grid is a big limiting factor) 2. Stop providing contracts to renewable where curtailed production gets paid (curtailed energy is paid by consumers as taxes on bills normally) 3. Start allowing to build more renewable so that renewable are setting the marginal price 4. Push utilities to do PPA (power purchase agreements) with producers of RE so they can agree to a fixed price, and a smaller slice of electricity is bought at the auction

There are a few more, but these are the most important.

Regarding your edit: the gas plant is not subsidizing, the customers are paying. But of course at the moment building renewable is so lucrative thanks to this setup, that there is a big incentive to build them. Of course they need to plan for 20-30 years, and the risk of getting to big periods at 0 marginal pricing is real, so builders need to evaluate well the risk (and PPAs can help)

In a non-competitive world what you say would be true (you'd avoid filling in the remaining 1%), but there are a large number of power producers that a cartel is unlikely
by browningstreet | 2026-01-15 19:52:07+00:00
A somewhat cynical response given the frequency of this topic/question being posted here and on other social media platforms. Add a weak "/s but not really" if you want:

People sitting at home living on apps and watching TV who decide to go to a new group social event to change things up will struggle to make a connection with someone else who was at home on an app and watching TV deciding to get out and meet someone else.

The people who have friends.. already have friends. Those who don't are numerous social cycle iterations in on that.

And how long before those people just end up talking about TV shows anyway?
by bflesch | 2026-01-15 19:52:18+00:00
People don't like how you both virtue signal and show ignorance at the same time.

It's not about "someone in my company is running some kind of ads service" but that you and your colleagues collectively have had a net negative impact on free societies all over the world.

Nobody is jealous about FAANG salaries if you need to step over unconscious homeless people on your way to work, fear about healthcare, university tuition and that your kid might be shot at school.
by Y-bar | 2026-01-15 19:52:53+00:00
Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not taking judgement on his work?
by incomingpain | 2026-01-15 19:53:00+00:00
Loneliness epidemic started 30+ years ago. There were books written in the 90s about it(bowling alone). Nothing modern can be blamed on it. If anything, social media is helping the crisis; not causing.

The 'fixes' has been established for just as long. My nearby 'community centre' was built in 1987. Has this been successful at all? Not in the least bit.

The reality of what is causing this hasnt changed. Without fixing this key problem, the crisis obviously has continued for 30+ years. I'm not nostradamus here. However, from many previous conversations it's crazy how absolutely nobody is ready to talk about the cause. They'd rather just call it a paradox or feign ignorance for why this is happening. Honestly it's rather conspiratorial creating when you think about it.

Out of curiousity I asked what gemini 3 pro thinks.

1. Revival of third places.

As if that hasnt been tried for 30+ years... fail.

2. replacing 'socializing' with "service"

The idea is that cleaning a park will somehow make you less lonely is laughable at best.

3. Bridging the generational gap.

Elderly teach the young skills? while youth teach digital literacy. My community centre literally has this. F mark.

4. Urban design and walkability.

We need to spend trillions of dollars to completely redesign and rebuild cities? lol what.

5. digital hygiene

social media is a sedative? crazy.

I love gemini, but man they are getting it so wrong. All of this will likely just caused the crisis to be worse in my opinion.

To me, has this been done unintentionally through the typical 'road to hell is paved with good intentions' or has this been intentionally done and maintained? The refusal to acknowledge the cause seems to push toward intentional. Guess we just live with the loneliness epidemic.
by musiclocal | 2026-01-15 19:53:20+00:00
I think the big solution consists of many small solutions. One problem I identified is that social media platforms (1) decimated local live music events coverage in mid-sized cities and (2) placed live music events into the same "filter bubble" algorithm as everything else, making it difficult for people to discover what is going on nearby.

I started https://musiclocal.org, a 501(c)(3), as a curated live music events platform for my local area (and hopefully others). We list all the live music events in the area, and we optimize the software for usability, performance, SEO, etc. The goal is to make discovering local live music events as easy as doom-scrolling. We have had an outstanding reception in the area we serve. We are not self-sustaining yet, but I am optimistic about our chances. As a non-profit, we do not do any of the dark-pattern garbage that has become omnipresent in social media and other consumer software. We just do the right thing as best we can.

Here is some more background (from our "Issues" page):

At MusicLocal, we focus on the root challenges facing local music communities to address endemic issues of negative social media practices, isolation and community polarization, and economic concentration and monopolization. Specifically:

• We believe convenient, comprehensive live music event listings are critical to reversing the decline in local music journalism.
• We believe ethically designed, steward-curated live music event listings provide a vital alternative to addictive social media platforms.
• We believe that making live music more visible and accessible encourages in-person interaction, strengthening communities and alleviating loneliness and social isolation.
• We believe that local live music listings are a critical component of strong local economies, helping to lessen the negative economic consequences of big tech and music industry monopolies.

---

"Technology has a purpose, and that purpose is to do good and to share" --Steve Wozniak
by Lerc | 2026-01-15 19:53:31+00:00
Regardless of the usage of the term Sprite, the real measure of how appropriate it is to use the term for something else is how many people get confused in this manner. I can't really tell what the average reader would think because my background is in game development, so my view is not representative.

I think people can get bogged down in the technical weeds over what a sprite is in graphics. Historically it started out as mini graphics overlays in hardware. There was a transition period motivated by Amiga documentation to have Sprites and Bobs, to distinguish, and perhaps advertise, the use of the Blitter. When software or Blitter Sprites became nearly ubiquitous, they returned to simply being called Sprites, the fairly rare use of the original form became known as Hardware Sprites. Usually it was only mouse pointers that remained as Hardware Sprites

Obviously the term Hardware Sprites is not strictly a distinguishing label either. They are all controlled by software using hardware with some degree of balance between the two.
by mtrovo | 2026-01-15 19:53:34+00:00
I know the feeling but my impression is that interacting with people that are strictly internet friends is a proxy to the real thing, the same way watching porn is a proxy for the real thing. When you spend X hours talking to people on the Internet you're spending at least less X hours talking to people IRL and building the sense of community that we now feel thinning away.

I know people that are internet famous and are terminally online all the time. I'm pretty sure it must feel like they're accomplishing something but for somebody IRL not familiar with the game they're playing their life looks very weird socially.

My current mindset for this is that social media should only work augmenting my real world social life, not take what's left of it away from me.
by tialaramex | 2026-01-15 19:53:43+00:00
So, what's auctioned here isn't power.

What they're auctioning are what's called "Contracts for Difference". The contract has a "Strike price" which is in essence the price the government (via a for-purpose company) agrees you will be paid regardless of what happens for electricity sold to the system.

Now as the word "difference" might suggest there will be a difference between the market price at any particular moment and this strike price. The CfD works by the government paying you the difference when the market price was lower, and you pay the government the difference when it's higher. You can definitely afford to pay them 'cos you just got to sell power for $$$$

Why do this? Well, the trick is that a government (even if politicians don't always act like it) is here for the long haul. So for them guaranteeing how much you'll be paid for energy you're not going to make for ten years is fine. Tax will still exist in ten years, houses with electric light will still exist in ten years, this is an easy bet. But for a wind farm company, a commercial undertaking, such guarantees are incredibly valuable and would be unaffordable from elsewhere. So this is (relatively) a very cheap subsidy.

When there was a gas price spike because Russia invaded Ukraine the contracted wind farms paid a whole lot of money because of that difference I talked about, if you'd gone freelance, no CfD subsidy well, you're printing cash, 'cos at those prices you probably made back your whole install costs in a year of trading.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-15 19:53:53+00:00
Nobody was suggesting that models should or would talk about adult content at the dinner table. What a weird comparison to make.

My point was literally that it’s a bigger industry than you give credit to because it’s a topic that isn’t generally discussed in polite conversation.

But I don’t think this is a topic we are likely to agree on. So perhaps it’s better to agree to disagree.
by wildzzz | 2026-01-15 19:54:01+00:00
Yep, a pound of pasta is about 4 good servings for an adult so use that to factor how much or little you want. I'll typically make one pound of pasta for my wife and I for dinner and lunch the next day. Although depending on the sauce or any added meat, it could easily be 5 or more servings. Growing up, my mom would use one 1lb box of pasta, one 24oz jar of sauce, one onion, and 1lb of ground beef to make enough food for a family of two adults and three kids.
by solatic | 2026-01-15 19:54:07+00:00
Make Single Room Occupancy (SRO) housing legal again.

Having barely room for little more than a bed forces you to get out during the day. Stuff happens when your default for where to spend your time is not at "home". SRO halls also usually had more room for common spaces to meet and socialize with other people in a similar position in life, and of course, SRO is a very cheap housing option.
by hereonout2 | 2026-01-15 19:54:08+00:00
Clearly one use case where it wouldn't work.

On the other hand I'm a software engineer and my incredibly powerful MacBook could be not much more than a fancy dumb terminal - to be honest it almost is already.

If I can play a very responsive multiplayer game of the latest call of duty on my $300 TV with a little arm chip in it, then I could well imagine doing my job on a cloud Mac if the terminal device looked and felt like a MacBook but had the same tiny CPU my TV has.

Not sure if I'd choose it as a personal device but for corporations it seems a no brainer.
by nemomarx | 2026-01-15 19:54:31+00:00
In my experience a few times people will ask for money if they see you giving someone else something, but not that often, and you can shrug through it and say that was your last dollar or something. Keep the interactions short and easy and try to carry the loose bills outside of your wallet so no one can actually see how much you have inside it?

Exactly one time after I did this, a guy asked me to send something to his venmo since I really only had a dollar. Probably my strangest interaction.
by coeneedell | 2026-01-15 19:54:46+00:00
I don’t see how you can make this claim when the budget balance at universities is extremely tilted towards stem. The budget for the kind of programs you seem to be complaining about come out to percents. Hard to say universities are “more interested” in very very small parts of their budget. What is happening now though is the federal government holds back billions of dollars in medical research grants, punishing, in some cases even killing patients, over “ideological” issues.
by bombcar | 2026-01-15 19:55:21+00:00
Yes, there's tons of subtleties (my Latin is mostly relegated to philosophical and theological texts, not known for unsubtle clear language!) - but they're usually restricted to the document and one or two for each given "phrase".

You become somewhat of a tokenizer and realize what the token means and can parse that way.

It's not day-1 wheelock and can read, but it's way sooner than "I can fluently ask Caesar to make me a hamburger down by the docks."
by SoftTalker | 2026-01-15 19:55:40+00:00
I'll say that when I was a kid, the neighborhood was still as it was originally built, no sidewalks. Didn't stop anyone from socializing, didn't stop kids from biking around.

The city added sidewalks there in the '00s or so, but when I go back there I almost never see anyone using them.

I think the trend of isolation and loneliness is not really related to infrastructure or stuff like "walkability." Those things are pretty minor.
by sharkjacobs | 2026-01-15 19:55:47+00:00
It takes a certain amount of expertise to use LLMs effectively. And I know that some people claim otherwise but they simply aren't worth listening to.

Just because Claude Cowork is for "other" kinds of work, not just software engineering, doesn't in any way change that. It's not like other kinds of knowledge work aren't being done by intelligent professionals who invest time into learning how to use complicated software and systems

That is to say, I don't know who the "target user" of this is, but it is a $100/month subscription, so it's presumably someone who is a pretty serious AI user.
by lunaticlabs | 2026-01-15 19:55:51+00:00
What is probably happening, based on my own experience inside companies doing hiring, is that we generally get flooded with CVs anytime we put up a job listing, and most of them are irrelevant. To help manage the flow of applicants, we use recruiters and HR people to filter the resumes. Since they don’t know how to evaluate engineers, inevitably they filter CVs by the somewhat arbitrary criteria that is in the job listing.

My recommendation for you, when you see a job listing, is to investigate the company and project, try and find people on the responsible teams, and see if you can network or reach out to them directly. This often will get you past the arbitrary screening that is setup, and they’re much more likely to be able to judge you on your merits and not whether you meet some arbitrary filtering goal. The first pass in hiring is always a fast rejection pass, and is rarely one that is looking for qualified people, just one that is trying to get the flow of applicants down to a manageable level.
by bflesch | 2026-01-15 19:55:52+00:00
In the US you have to privately pay for many things that you get for free in more developed nations.

For example safety is not guaranteed due to extreme homelessness and easy access to guns, so you have to pay more for gated communities and security/concierge. You need to privately pay for healthcare and also pay off debt from university tuition, both is much cheaper in EU. If you have kids, you have to pay for private schools.

Then all over the US the infrastructure is so extremely bad that you don't even have sidewalks and you need to take a car to get anywhere, with really bad public transport.

If you want to just emulate European lifestyle in the US you really need to spend a lot of money.
by f1shy | 2026-01-15 19:56:00+00:00
Let me point out, that for me personally, for many years, hyperlinks in Wikipedia were the worst feature. I hated that! Anytime I started looking for something, I would start following links ad infinitum. Was extremely distracting. Instead of a little inline definition, for everything is a link. There is a good balance between linking to the definition of each word, and just inlining the definition.

Anyway, at some I disciplined myself to not follow the links. But sometimes the definition really needs following them.
by ahussain | 2026-01-15 19:56:07+00:00
I enjoyed hearing Claude Code creator Boris Cherny talk about "latent demand"[0], which is when users start using your product for something it was not intended for. When that happens, it's a great signal that you should go build that into a full product.

Cowork seems like a great application of that principle.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmdLVWMdjOk
by huntaub | 2026-01-15 19:56:10+00:00
Yes, I'm working in the space too. I think it's fine to do benchmarks, I don't think it's necessary to immediately post them any time a competitor comes up on HN.

I don't want to see the cloud storage sector turn as bitter as the cloud database sector.

I've previously looked through the benchmarking code, and I still have some serious concerns about the way that you're presenting things on your page.
by AndrewDucker | 2026-01-15 19:56:39+00:00
"Who don't feel that they can join any local groups"

There's your problem. Fix that.

If there aren't any local groups then help create one. If there are, go along, meet some people, see what works for you, join a different one if you didn't like the first one, keep going until you've found your people.

If you feel like you can't go to a group then create a support group for people who feel like they can't go to groups. Or go online and find the virtual space for people like you and then travel to see those people (or invite them to see you).

But there is no fix for you having to socialise if you're lonely. You're going to have to find a way in.
by wgjordan | 2026-01-15 19:57:02+00:00
> The benchmark suite is trivial and opensource.

The actual code being benchmarked is trivial and open-source, but I don't see the actual JuiceFS setup anywhere in the ZeroFS repository. This means the self-published results don't seem to be reproducible by anyone looking to externally validate the stated claims in more detail. Given the very large performance differences, I have a hard time believing it's an actual apples-to-apples production-quality setup. It seems much more likely that some simple tuning is needed to make them more comparable, in which case the takeaway may be that JuiceFS may have more fiddly configuration without well-rounded defaults, not that it's actually hundreds of times slower.
by jeron | 2026-01-15 19:57:17+00:00
>because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.

it's not just that. Alexandr Wang from Scale AI once said in a talk that they had to compete against Palantir for a gov contract. Palantir's salesmen have a high closing rate because they sell the software as if it were written by God itself. It's one hell of a sales strategy