MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SecretDreams | 2026-01-18 01:44:21+00:00
> ad revenue which is likely going to be huge given their DAU and what you can extrapolate their ARPU to be based on other big tech advertisers.

Ad revenue doesn't come out of thin air. Unless budgets and TAM in the ad space increase (hint: they won't), the spend has to mostly come from cannibalizing META and Google. In that regard, I wish them luck - that will be a long and bloody battle. And both the established players can fight it longer than OAI because they have actually revenue streams and strong cash balances.
by toast0 | 2026-01-18 01:44:25+00:00
It's been so long since I used a mac that I don't recognize any of these icons (or maybe it's a iPad thing?)

What app is it even for? The middle one looks like writing something. The left ones look like drawing a line or testing/calibrating a stylus? The inkpot? I don't even. And the two on the middle right look like desktop publishing?
by danabrams | 2026-01-18 01:45:16+00:00
The author talks about how software creation processes at large organizations are an artifact of how large organizations operate, but in all 3 of the 3 cases, I would ask “why does the large organization need to be that way?”

Most obviously, why do executives need to be the proxy to customers? Why can’t development teams simply talk to real customers? This isn’t just an abstract idea in agile, it grew out of actual Japanese product development practices practiced at large organizations: Toyota, Canon, and others, and documented in “The New, New Product Development Game” HBR review article that was so influential to early agile.

The point that in large organizations, most of the work is coordination, again demands the question, why? It’s been understood since at least World War I by some military planners (with organizations far larger than Google) that coordinating dependencies was far more complex than reducing or minimizing them. Goldratt wrote about it when designing a project management system for Theory of Contraints (indeed, you could argue this is a fundamental learning of ToC). And one of my favorite software conference talks of all time is Mary Poppendeck’s excellent “Tyranny of the Plan,” where she notes that as computer systems have been used in planning, we seem to have become more confident but no more competent in coordinating, rather than focusing on flow, in large-scale projects.

Finally, on the importance of software created at large organizations, I agree, something that will have millions of users on day one has a greater responsibility, but that doesn’t mean that loads of bureaucracy and checking are the pathway to quality software. First of all, does anyone believe that highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions are general high quality services? The often provide access to even the most extreme edge cases, but they do so by reducing the quality of service to everyone else. Anyone who’s ever filled out their own tax forms in the United States knows that it covers every base of possibly income, but 80% of people really only need to be concerned with 2-3 common forms, and 99% could simply be asked about 10 forms or so. Instead we have to answer questions for “directors of foreign corporations who also happen to be Us citizens,” instead of just requiring those people to fill out an additional form. And, of course, to (probably badly mis-)quote Deming, “you can’t check quality into a product.”

I would turn it around in the author: yes, the software practices operate this way in large orgs because large orgs are structured differently—but why do large orgs need to be structured that way? Is it inherent when absentee owners with low domain context (shareholders) pass ownership over to a manager? Is it because hierarchies insulate good but not great managers from genuine value creation as long as they play politics well? Is it because these are first order ways to understand complexity, and again, low-context absentee owners aren’t going to do the work to understand the more complex dynamics at play?
by Morromist | 2026-01-18 01:46:25+00:00
One problem with OpenAi advertising is that users are already moving towards Gemeni, which isn't advertising.

Chatgpt is mostly worse than Gemeni too (arguably) and isn't nearly as rate limited. So they're already losing users and making their product a worse experiance than their competition.

Sure OpenAI will make some money from ads but will it be anything close to what it takes to quench the amount of money they're burning? It seems unlikely to me. They really need to be bought out by a sugar-momma who can afford to play this kind of game like MSFT.
by pstuart | 2026-01-18 01:48:06+00:00
Grief and depression are distinctly different things.

There's obviously been many missteps on the road to "curing" depression but I think we're moving forward and it's nice to have options.

I went on anti-depressants after my brother died and they helped a lot, and I was able to stop them when no longer needed. In my decades of having medical care, I've never had a doctor push any medications on to me other than strongly recommend in certain conditions (statins, as the accumulated evidence indicates it's worth a go).

Ketamine has been very helpful as well but that is unfortunately unnecessarily spendy. I've don't plenty of recreational chemical adventures and I fail to see the appeal of it in that regard.
by defrost | 2026-01-18 01:48:34+00:00
It's been a slow steady increase in CO2 since industrialisation.

The atmosphere has become increasingly better insulated in the thermal energy spectrum .. albeit still losing a lot of heat to the outer layers and to space.

Basic back of the envelope thermodynamics tells the story - more trapped energy at the surface layer - land, sea, and near surface air becomes warmer across the globe and that warmth cascades through energy transfers.

For some it's confusing that warmth -> rising air -> inrushing colder air -> circulating air cells -> freezing conditions (just as fridges / freezers heat pump via air pressure).

The first significant paper on this was

Thermal Equilibrium of the Atmosphere with a Given Distribution of Relative Humidity (1967)

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/24/3/1520-04...

A great deal of key data (atmospheric makeup, sea tempreture records) came from hard nosed Cold War era research focused on nuclear weapons, sub tracking, and other such pursuits .. much of it "disguised" as environmental research (we listen to whales!) but not at all driven by a 'need' to invent and justify an AGW agenda (as some have claimed).
by card_zero | 2026-01-18 01:49:25+00:00
There are very long-term culture wars, from before the term was invented. Consider:

* Hippies. They were great in many ways, but also fucking stupid, man.

* The New Age movement of the 90s, obsessed with dolphins and crystal healing and mystic composting toilets, and anti-human except when the humans sit in drum circles. Actually these days I've come to quite appreciate the music of Enya. But this cultural movement was also fucking stupid and very enamoured of performative environmental concerns, which fed into a sort of industry of selling concerns to New Agers. There was a lot of guilt tripping involved for anybody who wouldn't recycle, or whatever. So naturally that made me highly suspicious and unreceptive.

* The climategate email scandal of 2009. This one actually swayed me in favor of climate scientists, because I got to see what the emails from inside the echo chamber looked like, and to see how badly they were behaving when motivated by their careers and status, and actually the answer was "not all that badly", and the massaged figures, though shameful, weren't all that massaged, and their attitudes, though biased, were actually fairly sincere. But they were part of a biased "us against them" sort of struggle, where they wanted belief.

So you get ongoing skepticism just because of, you know, backlashes, pushbacks, people rightfully wanting to be independent thinkers in the face of other people who apparently want them to conform mindlessly. The idea that it might all be a popular delusion is plausible because there's always been a lot of popular delusions around, so you've got to respect analytical doubters, if they truly are analytical.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-18 01:49:26+00:00
> It has constructs for a few different moods/modes[1], but no conjugation: the morphology used to form moods is borrowed from other verb forms (in your example, the bare infinitive) that were never (as far as I know!) dedicated mood conjugations.

Well, this is mixing an argument about the facts with an argument about the history.

On the facts this is a mood expressed by conjugating the verb. It obviously isn't an infinitive form because it's a finite verb. It is identical with the infinitive form, and this is a general rule of English (only observable with this one verb), but there's nothing stopping different forms from being identical, even identical by rule. In Latin the nominative and accusative case of a neuter noun are always identical.
by ipnon | 2026-01-18 01:51:14+00:00
When I read that there were three separate pilot programs to test how to introduce algebra back to 10 year olds all I see is dollar signs and bureaucratic paralysis. I will avoid political arguments and instead make a simple economic one, which is that in California there is a lot of money to be made by endlessly experimenting and trialing and suing for any given public proposal. And this incentivizes things like not teaching 10 year olds algebra, or taking 10 years to reintroduce algebra, when such a pedagogy is already well established for many decades, because you can make a career out of toying with outcomes. But we're not talking about software simulations here: A whole generation of kids have been denied an educational opportunity that will have effects on the rest of their lives. This reintroduction is a decision that should have been made in a single day long ago if the well-being of the pupils was the goal of these schools.
by verdverm | 2026-01-18 01:52:22+00:00
I agree the latest Gen of models, Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3 are more capable. 5.2 is OpenAI squeezing as much as they can out of 4 because they haven't had a successful pre training run since Ilya left

I disagree that they are really really capable engineers et al. They have moments where they shine like one. They also have moments where they perform worse than a new grad/hire. This is not what a really really capable engineer looks like. I don't see this fundamental changing, even with all the improvements we are seeing. It's lower level and more core than something adding more layers on top can resolve, that a only addresses best it can
by tptacek | 2026-01-18 01:54:54+00:00
It's a fun class; worth keeping in mind that several topics with 1-2 units here are whole specializations in the field, including:

* memory safety and exploitation (the "buffer overflow" section is about 20 years out of date, though super appropriate for a first course)

* the WebPKI/certificates thing

* messaging security and messaging cryptosystems,

* microarchitectural security and hardware side channels.

Multiple full courses on each of these subjects would bring you up to "practitioner" levels of expertise.
by soorya3 | 2026-01-18 01:55:12+00:00
> The thing is: it's a lot easier to live your life thinking you could have done X if you wanted to, than to "disappoint" these people that believed in you by trying and failing. You can always lean on this idea in your head of what you could have been, and how everyone believed in you so it must be true, but you just chose not to follow that path.

sometimes the best decision is the one you don't take.
by ranger_danger | 2026-01-18 01:55:53+00:00
They're probably referring to gnome's history of controversial opinions that many users don't like, such as:

- "simplifying the UI" by removing many useful features (like systray icons)

- "what makes you think sharpness is a metric?"

- claiming fractional scaling is dumb because "monitors don't have fractional pixels"

- "we know what users want" while ignoring most user feedback

- "we're not copying mac OS" while blatantly doing so

- "consistency is key" then changes entire UI paradigm every release

- "what's the usecase for <insert well-known feature>?"

- intentionally obscuring how to access / in the file picker

And in general just being incredibly tone-deaf and abusive to their own users on the forums. Torvalds has been calling out their "users are idiots and are confused by functionality" stance for over 20 years now.
by networkadmin | 2026-01-18 01:55:57+00:00
Good news, everyone! ~450 ppm is far from the 10,000+ PPM that is toxic to humans or animals. (That's 4.5%, for the math challenged.) At this rate of increase you'll be "drowning" in a thousand or more years, I guess.

It's also 1/4 of the approximate 1,600 PPM that is optimal for a large number of plants to grow. In other words, the current levels are actually very low, compared to what the plants evolved to use.

Increased plant growth from more CO2 results in more biomass, thus more CO2 uptake, so it's a virtuous cycle and you'll be OK after all.
by shagie | 2026-01-18 01:56:35+00:00
My grandparents' house was this way - the chimney was in the center of the house (built sometime in the late 1800s and rebuilt in the 1950s).

The fireplace had a stone chimney - and the kitchen was built in an 'L' shape around the first floor of the fireplace. The (master) bedroom (an additional bedroom was built in the 1950s), the stone of the chimney was a good quarter of one of the walls.

I do, however, think that the rough hewn stone and mortar of the chimney with the insets around it had a certain rustic beauty... aside from the "that got warm" in the winter and could keep the kitchen, living room, and bedroom warm.
by swisniewski | 2026-01-18 01:57:19+00:00
Take a look at pr-bot:

https://github.com/marqeta/pr-bot

The answer to dependabot, or snyk prs is to automatically merge them once all the status checks pass.

This free your devs from having to worry about patching.

PR-BOT will let you define policy on when it’s ok to automerge prs.
by singpolyma3 | 2026-01-18 01:57:22+00:00
It's not always consciously slacking off. For example when I was at Google most of the team was simply incompetent. They thought they were smart (PhDs!) and working hard. But they refused to work together. They estimated tasks in weeks and months and at the end of my time there after I'd done very little due to obstruction by other teams I was praised for my high productivity.

I never saw anyone just sitting around or really slacking. But they couldn't execute anything. It was depressing.
by genocidicbunny | 2026-01-18 01:57:39+00:00
I remember colors better than I remember names. It's a difference in how I process text, and for code where there's already 'types' of syntax, colors help differentiate between all those. It's not that I can't find the for loop, it's just that visually it becomes more distinct to me if all loops are a certain color. And class names are a certain color. And those colors tend to stand out better on a dark background than a light one. Reading light themes, or even unthemed code just feels like an additional chore that's solved pretty simply by using a dark theme.
by NewsaHackO | 2026-01-18 01:57:51+00:00
>Where is the actual financial modelling? This is pure speculation?

Every doom and gloom article about OpenAI is almost always speculation, with no actual evidence backing the claims. The issue is that people love a good "AI is going to fail" story, so it gets shot up to the front page. Unfortunately, some journalists now know that it can rake in clicks, so they will happily reduce their journalistic integrity to ride the wave.
by somewhereoutth | 2026-01-18 01:58:09+00:00
> Investors were briefly spooked last July when an M.I.T. study suggested that almost none of this is useful to businesses. Corporations had poured tens of billions of dollars into A.I., yet only one in 20 projects had succeeded, the study reported. But a Wharton study in October delivered the opposite verdict. After interviewing 801 leaders at U.S. companies, Wharton concluded that three-quarters of the businesses were getting a positive return on their A.I. investments.

The MIT study actually carried out a study. Wharton just asked some execs, who of course parroted the party line. Winter is coming.
by heliographe | 2026-01-18 02:00:18+00:00
Oh hi everyone! So funny to see how my quippy little tweet blew up the last few days on all the platforms (much more than when I share actual things I make, to my great dismay - if you're an artist/photographer, check out my apps & tools: https://heliographe.studio).

There's lots of interesting discussions to be had around what makes a great icon (but social media platforms aren't the places to have those deep conversations). For example the original Mac HIG says that an app icon should:

- clearly represent the document the application creates

- use graphics that convey meaning about what your application does

(https://www.threads.com/@heliographe.studio/post/DTehlciE3wY)

The first point might be a little outdated, as we tend to live in a "post-document" world, especially on mobile. The second is broad enough that it holds up, and under that lens it doesn't seem that an image of a pen/stylus is most appropriate for a word processor app.

By that metric, the Mavericks/Catalina (5th and 6th on the linked image) seem like the strongest icons. The Big Sur (4th) one isn't too bad given the "must fit in a squircle constraints" that came with it, but it starts to feel less like a word processor app icon - it could as easily be an icon for TextEdit/Notes.

The most recent 3 are very hard to defend - the main thing they have going for them is that because they are simpler and monochromatic, they fit more easily within a broader design system/icon family. Even then, the simpler shape doesn't make them more legible - a number of people have told me they thought it was a bandaid at first, or maybe something terminal-related for the orange on black one. The "line" under the pencil (or is it a shadow?) on the most recent one is almost as thick as the pencil itself, and blends with it because gestalt theory.

I agree that the 7th one (original ink bottle) has a few issues that don't necessarily make it the best choice for an icon - but dang, the level of craft that goes into it makes it an instant classic for me. And it does retain a fairly distinct, legible shape that still makes it a solid icon even if the detail gets lost at smaller sizes.

Icons need to be quickly recognizable, but at the same time an icon is not a glyph - and illustrational approach do have their place. Especially on devices with larger screens where they are going to appear quite large in most contexts.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-18 02:01:38+00:00
Author of Mavericks Forever here. I find it really strange that the author complains about low contrast in light mode—a complaint I share—and then says if they were to pick a favorite OS, it would be Yosemite.

Yosemite is absolutely what started this trend, and the lack of contrast is why I hate using it. Maybe this doesn't show up in the window chrome but the UI in general has way less contrast.

It actually got somewhat better in 10.11 – 10.15 before getting worse again. 10.9 and before are the best.
by apgwoz | 2026-01-18 02:02:55+00:00
Perhaps I am missing something, but this seems to require a Lemon (LLM)? Is the idea that the Lemon is used to help build an index AOT that can be queried locally, after?

I want to figure out how to build advanced tools, potentially by leveraging Lemons to iterate quickly, that allow us all to rely _less_ on Lemons, but still get 10,20,30x efficiency gains when building software, without needing to battle the ethics of it all.
by quotemstr | 2026-01-18 02:03:28+00:00
> As opposed to all those OSes that only publish headers in one language right that require everyone to go through heroic effort to interoperate with it?

Everyone can speak C ABI. It's just a matter of making memory and registers spell out the right things. Only Rust can speak to a Rust API that needs monomorphization before it can be used.

> Nobody is going to stop you from typosquatting yourself, no

True, but if it's about the same amount of work either way, you might as well design the system such that it could conceivably run services at different trust levels.

And if you don't have different trust levels? Why not just stick everything in one address space, like Midori?

I can see a case for something simpler and more streamlined than your typical Unix system, but I imagine that thing being something more this Zephyr or FreeRTOS and not require an MMU. This project does require an MMU and virtual memory.

I appreciate the effort that's gone into Xous, but I'm not sure who it's for except Rust fans who really like greenfield projects. It's just as alien as seL4 but without the mathematical correctness assurances.

I think it'd be cool to make something like this a middleware layer atop seL4 that helps make building systems with it practical.
by D-Machine | 2026-01-18 02:04:20+00:00
Code can be read without any syntax highlighting or text decoration, obviously. But adding those things is an additional information stream that makes processing faster and more reliable (redundancy in general has this effect).

As you said, it is especially useful for making certain code smells instantly visible at a glance.

I also find that different kinds of code will get different "color rhythms" (e.g. low-level algorithmic code vs. high-level code that calls a lot of functions vs. code that does a lot of operations / mutation of object or class properties) when syntax highlighting is properly semantic. This makes scanning for certain types of things (where objects are being mutated, where variables are introduced, etc) extremely fast, since you don't even need to read the characters.

I also find that rich syntax highlighting makes the codebase easier to remember, since the color (along with things like the line-lengths) gives each function a sort of unique visual texture.

Of course, all of this is personal preference. I am a very visual thinker so this kind of stuff helps a lot for me. Some people are far more verbal in their mental imagery or may remember code chunks solely based on semantics. Then, obviously, a bunch of color and/or text decorations might not matter much, or even just be a distraction.
by BuckRogers | 2026-01-18 02:05:26+00:00
Who here has said anything of substance in response to anything I've said? Not you. You're not countering anything I said, offering no new information, not even offering a counterpoint to anything. Just pure ad hominins. Yes, it's absolutely pathetic and not uncommon anymore. You're just neffing and signaling that you dislike my position and views. Too bad. Talking about insecurity. That's the only "more of the same" going on here.
by SahAssar | 2026-01-18 02:05:26+00:00
It's still ideographic but not legible, right?

Just like most software icons are not legible without prior knowledge like arrow down mean to save, a circle with a line mean power on/off, etc. Both are ideographic, and I guess some software icons might be a bit more pictographic (like a cogwheel meaning settings because you are interacting with the machine).