MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wat10000 | 2026-02-04 20:46:23+00:00
Has anything changed? He's not correct about the past metric always being about zero-sum games. Railroads are pretty obviously not zero-sum, and wars are generally negative-sum. How many successful merchants existed in ancient times? I'm sure there were plenty.

And there's plenty of zero-sum in success today. Politics is the most obvious example. I can't be a Senator without excluding someone else from being a Senator. Your startup might be creating value, but the funding it needs is funding that can't go to other startups. The economy is not zero-sum because things have different value to different people, but money is zero-sum aside from banks playing tricks.

The idea is patently absurd in any case. There are plenty of successful mean people out there, including one extremely successful mean person who became particularly successful after this essay was written and is so notorious that I don't even have to name him for you to know who I'm talking about.

This looks like an example of hackers thinking they're fundamentally changing the world, when all that's happening is that they're working in an area that's too small for the wider world to care very much yet. Back when the internet was shiny and new, there was all this talk of how it was going to change the world with the free flow of information. Censorship would fall, regulation would be impossible, and the internet would be a bastion of freedom. Well, it only looked that way because governments took a while to start actually caring about the internet. Once they did, it turns out the internet is like everything else: the people with guns ultimately get to decide what you do if they want to.

I accept that the successful people pg knows are nice to him. Maybe they're even nice in general. But extrapolating that to "being mean makes you fail" is absurd.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-04 20:46:23+00:00
> Sure, a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M.

What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital?

Also consider how you're going to choose the board of a trillion dollar company if no natural person owns more than 0.01% of it. It's going to end up being controlled by Wall St funds instead. How do you expect that to go?
by michaelt | 2026-02-04 20:46:36+00:00
> the Post endured two punishing rounds of voluntary buyouts, in 2023 and 2025, that reduced its newsroom from more than a thousand staffers to under eight hundred,

Note a report on another WaPo layoff, from January this year, describes a layoff as "nearly 100 workers, or 4% of its staff" [1] which would of course work out to 2500 employees.

'Newsroom' employees are journalists, editors, photographers, fact checkers, foreign correspondents etc; non-newsroom employees are jobs like ad sales, customer service, printing, distribution, HR, IT, legal, finance etc.

So the $100M loss isn't $125k per employee, it's more like $40k per employee.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c623ppl5d8ro
by ssl-3 | 2026-02-04 20:46:51+00:00
That's broadly how it works today, yes: The printer itself has no concept of what it is printing. It's just running some heaters and spinning some motors in response to gcode.

Since such a printer is incapable of determining whether or not this gcode represents a legislatively-restricted item and then blocking its production, then that machine becomes illegal to sell in New York. Easy-peasy. It just takes a quick vote or two and the stroke of a pen, and it is done.

You're probably thinking something like "But that doesn't work at all," and I agree. But sometimes legislators just don't care that they've thrown out the baby along with the bathwater.
by echelon | 2026-02-04 20:47:18+00:00
I, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got.

B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.

I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane prices. LaunchDarkly promised the moon, but their product worked worse than our in-house system and we spent nearly a year with a couple of dedicated headcount engineering workarounds.

Atlassian, you name it - it's all got to go.

I just wish I could include AWS in this list. Compute and infra needs to be as generic as water.

If you're working at SaaS, find an exit. AI is coming for you. Now's a great time to work on the AI replacement of your product.
by trentnix | 2026-02-04 20:47:40+00:00
Reduce the power of government if you want to reduce the power certain individuals have over society. Because government is such a single, extremely powerful lever it becomes a singular target of influence and corruption by the rich and influential. Why do you think so many of the rich and powerful move to DC or keep residences there?

The insistence of so many to take away power from Jeff Bezos, who won’t send armed goons to my house if I choose not to buy stuff from Amazon, and giving more power to the government that sent goons to Matt Taibbi’s house the same day he was giving Congressional testimony is an egregious case of missing the plot.
by dredmorbius | 2026-02-04 20:47:52+00:00
3/4 cup is about 315 ml, or another 315 g, for just over 400g cooked weight. The linked article does not make clear whether or not the 300g is dry or cooked weight.

The original paper describes two protocols, short-term and long-term (2-day and 6-week respectively) of 100g dry oats and 80g dry oats prepared for each meal. That's a generous but not outrageous serving size, and the former comes out to 300g oats per day over three meals.

<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68303-9#Sec15>
by JumpCrisscross | 2026-02-04 20:47:53+00:00
> a board, no member of which may be worth more than $100M

This is just a power transfer to Wall Street and CEOs.

We live in a wealthy society. Folks will be wealthy. The problem isn’t the wealth per se but the distribution, in particular, the pain at the bottom; the channels between wealth and politics; and the connection between wealth and morality in fascistic-Christian circles.
by washadjeffmad | 2026-02-04 20:48:13+00:00
I work with a lot of artists, and selling them on (not totally rejecting) AI has largely been unsuccessful until they both understand the analogies and the specifics of what different tools do.

AI makes you the manager. The models are like GRAs or contract workers, maybe new to their fields but with tireless energy, and you need to be able to instruct them correctly and evaluate their outputs. None of them can do everything, and you'll need to carefully hire the ones you want based on the work you need, which means breaking workflows into batchable parts. If you've managed projects before, you've done this.

Right now, my focus is improving pipelines in composition and arrangement based on an artist's corpus. A lot of them just want to be more productive, and it's a slog to write, then break into parts, etc using modern notation software.
by monero-xmr | 2026-02-04 20:48:31+00:00
Well before vibe coding, tons of open source software existed (and exists) to replace SaaS. With lots of features and knobs and real communities. But I still often pay for SaaS because managing it is a headache. Some human has to do it. I can pay the human or I can pay the company. I really don’t see how vibe coded toys can replace real battle tested SaaS products. A better explanation is the bubble in PE ratio is deflating and it’s happening all over, regressing to the mean. AI is a convenient explanation for everything
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-04 20:49:18+00:00
To tackle the second part first, do you think creating finely crafted bespoke code is going to save a mid level ticket taker (not referring to you of course) who can take well defined requirements and create code is going to save anyone’s job - ie “a human LLM”?

Those types of developers on the enterprise dev side - where most developers work - were becoming a commodity a decade ago and wages have been basically stagnant. Now those types of developers are finding it hard to stand out and get noticed.

The trick is to move “up the stack” and closer to the customer whether that be an internal customer or external customer and be able to work at a higher level of scope, impact and ambiguity.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

It’s been well over a decade and 6 jobs ago that I had to do a coding interview to prove I was able “to codez real gud”, every job I’ve had since then has been more concerned with whether I was “smart and get things done”. That could mean coding, leading teams, working with “the business”, being on Zoom calls with customers, flying out to the customers site, or telling a PE backed company with low margins that they didn’t need a team of developers, they needed to outsource complete implementations to other companies.

I’ve always seen coding as grunt work. But the only way to go from requirements -> architectural vision -> result and therefore getting money in my pocket.

My vision was based on what I could do myself in the allotted time at first and then what I could do with myself + leading a team. Now it’s back to what I can do by myself + Claude Code and Codex.

As far as the first question, my “fun” during my adult life has come from teaching fitness classes until I was 35 and running with friends in charity races on the weekend, and just hanging out, spending time with my (now grown) stepsons after that and for the past few years just spending time with my wife and traveling, concerts, some “digital nomadding” etc
by raffael_de | 2026-02-04 20:49:32+00:00
That may well be. I'm also extrapolating from what I read about his upbringing. That's pretty extreme. He was severely abused by his father (possibly even sexually) and bullied by his peers. His "superpower" is an insatiable desire to proof something forever. Also asking Epstein (post-conviction) for an invitation to a wild party on his island is allowing for conclusions that are hardly flattering. And I mean that in a way that is orthogonal to happiness.
by wellwelloctober | 2026-02-04 20:49:59+00:00
It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.

Relative to what it was like c. 2005 it's impossible to describe how much worse a paper WaPo is. The local coverage was basically nonexistent (a blog run by one guy was putting out more). At some point the paper stopped covering the business of congress and the federal government with regularity. And most of the articles felt like recycled, lesser versions of what the Times would write about things. In short, it brought very little to the table for me as someone who just wanted to know what was going on.

I cancelled my subscription, and they still delivered it to my apartment every day for four more years until I moved.

It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.
by tannervanessen | 2026-02-04 20:50:00+00:00
Location: Austin TX
Remote: Interested in fully remote or flexible hybrid

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Node.js, SQL, APIs, Python, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, AWS, GCP, PyTorch, Docker, React, Linux, Bash, ML, Agentic design, Eng Management, IaC, Terraform, Terragrunt, SysAdmin, MDM admin, GCP, NoSQL, Json, Azure, K8s

Résumé/CV: https://tanner-vanessen.com/

Email: tanner.vanessen@gmail.com

Hi Im Tanner, Former CTO of Atomo, we made some amazing AI agents but we ran out of funding. I am looking for my next role. My career took off so no one wants me to be an IC anymore but I didnt spend enough time as a Manager to be a manager anymore. West Point degree in 2008, spent the last 9 years in Tech. Take a look at my webstie and let me know what you think. reach out to me directly or my AI Chatbot that has been preloaded with most of my history. You can even upload the Job description you are looking for and see if Im a match!
by brendoelfrendo | 2026-02-04 20:50:32+00:00
I think that on the whole, you're right in that these issues, where social media can provide support to young people, are not often addressed, but I also think that the larger framing that seems to pop up in these threads, where we assume social media is a negative influence that might sometimes facilitate a positive interaction, is backwards, and not really supported by evidence. Far more research, especially research that actually talks to kids about their social media use seems to indicate that, on the whole, kids experience social media as a largely neutral thing that sometimes has good or bad outcomes. Importantly, I think talking to kids reveals that they're usually aware of the harms of social media and they work to mitigate those influences in their lives.

I really blame "The Anxious Generation" for somehow successfully setting the tone of conversation around social media by feeding into the larger moral panic despite being a poorly researched pile of dreck.
by pdonis | 2026-02-04 20:50:53+00:00
"Recorded according to law" refers to separate Florida statutes that specify how that's done--with the county clerk in the county where the property is located.

> it just means that the deed needs to have been recorded some time before you get to court.

No, before whatever event happens that might trigger a lawsuit.

For example (hypothetical as far as I know): say I purchase a property from a fraudulent seller. They promise me they'll record the deed after it's signed and notarized by both of us, but they never do so. (Of course I'd be stupid to do things this way, but maybe I'm a real cheapskate and want to save on title company fees.) Then they sell it to someone else. In order for my ownership rights to be protected by Florida law, I would have had to see that the deed was not recorded, and do it myself (and pay the recording fee), before the date of the second sale. Before the date of the court hearing to challenge the second sale would not be sufficient.

It's true that, in a typical closing in Florida (and in every other state where I've bought real property), the closing takes place at the title company's office, their notary notarizes all the documents and gives me copies before I leave, and I get the key to the house at the end of that. I don't have to wait until the deed is recorded with the county to take possession.

My question would be, how does a closing work in jurisdictions that have Torrens title? Does the closing have to take place at the land registry, so they can confirm that everything is checked and valid and recorded before I get the key to the house?
by warrenski | 2026-02-04 20:51:02+00:00
Thanks for sharing your experience and insights on this. Migrating out of Eudora is no walk in the park! I've often considered taking the IMAP route, but Eudora's support for IMAP feels a little patchy.

Specialised conversion/migration software is probably the better route to go, especially now that the Eudora source code was donated to the Computer History Museum. I'll give Eudora2Unix a shot though!

You mentioned attachment name clashes: Eudora simply appends an incrementing integer to the incoming attachment's filename, for example, it would retain file.jpg for the first email and use file1.jpg in the next email it encounters.
by conductr | 2026-02-04 20:51:17+00:00
Yes to some extent. We wrote a CRM that works for what we needed. It's not a full blown SaaS product we could sell to any company as a tenant, as they would all want other features that aren't important to us. This is what happens during an implementation anyways, we only implement what we care about.

No names, but my company is service companies (mostly residential) - many logos with different verticals (think electric, hvac, etc). Having a SaaS CRM that served all our brands needs was always a challenge and made aggregating anything difficult (we basically were running multiple CRMs)

We were using dozens of SaaS tools per logo - and just going through them all and figuring out what features we need/want and rolling them into the larger system. We've also built handful of things for internal operations, finance, etc
by coldpie | 2026-02-04 20:51:34+00:00
> What does that change when the CEO is still commanding a trillion dollars in capital?

Their incentives. They've already hit the wealth cap, they can't make their high score any higher. The incentive to steal from their workers is gone.

> How do you expect that to go?

Better than what we have now, hopefully. I'm open to suggestions if you have a better idea for how to reign in these people!
by falloutx | 2026-02-04 20:51:37+00:00
> And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.

I have no idea how you are spending "large amounts" of unplanned spend on Saas products. Every company I worked for had Saas subscription costs being under 1% of capex. Unless you add AWS, which is actually "large amounts" but good luck vibe coding that.
by bravoetch | 2026-02-04 20:51:47+00:00
Unfortunately there is no way to slow down technological progress. The plea for mercy in the face of rapid change is heard, and now it's time to adjust instead of asking for pause.

The Guardian opinion piece is sad to me, in that the view of humanity freed from work is seen as a problem. I prefer to think that we could adjust our economic goals from 'high employment' to more wholesome metrics about mental health and happiness.
by colpabar | 2026-02-04 20:51:59+00:00
I think the percentage of people who drink alcohol and have never done any drugs is >50%, and I would bet that the percentage of people who smoke weed (not just once) who have also done other drugs is like 95%. There are plenty of people who will binge drink every weekend but think that smoking a joint is too far. I find that strange, but it is surprisingly common.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-04 20:52:07+00:00
> and even get into conflicts with governments over the issue.

To be fair, they also cooperate with the US government for immoral dragnet surveillance[0], and regularly assent to censorship (VPN bans, removed emojis, etc.) abroad. It's in both Apple and most governments' best interests to appear like mortal enemies, but cooperate for financial and domestic security purposes. Which for all intents and purposes, it seems they do. Two weeks after the San Bernardino kerfuffle, the iPhone in question was cracked and both parties got to walk away conveniently vindicated of suspicion. I don't think this is a moral failing of anyone, it's just the obvious incentives of Apple's relationship with their domestic fed. Nobody holds Apple's morality accountable, and I bet they're quite grateful for that.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
by hirvi74 | 2026-02-04 20:52:13+00:00
> choosing to use AI isn't all or nothing.

That's how I have been using AI the entire time. I do not use Claude Code or Codex. I just use AI to ask questions instead of parsing the increasingly poor Google search results.

I just use the chat options in the web applications with manual copy/pasting back and forth if/when necessary. It's been wonderful because I feel quite productive, and I do not really have much of an AI dependency. I am still doing all of my work, but I can get a quicker answer to simple questions than parsing through a handful of outdated blogs and StackOverflow answers.

If I have learned one thing about programming computers in my career, it is that not all documentation (even official documentation) was created equally.
by mlyle | 2026-02-04 20:52:27+00:00
> The radiator could be aluminum foil,

As I've pointed it out to you elsewhere -- how do you couple the 4MW of heat to the aluminum foil? You need to spread the power somewhat evenly over this massive surface area.

Low pressure gas doesn't convect heat well and heat doesn't conduct down the foil well.

It's just like how on Earth we can't cool datacenters by hoping that free convection will transfer heat to the outer walls.
by Etheryte | 2026-02-04 20:52:28+00:00
There is space to suspend your belief/disbelief before you look it up and entertain an idea as plausible to consider what it might say about the discussion at hand. This doesn't mean blindly believing make believe, rather it means deferring coming to a conclusion, to quote the site guidelines, to converse curiously. Of course you can look it up and resolve it after the fact, but that doesn't mean the rest of the surrounding context can't be interesting without the resolution.
by miltonlost | 2026-02-04 20:52:30+00:00
He bought the company, changed the editor in chief, forced the editorial board to not make an endorsement in 2024. That decision alone helped drop thousands of subscribers due to its overt spiking from the Billionaire. So yes. He is to blame entirely for tanking the reputation of the WaPo to be nothing more than billionaire trumpet. That's going to turn off the vast majority of people who had subscribed to what the WaPo had been.
by panarky | 2026-02-04 20:52:49+00:00
> They historically had the best political coverage of DC

And then Bezos replaced veteran leaders with ideological leaders from the Murdoch empire. Then Bezos put his thumb on the scale and vetoed the paper's presidential endorsement in 2024, and 250,000 subscribers cancelled. Then Bezos dictated that the paper's opinion section will censor any idea that does not support conservative/libertarian/free-market ideology and 75,000 more subscribers cancelled.

Maybe the ideological reorientation along with savage cuts to the newsroom has something to do the loss of subscribers and the dire financial straits used to justify even more cuts to the newsroom?

There is a market for quality, fact-checked journalism that you can't get on podcasts and social media. But when you force that journalism through a right-wing ideological filter, you destroy the intrinsic value of independent journalism.
by bigyabai | 2026-02-04 20:52:55+00:00
No company has values. Anthropic's resistance to the administration is only as strong as their incentive to resist, and that incentive is money. Their execs love the "Twitter vs Facebook" comparison that makes Sam Altman look so evil and gives them a relative halo effect. To an extent, Sam Altman revels in the evil persona that makes him appear like the Darth Vader of some amorphous emergent technology. Both are very profitable optics to their respective audiences.

If you lend any amount of real-world credence to the value of marketing, you're already giving the ad what it wants. This is (partially) why so many businesses pivoted to viral marketing and Twitter/X outreach that feels genuine, but requires only basic rhetorical comprehension to appease your audience. "Here at WhatsApp, we care deeply about human rights!" *audience loudly cheers*