MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fairity | 2026-02-18 05:25:24+00:00
The author keeps saying, over and over, that the reason this is a good bet is because "the downside is capped and the upside is asymmetric" as if that's some ground-breaking realization.

Sorry, but obviously the downside is capped. The downside of virtually any marketing investment is capped at the cost of the media buy...And, the upside being "asymmetric" isn't some saving grace. What matters is the likelihood that you actually realize that asymmetric upside. And, nowhere in the article does he talk about Ro's estimated success likelihoods or actual outcomes.

In short, he's basically saying:

- I made a bet

- It costs me something ("capped downside")

- There's a potential payout ("asymmetric upside")

- I have no idea whether this is positive expected value
by pcchristie | 2026-02-18 05:25:25+00:00
Yeah, I do/did doubt this would port over the Alt Codes, though as you say I'm not sure someone couldn't just long-hand re-write the Alt Codes in either a mod/add-on/config file for any given Office competitor suite.

After all, the majority of the "mappings" are arbitrary/obscure anyway as only one option can "match" the letter (e.g. F is for File, so ForMulas needs to use M. I and D are used for legacy Office Shortcut compatibility so iNsert and dAtA use N and A respectively).

In other words, looking for a logic to these codes even in Office is a hiding to nothing anyway and it's really just a case of building muscle memory (or coming up with a bizarro-logic that helps e.g. "A is for dAtA").

It would be incredible to just be able to install a "365 Mode" or config where the full re-map has been done. I'm semi surprised this hasn't already existed for a long time, even to the point of being shipped built-in.
by lnsru | 2026-02-18 05:25:34+00:00
Take the reports with a grain of salt. Tesla does not mandate maintenance. The cars in the reports are the ones who left factory and get checked after 3 years of intensive use without any maintenance. Check the light alignment, check rust in the brakes and check the suspension and the inspection will be fine. Still cheaper than 400-600€ bi-yearly coolant refill from other manufacturers. Plus Tesla has published repair manual which is very strong advantage for me. I am poor and maintain my cars by myself. Maybe I like it too.
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-18 05:25:51+00:00
Interesting how this thread has people saying they love the acting and people saying they hate it. I can't say as I found the acting itself to be amazing outside of a few scenes, but I never found it cringe enough to not want to see more. It'd be cool to understand more about what triggers this differently for different folks.

A related thing I find difficult to watch is when characters are in impending danger too often. Breaking Bad, for instance, was a bit hard for me to get into because of the continual tension and risk of everything going sideways. I managed to watch it anyway and am glad of it, but definitely found Better Call Saul to be a more pleasurable watch.
by autoexec | 2026-02-18 05:27:54+00:00
> This piece contains spoilers for Halt and Catch Fire.

I'm glad they put this at the top. I instantly closed the tab. On the off chance that the title is remotely true, I wouldn't want to have the show ruined for me before I even saw an episode.

For others who have never heard of this show, here's a little I picked up from carefully scanning over the wikipedia page:

It's a AMC period drama about the early days of PCs and the internet. It ran from June 1, 2014 – October 14, 2017, had four seasons, reviews are good (so it's not just this guy who liked it) and they got better as the show went on. Also "it was marketed as the first TV series to premiere on Tumblr and the first time AMC had partnered with a social media service to debut a new show." which is weird, but it does seem like it's worth checking out.
by altairprime | 2026-02-18 05:27:58+00:00
Notably, I believe the Cessna stall parachute in certain planes is autonomous by most definitions, not the least of which because it fires without pilot input and because it takes control of the plane away from the human to do so. I recognize this is a rather, uh, odd use of ‘autonomous’ — but it does technically serve as a pilotless emergency landing mechanism :)
by Aurornis | 2026-02-18 05:28:02+00:00
It reminds me of the claims that your phone's microphone is always on and feeding your conversations to Facebook so they can serve you ads, even when the app is closed.

Anyone who has experience with apps, permissions, or even basic reverse engineering or network activity monitoring would realize that this couldn't be true without someone having found evidence.

Yet even on HN you find die-hard believers that it's true. I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true. If it's true, it means they were smart enough to see through the facade unlike the other sheep in the world.
by Jashwanth01 | 2026-02-18 05:29:18+00:00
Thanks for clarifying... I appreciate you taking the time to explain.

I understand the sensitivity around spam lately. I’m new here and still learning the culture, so the context helps a lot.

I’ll take the feedback on presentation and positioning, polish it properly, and resubmit in a better form. Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.
by musicale | 2026-02-18 05:30:03+00:00
> In all of the material (two textbooks and numerous handouts) there was no mention of the obvious similarities to Ada

Really? That's kind of the point of VHDL, isn't it? (vs. Verilog's unholy combination of C-like syntax with begin/end blocks, etc.)

VHDL also inherits Ada's module style, designed to have different implementations of the same thing (and verbosity, where it seems like you often have to say the same thing repeatedly, for better or for worse - more type checking at the expense of more typing at the keyboard.)
by Swizec | 2026-02-18 05:30:49+00:00
>This has always bugged me. $7 million for a 30-second-long ad. What do they get out of it?

Super Bowl ads are about brand building. They're not conversion ads. Their direct impact is to reduce CPC (cost per conversion) on other advertising.

Say you have to pay $100 per instagram conversion. Users see your ads cold and need a lot of convicing. Most won't pay attention long enough for your ad to convert. You need them to see a lot of ads.

But after they've seen your brand plastered all over the Super Bowl (and other brand opportunities), those same instagram ads might start converting at $90 per conversion. Users see your ad and go "Oh yeah I remember that brand, lemme check this out"

The brand effect is so strong that displaying a Visa (or Mastercard or Amex) logo near checkout literally increases consumer spend. Study from 1986: https://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/13/3/348/18224...

Another study from 2015 showing that credit card logos increase estimates of item value: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Effect-of-Credit-Card-...
by rich_sasha | 2026-02-18 05:31:06+00:00
I would add that it's really unclear, IMO, what the real state of the Russian economy is.

The main focus is on GDP growth, which indeed has been reported as decent - maybe a bit of a wobble recently but no more.

So, first of all, that number is kind of unverifiable. Hostile journalists have been silenced, independent institutions shattered or kicked out. Their GDP number might be true, but might also be inflated, and we'd never know.

Moreover, with Putin's (and incidentally Trumpian) approach of never retreating and always doubling down, I'd expect Russia would act like it's business as usual until pretty much the day it collapses. As with the Titan sub, there will be some awkward creaking sounds then in one instant it will all go.

For the final straw, even if the GDP number is 100% right, increasingly it is driven by military spending. GDP is essentially the sum total of money spent in a country. And Russia is increasingly spending that money not on healthcare, schools, police, infrastructure and investments, and instead on military hardware being sent straight to be destroyed in Ukraine. You can do this for a little bit but, as the article points out, not forever, and mere GDP growth is not much of a sign of a strong economy.

There's just so much we don't know: if the GDP is real, what Russian gold reserves look like (apparently raided - but how much?), how their oil companies are holding up having siphoned every last Rouble meant for maintenance off to cash. Russia also lost something like an estimated 1.25M men. If for a back-of-the-envelope we assume half of Russia's prewar population is participating in labour force, that's almost 2% of the workforce permanently lost. And their loss rate ain't dropping.
by fdefitte | 2026-02-18 05:31:13+00:00
What gets me about this show is how it nails the emotional cost of building things. Most tech dramas focus on the product or the money. HaCF focuses on what it does to the people. The relationships that get wrecked, the compromises you make, the way obsession eats everything around it. If you've ever been deep in a startup you feel it in your chest watching this show.
by yes_really | 2026-02-18 05:31:43+00:00
You are wrong. My question was not "in bad faith". It is unfortunate but multiple people really do believe that it is bad that Israel is able to detect and stop terrorism through technology. There are multiple comments even in this post that openly support terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.

Instead of assuming you can read my mind and falsely accuse me of saying stuff in bad faith, it would be better if you weren't so arrogant.
by lyu07282 | 2026-02-18 05:31:44+00:00
But if you could afford to hire a worker for this job, that an LLM would be able to do for a fraction of the cost (by your estimation), then why on earth would you ever waste money on a worker? By extension if you pay a worker and an AI or robot comes along that can do the work for cheaper, then why would you not fire the worker and replace them with the cheaper alternative?

Its kind of funny to see capitalists brains all over this thread desperately try to make it make sense. It's almost like the system is broken, but that can't possibly be right everybody believes in capitalism, everybody can't be wrong. Wake the fuck up.
by alexjplant | 2026-02-18 05:32:38+00:00
During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous.

So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such.
by user3939382 | 2026-02-18 05:32:59+00:00
I don’t also pretend that it’s ok to use software from shit organizations that are a cancer on our civilization, no. Even if I did, two wrongs don’t make a right, and nothing I personally say or do or not, does anything to absolve the NSA.

However you slice it you have no argument here. Being held hostage by corporate interests in computing doesn’t make it okay to hold hands with one of the worst organizations on Earth.

By your twisted logic, because it’s practically impossible to avoid proprietary firmware owned by corporations, we should completely acquiesce to all forms of digital abuse by the government and actually should participate in their computing programs. Listen to yourself.

You’d be telling people who lived under an evil dictatorship to shut up because they walk the roads the govt provides.
by mc3301 | 2026-02-18 05:34:47+00:00
It's not that hard, though obviously this is subjective. Over 200,000 people every year climb it.

Many on a short holiday with minimal hiking gear or local knowledge.

Along the way you can meet many elderly people who have climbed it multiple times.

Kids climb it.

If one is in decent shape, brings some water and rice balls, it's a nice slow adventure to the top. Unless you get super unlucky with weather.
by pmontra | 2026-02-18 05:36:31+00:00
In my case

* meeting with people, yes, on calls, on chats, sometimes even on phone

* “aligning expectations”, yes, because of the next point

* getting consensus, yes, inevitably or how else do we decide what to do and how to do it?

* making slides/decks to communicate that, not anymore, but this is a specific tool of the job, like programming in Java vs in Python.

* thinking about market positioning, no, but this is what only a few people in an organization have agency on.

* etc? Yes, for example don't piss off other people, help custumers using the product, identify new functionalities that could help us deliver a better product, prioritize them and then back to getting consensus.
by benatkin | 2026-02-18 05:37:31+00:00
Indeed, it's freestanding, the repo name doesn't have the correct term, but the source file does near the end: https://github.com/lopespm/zig-minimal-kernel-x86/blob/main/...

Also baremetal where the metal is virtual. LLVM uses this term for when an OS isn't available https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/tree/main/libc/src/stdl...
by alephnerd | 2026-02-18 05:37:34+00:00
> I asked it because I am building something similar since some tome and I thought its over they were faster than me

If you have been working on a usecase similar to OpenClaw for sometime now I'd actually say you are in a great position to start raising now.

Being first to market is not a significant moat in most cases. Few people want to invest in the first company in a category - it's too risky. If there are a couple of other early players then the risk profile has been reduced.

That said, you NEED to concentrate on GTM - technology is commodified, distribution is not.

> It appears that so far the mainstream success in AI is limited to slop generation and even that is actually small number of people generating huge amounts of slop

The growth of AI slop has been exponential, but the application of agents for domain specific usecases has been decently successful.

The biggest reason you don't hear about it on HN is because domain-specific applications are not well known on HN, and most enterprises are not publicizing the fact that they are using these tools internally.

Furthermore, almost anyone who is shipping something with actual enterprise usage is under fairly onerous NDAs right now and every company has someone monitoring HN like a hawk.
by cmdr2 | 2026-02-18 05:37:48+00:00
> This is obvious AI slop from the readme

I keep hoping that low-effort comments like these will eventually get downvoted (because it's official HN policy). I get that it's fashionable to call things AI slop, but please put some effort into reading the code and making an informed judgment.

It's really demeaning to call someone's hard work "AI slop".

What you're implying is that the quality of the work is poor. Did you actually read the code? Do you think the author didn't obsessively spend time over the code? Do you have specific examples to justify calling something sloppy? Besides a misaligned "|" symbol?

And I doubt you even read anything because the author never talked about LLMs in the first place.

My beef isn't with you personally, it's with this almost auto-generated trend of comments on HN calling everyone's work "AI slop". One might say, low-effort comments like these are arguably "AI slop", because you could've generated them using GPT-2 (or even simple if-conditionals).
by tliltocatl | 2026-02-18 05:38:01+00:00
> We started shit in Ukraine

No. Putin started shit in Ukraine after the locals got feed up with his dear friend's blatant corruption and he took it personally. America was never ever a factor there. The world doesn't spin around USA, even Americans may think so.

> Zelensky revolution

Lol, Zelensky didn't came into public light until a year or so after the revolution.
by jrumbut | 2026-02-18 05:38:03+00:00
Insurance is complicated, not frequently discussed online, and all code depends on a ton of domain knowledge and proprietary information.

I'm in a similar domain, the AI is like a very energetic intern. For me to get a good result requires a clear and detailed enough prompt I could probably write expression to turn it into code. Even still, after a little back and forth it loses the plot and starts producing gibberish.

But in simpler domains or ones with lots of examples online (for instance, I had an image recognition problem that looked a lot like a typical machine learning contest) it really can rattle stuff off in seconds that would take weeks/months for a mid level engineer to do and often be higher quality.

Right in the chat, from a vague prompt.
by lqstuart | 2026-02-18 05:38:21+00:00
I was in the “AI is grossly overhyped” camp because I work on large distributed deep learning training jobs and AI is indeed worthless for those, and will likely always be worthless since the APIs change constantly and the iteration loop is too cumbersome to constantly resubmit broken jobs to a training cluster.

Then I started working on some basic grpc/fullstack crap that I absolutely do not care about, at all, but needs to be done and uses internal frameworks that are not well documented, and now Claude is my best friend at work.

The best part is everyone else’s AI code still sucks, because they ask it to do stupid crap and don’t apply any critical thinking skills to it, so I just tell AI to re-do it but don’t fuck up the error handling and use constants instead of hardcoding strings like a middle schooler, and now I’m a 100x developer fearlessly leading the charge to usher in the AI era as I play the new No Man’s Sky update on my other PC and wait for whatever agent to finish crap.
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-18 05:38:33+00:00
> And I don’t recall it calling sales bullshit.

It says stuff like why can’t a customer just order from an online form? The employee who helps them doesn’t do anything except make them feel better. Must be a bullshit job. It talks specifically about my employees filling internal roles like this.

> advertising

I understand the arms race argument, but it’s really hard to see what an alternative looks like. People can spend money to make you more aware of something. You can limit some modes, but that kind of just exists.

I don’t see how they aren’t performing an important function.
by overgard | 2026-02-18 05:39:12+00:00
Does it matter if they can't ever stop training though? Like, this argument usually seems to imply that training is a one-off, not an ongoing process. I could save a lot of money if I stopped eating, but it'd be a short lived experiment.

I'll be convinced they're actually making money when they stop asking for $30 billion funding rounds. None of that money is free! Whoever is giving them that money wants a return on their investment, somehow.
by jldugger | 2026-02-18 05:39:18+00:00
Sadly, Season 1 Joe is just incohesive. Like, you want there to be some structural reason behind his madness and there just isn't any, because there's too much of crazy. Season 2 tries to walk much of that back.

I haven't yet seen season 3 and beyond, but it's clear the OP blogger agrees:

> The best thing the show’s writers ever did was realize that Joe wasn’t the most interesting character.

Like, Lee is a good actor for sure, he was just given a poorly story crafted role.
by vessenes | 2026-02-18 05:39:25+00:00
The Amish are skilled at getting cash from the “English” as they call non-Amish. I imagine they also think that the money they receive is roughly tied to value they create. I wasn’t talking valuations, just revenue - money that CFOs and individuals spent so far, and are planning on spending.

I also didn’t talk profitable. Upshot, though, I don’t think it’s just a US thing to say that when money exchanges hands, generally both parties feel they are better off, and therefore there is value implied in a transaction.

As to what it will be used for: yes.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-18 05:40:08+00:00
> LibreOffice is eating Microsoft 365 lunch

No way.

I love LibreOffice. It's fantastic. I rolled it out to a prior employer where everyone needed a word processor but we certainly didn't need to pay Office prices when we didn't have requirements that only Office could satisfy. A high point was when we were having trouble collaborating on a DOCX file with a customer, then they sheepishly told us that they weren't using Office, but this other LibreOffice (OO.org at the time) thing. We laughed and told them we were, too. That day we started swapping ODT files instead and everything worked 100x better.

And all that said, I haven't seen LibreOffice in person in years. Mac shops uses Pages & friends for internal stuff, but really, almost everyone not using Office 365 or whatever they're calling it now is using Google Docs. Google is eating Microsoft's lunch in this space, and my gut estimate is that they split 95+% of the office software market between them.

I do wish that weren't the case, but my personal experience tells me it is. I wish it were more common, and also that there was a virtuous cycle where more Mac users made it get more attention, and more attention made it feel more like a "Mac-assed Mac app", and feeling more like a Mac-assed Mac app got it more users, etc. I just don't see that playing out.
by cyberrock | 2026-02-18 05:40:21+00:00
Are you sure it's not just the delivery? If I want a storybook I don't want to wait 2 business days for it to print, ship, and deliver, and I'm sure most parents/guardians don't think that far ahead. The physical delivery factor turns your product into a mental burden.

If you (or Disney or Hasbro) shipped ebooks that unfolded when you tell it a prompt (in the format of "bibbidi bobbity boop tell me a story about an elephant"), then I'm sure it would fly off the shelves this Christmas. It doesn't even have to be expensive hardware; I'm sure you can build it with a Pi Zero with 2 cheap screens paired to an app on the parent's phone. But perhaps that's not the business you had in mind.
by BatteryMountain | 2026-02-18 05:40:43+00:00
In the old days we had these kinds of wars with cpu instruction sets & extensions (SSE, MMX, x64,). In a way I feel that CUDA should be opened up & generalized so that other manufacturers can use it too, the same way cpu's equalled out on most intruction sets. That way the whole world won't be beholden to one manufacturer (Big Green) and would calm down the scarcity effect we have now. I'm not an expert on gpu tech, would this be something that is possible? Is CUDA a driver feature or a hardware feature?
by linkjuice4all | 2026-02-18 05:41:22+00:00
It's especially strange considering the amount of work that Tesla (the company) put into becoming a car manufacturer which is certainly no easy feat. I'm sure some of the know-how, process, and tooling/supply lines could be transitioned to general purpose robot manufacturing - but why would you build these supply lines and factories just to screw it all up like this?