MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ameliaquining | 2026-02-27 02:53:14+00:00
The question of what does and doesn't constitute illegal insider trading turns out to be surprisingly subtle, and can vary depending on the type of market. Prediction markets in the U.S. are legally treated as commodities, not as securities like stocks, and insider trading rules for commodities are in some ways less strict. (There are good policy reasons for this; you want to let, e.g., farmers hedge their exposure to the market prices of the stuff they grow, this being the principal reason why we have futures markets, and presumably they have inside information about how their crops are doing.)

Specifically, the CFTC's rules say that it's illegal to "misappropriate confidential information in breach of a pre-existing duty of trust and confidence to the source of the information" by using that information to inform your commodity trades. The MrBeast editor likely did that, but the gubernatorial candidate didn't (he didn't promise anyone that he'd keep his candidacy secret), so if it were just up to government regulators and not platform rules, he'd be in the clear.

Matt Levine writes about this a lot (and is both funny and astonishingly good at explaining the workings of financial capitalism to laypeople); most recently he did so about this particular case: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-02-25/kal...
by numpad0 | 2026-02-27 02:53:17+00:00
> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize. What happened instead follows a pattern that Joel Spolsky described years ago in his essay on commoditizing your complement: cheap 3D printers and Arduinos made prototyping nearly free, which was genuinely useful. But the deep, compounding knowledge of how to actually manufacture things at scale continued to accumulate in industrial bases like Shenzhen. Prototyping got democratized. The cheap tools commodified one layer of the stack and made the layer beneath it more valuable by comparison.

> You can watch something structurally similar happening with vibe coding right now. People are rapidly prototyping tools that threaten to displace entire SaaS business models. But the value generated by all that rapid iteration and prototyping flows upward. It accumulates at the model layer, in the training data, in the infrastructure. The vibe coders themselves risk becoming interchangeable, each one spinning up impressive demos without accumulating durable value of their own. The pattern rhymes: cheap tools democratize one layer, and the layer beneath captures the surplus.

dot dot dot.
by gnabgib | 2026-02-27 02:53:37+00:00
Discussion (41 points, 7 hours ago, 13 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47170928

(14 points, 12 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47166522

(9 points, 5 hours ago, 5 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47172192
by karmasimida | 2026-02-27 02:55:37+00:00
Precisely

Anthropic never explains they are fear-mongering for the incoming mass scale job loss while being the one who is at the full front rushing to realize it.

To people like Dario, the elimination of the programmer job, isn’t something to worry, it is a cruel marketing ploy.

They get so much money from Saudi and other gulf countries, maybe this is taking authoritarian money as charity to enrich democracy, you never know
by SanjayMehta | 2026-02-27 02:56:16+00:00
Re: over hiring

I haven't worked for a large company for a long time but the last place I was my VP pushed us to hire 1000 people in one year. Turns out he was an acting VP, and needed to have that number for his formal promotion. Our division got penalised at the end of the year for falling short. By 30+ people.

I left before it collapsed and was sold for parts.
by PlunderBunny | 2026-02-27 02:56:43+00:00
Polymarket and Kalshi have just been declared gambling under New Zealand law, and therefore 'investing' in them is now illegal for New Zealanders. Both companies have been ordered to stop providing services to New Zealanders [0]

0. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/587993/why-betting-on-to...
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-27 02:57:06+00:00
Appreciate recent numbers. FedNow (us instant payments) has not been around long, growth will take time. My point was you don’t need Venmo or CashApp, almost any bank or credit union will do.

I expect it to take at least 5-10 years for instant payments to replace Zelle, credit, and debit cards in the US.

Brazil’s Pix is Coming for the Card Industry - https://paymentscmi.com/insights/brazil-pix-impacts-card-ind...

> Brazil’s card industry seems to have already come to terms with the loss of market share to Pix. For 2024, Abecs sees the debit card “moving sideways,” growing only between 0.4% and 0.7% compared to the previous year. This trend is consistent globally: Visa earnings reports reveal that its debit volume has been in monthly decline since February 2024.

> The numbers around Brazil’s RTP [Pix] are indeed superlative. Central Bank data shows that over 40% of all payments in the country are currently made through Pix. The system is used by more than 90 percent of the adult population, has over 15 million businesses and moves 20% of the country’s total transactional volume.
by abeppu | 2026-02-27 02:57:07+00:00
... but you have a staff that can come up with ideas, and now you can say yes to more of them.

"Infinite growth" framing is asking a lot, but for most of my career, I've seen teams, departments or companies solicit ideas of what to do next quarter/year/whatever, and really aggressively winnow it down -- in large part b/c there weren't enough people to do it (and we could only afford so many people).

And we were _bad_ at prioritizing; we'd often have like a list of multiple things declared P0 and a longer list of things called P1, and a stack of stuff that didn't make the cut to maybe revisit in the future.

But if the same number of people can build and ship and iterate faster, then why not do more?
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-27 02:57:10+00:00
I don't want to be an absolute killjoy about it; but IMO sports betting should be cash between you and a buddy watching the game down the pub. Anything past that - where a bookie gets involved, where the sums get bigger than a hundred bucks, that's when we really ought to stop, because it's just not a necessary action for anyone other than an addicted gambler. We're preying upon such personalities at scale. Entire people are working entire careers supporting such a thing - what a waste of human capital.

Similarly, I love the idea of the casino aesthetic, but the entire setup is designed to fleece you and to exploit the addicted. It was better when you had to go to Vegas to experience such a thing, but now casinos are everywhere, diluting the entire thing and making it sad instead of glamorous. Maybe it always was....
by TacticalCoder | 2026-02-27 02:57:31+00:00
And why draw the line at Gaza? Why not talk about who manufactured the arms the soldiers from the islamic of Iran used to execute tens of thousands of peaceful protesters in a matter of days a few weeks ago? What about their phones, computers, Internet infrastructure: it's not as if Iran was building all these. It's all imported.

But, somehow, there's a very selective outrage going on on HN where there's a very vocal pro-Gaza crowd which happen to very often overlap with the crowd that does never say a word about the tens of thousands that were slaughtered in Iran by islamists.

I think none have their place on HN but as long as those with a pro-Gaza / anti-Israel slant shall keep posting I shall keep pointing out their dark double standards. And I'm not jewish.
by nine_k | 2026-02-27 02:57:53+00:00
Rewiring an entire country is a wee bit expensive. Even if the wires are rated to 300V (they usually are), transformers would have to be replaced, and they cost quite a bit. Also different sockets and circuit breakers, and a whole lot of billable hours by licensed electricians.

(But changing the voltage is easy compared to changing the mains frequency. Japan still has to live with 50Hz in one half of the country, and 60Hz in the other.)
by klipt | 2026-02-27 02:58:18+00:00
Doesn't the Geneva Convention state that if militants build an underground base beneath a civilian building, that civilian building becomes a military target?

Gaza is Swiss-cheesed with hundreds of miles of military tunnels. If any attack on a tunnel is disallowed because of civilian buildings above it, I predict many countries will start adopting the Hamas strategy of putting military bases under civilian buildings. That way, every attack on your bases becomes a war crime by your enemy - you can't lose!
by dvt | 2026-02-27 02:59:10+00:00
> So edgy; is being an apologist really the noble calling you think it is?

Is it your noble calling? From the Temporary Constitution of the State of Palestine (2026)[1]:

Article 4 – Islam, Sharia and Christianity
1. Islam is the official religion in the State of Palestine.
2. The principles of Islamic Sharia are a primary source for legislation.

Not sure how anyone can possibly defend a literal religious autocracy, especially while espousing liberal ideals (right to self-determination, statehood, free markets, rule of law, etc.).

[1] https://constitutionnet.org/sites/default/files/2026-02/2026...
by rezonant | 2026-02-27 02:59:27+00:00
It seems AI code is producing technical debt at an alarming speed. What many people think of as "AIs don't need code to be pretty" is misunderstanding the purpose of refactoring, code reuse, and architectural patterns that AIs appear to skip or misunderstand with regularity. A reckoning will come when the tech debt needs to be paid and the AIs are going to be unable to pay it, the same way it happens when humans produce technical debt at a high rate and do not address it in a timely manner.
by grosswait | 2026-02-27 03:00:00+00:00
This is a terrible analogy. Imagine you’re an LLC that signed a contract to mine minerals, but your terms state you’d only mine in areas you felt safe. OSHA says it’s safe but you disagree, because….. any number of reason unknowable to an outsider. Maybe you just don’t like this OSHA leadership. That is more like what is happening.

Signing a contract with Anthropic assuming they wouldn’t rug pull over their own moral soapbox was mistake number one.

I love anthropic products and heavily use them daily, but they need to get off their high horse. They complain they’re being robbed by Chinese labs - robbed of what they stole from copyright holders. Anthropic doesn’t have the moral high ground they try to claim.
by exabrial | 2026-02-27 03:01:01+00:00
Brother in law did some "time with the brass" as he calls it. His take was that the DOD, er DOW would, as an example, never acquire a fighter jet that "wouldn't target and kill a civilian airliner", citing that on 9/11 we literally almost did that. The DOW is acquiring instruments of war, which is probably unconformable for a lot of people to consider.

His conclusion was that the limits of use ought to be contractual, not baked into the LLM, which is where the fallout seems to be. He noted that the Pentagon has agreed to terms like that in the past.

To me, that seems like reasonable compromise for both parties, but both sides are so far entrenched now we're unlikely to see a compromise.
by keeda | 2026-02-27 03:01:02+00:00
This is right on all counts and matches what I've seen and heard. And to all the sibling comments arguing about Elon's Twitter shenanigans being a bad move, it doesn't matter. I know because that's exactly what I said to a senior executive who deals with even more senior executives, and those were his exact words: "It doesn't matter." (A bit more in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750804)

I think their attitude could be summed up with this line by the Architect from the Matrix: "There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept."

I would only differ on one point: the situation was not this bad 2015-22. I would actually put the painful periods around the dot-com bust and the GFC. In fact, while not as great as the post-COVID heydays, things actually took off post 2010-ish. This timeline coincided with Meta starting a talent war at the same time that the Apple/Google no-poaching collusion lawsuit was filed.
by spaqin | 2026-02-27 03:01:16+00:00
On Android of course it depends on the configuration. I am running LineageOS 23 on an older device with 6GB of RAM as well and it would kill basically anything (making e.g. paying with a credit card a pain when you have to switch to the bank app to confirm a transaction). Had to adjust few variables for ZRAM control and now it's seamless.
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-27 03:01:18+00:00
There's a simpler explanation than "billionaires with hearts of gold" here. If:

(1) this is a wildly unpopular and optically bad deal

(2) it's a high data rate deal--lots of tokens means bad things for Anthropic. Users which use their product heavily are costing more than they pay.

(3) it's a deal which has elements that aren't technically feasible, like LLM powered autonomous killer robots...

then it makes a whole lot of sense for Anthropic to wiggle out of it. Doing it like this they can look cuddly, so long as the Pentagon walks away and doesn't hit them back too hard.
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-27 03:01:42+00:00
I'm actually super fine with the hardware stagnating! Work on the yields, cut the prices, simplify and make it more robust, while keeping the spec the same. It gives developers something to focus on, like a console, so the software gets better over the life of the device, not worse.

Perhaps this could give room for physical design changes instead. I'm sick of phones that are just a slab of glass. I remember fun, weird, fashionable designs! Buttons and keyboards, phones felt like an individual choice, not just this boring black mirror. I'd take ten years of stagnation on hardware development in phones in exchange for ten years of exciting form factors with improving software. Let's face it: the spec is high enough for anything we need to be doing, by now. The software is the real problem, and there's room here for massive improvement.
by deadbabe | 2026-02-27 03:01:57+00:00
Your theory is wrong.

Someone will inevitably have to prompt AIs, CEOs and other executives are NOT going to be doing it themselves. The people driving those AI will have greater leverage as less and less people choose a career in tech.

Also, when an AI fucks up in a way only a human can fix, the human must be available.

What I see more likely is a future where software engineers do even less work but frustratingly you still need them around to fix problems whenever they come up. Kind of like firefighters.
by pembrook | 2026-02-27 03:02:53+00:00
If we're being generous we could say mayyybe 20% of the layoffs are accountable to overhiring during ZIRP.

Block was doing $4B in revenue with 4K employees in 2019 before the pandemic.

They're now doing $24B in revenue with 10K employees and are going to cut near to those previous employee levels. That's a 5X jump in revenue per employee from the pre-covid, pre-AI levels.

If you don't think code becoming 1,000X cheaper to produce doesn't radically change the number of employees needed inside a technology org, then it's time to put down the copium pipe.
by jjcm | 2026-02-27 03:03:08+00:00
I think this will work out nicely for Netflix. It overleverages their competition, putting them in a worse spot, and I suspect traditional media is going to be far less of an demand from a pure screen-time perspective in the next 10 years. Generative content is just starting to get good enough with Seedance 2 - the cost of creation is about to plumet.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-27 03:03:16+00:00
> is being an apologist really the noble calling you think it is? Both are just words, mappings to concepts in our minds; "genocide" is an invented term, but it has a widely shared definition that the UN helped formalize

Great. Which describes a very specific thing. good.

> and in the minds of many, many people all over the world, the term applies here.

In minds of many people many things were acceptable. I am not sure this kind of reasoning is a good strategy. In minds of many Hutu, Tutsi did not deserve to live. Were Hutu right?

> "War" could one day be waged against whatever group you belong to, as well. You may wish for the country waging it to follow the Geneva Convention so that your sons gain a small chance of becoming POWs and returning to you, instead of being destroyed by an autonomous drone.

This is very good point. Unfortunately, Palestinians did not follow Geneva convention. Firing unguided rockets in barrages towards population centers with the goal of overwhelming air defense systems is very much non-conventional.

> Comments like yours endorse the actions that are being done;

How come? Do you see a difference between saying "it's okay to kill civilians" and debating the merits of using one term vs. another to describe an event?

> we're beginning to recognize the term "hasbara" for them.

It seems to me an easy way out. Why discuss the merits of an argument, if you can simply say "it's hasbara" and walk away?
by hirvi74 | 2026-02-27 03:03:42+00:00
> The only situation in which 2A will stop mattering is if the government decides it is willing to level American cities to achieve its future goals.

That wouldn't even be necessary. A siege/blockade would cripple any resistance after enough attrition. Take any moderate or large city. It's hard to maintain hundreds of thousands to millions of people with no running water, electricity, agriculture, fuel, healthcare, etc..
by neya | 2026-02-27 03:03:55+00:00
When you accept my application, there is an implicit understanding that I will have a job for a foreseeable future. I am making life decisions based on YOU, the CEO - I have to think about commute, renting, school for kids and a lot more. All you need to think about is my pay-check.

And once you fuck up, you still get your nice fat cheque and bonus, but I'm very realistically looking at relocating and/or unemployment for a very long time and possibly homelessness. You will be hailed as a hero by the board for saving them money, I will be painted a villain by everyone in my family...just for believing in you and your empty words. I'm not even mentioning the side effects of health I get as a result (possible anxiety, depression, blood pressure, etc.)

Services rendered is an acceptable excuse for a contractor relationship, not employees. If that's how you view employees, then good luck with your business.
by Analemma_ | 2026-02-27 03:05:06+00:00
I’ll admit that in my younger days, reading Bryan Caplan and Nassim Taleb, I got caught up in the starry-eyed fantasizing about prediction markets that was (and still is) widespread in the libertarian corners of the internet. Force people to put their money where their mouth is! Combining the wisdom of crowds with Superforecasters will lead to vastly improved decision-making! Prediction markets will be so accurate eventually we’ll run the government on them! It sounds so good on paper.

The reality has been rather different. It’s just another form of gambling that’s wrecking people’s lives, and it's not obvious to me that they’re even very good at forecasting, which might help make up for it (the absurdly overpriced markets re: “is LK-99 a room-temperature superconductor” were one example). It was an interesting hypothesis but a failed experiment: shut it down and move on.
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-27 03:06:10+00:00
I agree with you on the AI blogspam. This is a lot like the dot-com era, where a profusion of capital is causing people to develop complete horseshit products nobody needs. When the shine comes off, a lot of companies will fade, but many will stick around, and become the FAANGs of the 2030s.

In some ways it's pretty interesting to watch the entire world mobilize production for AI; some folks like to call this "hyperstition" as the future AGI reaches backwards in time to compel its own creation. Wild, but when trillions of dollars - i.e. millions of people's entire life output of work - are being put into something, it's truly an effort on a scale that no societal project has ever been before. There's no leader, nobody is in control, nobody has the grand vision other than "build the thing and get rich in the process". Amazing times to live in. The best use of our time and resources and coordination? Probably not... as we look around our broken cities, stepping over our poor and hopeless...
by lateforwork | 2026-02-27 03:06:15+00:00
Palm OS does not get enough credit as the progenitor of modern handheld experience, including especially iOS.

iOS shares many similarities with Palm OS, such as the home screen layout of app icons, the use of full-screen apps without windowing, the absence of an explicit "quit" action, no exposed file system (obvious today, but bold back in those days), a single hardware button to return "home", and so on.

What iOS added is true preemptive multitasking, memory protection, multitouch gestures, physics-based scrolling and so on.
by theshackleford | 2026-02-27 03:06:53+00:00
> Is discount really an ad?

In most cases, yes. At minimum, it’s a marketing tactic built with the same intent as an ad: to influence your decision-making.

> Also sponsored content is way different than having ads on a website or in an app

However they are all exactly the same, in that they are all ads.

> When people say “ads” that is pretty specific thing that they mean.

No, that’s what you mean. Most people aren’t limiting it to a specific kind of ad, they mean anything designed to influence their behavior, shape their decisions, or sell them something.

> And we can argue forever what counts as an advertisement.

Or we can just work off the available definitions of modern advertising.

"An ad is any paid or strategically placed message designed to influence attention, perception, or purchasing behavior, regardless of format or channel."

> There is two options

There are in fact not. There are two you seem cable of recognising, but there are in fact others.

> OR they do work on most people but not on me

That’s an oversimplification. Ads can work in aggregate without working every time, in every format, or in the specific way you imagine.

Blocking one specific type of ad doesn’t make you immune to ads, it just means you’re filtering one, very narrow channel.

Influence happens through a huge variety of other means, including those that you seem to think specifically don't count and include, but are not limited too, sponsorships, discounts, product placement, social proof, algorithmic recommendations, brand exposure and many, MANY more.

You don’t have to consciously click an ad for advertising to shape your buying behavior.
by neya | 2026-02-27 03:06:59+00:00
> he didn't see the AI thing coming. Almost nobody did.

That's what he wants you to believe. That is just an easy way out for CEOs to blame it all on AI and not take accountability for their over-hiring in the first place.

Literally on their homepage:

"Block builds technology for economic empowerment"

How can you claim to build technology for "economic empowerment" if you couldn't see through the AI coming? The trend started like 4-5 years ago.
by com2kid | 2026-02-27 03:07:20+00:00
Everyone predicted twitter would crash and burn within months of the layoffs.

It didn't.

Anyone who has worked at a large company knows that 1/2 the staff there is stuck keeping the lights on because it is easier to hire a warm body than fix tech debt.

I've worked at companies that are literally 10x more effective than other competitors in the market purely due to good engineering practices.

Even within large companies, you can have orgs that are dramatically more effective than others, often due to having to work under just the right set of resource constraints. Too little and no investments in the future, too much and it becomes easiest to build fast and hire people to duct tape the mess that is left behind.