MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-04 07:24:45+00:00
> Not really ... Places selling similar items tend to accept the similar common payment methods.

The point is that sometimes the alternative isn't a similar item.

Suppose you're a restaurant. The customer can either pay you to make food or buy it from the grocery store for 1/5th as much money and then spend the time to make it themselves. If both you and the grocery store were to raise prices by the same percentage, your price increases by five times as much as the grocery store price, because the time cost of preparing the food themselves wasn't taxed by the credit card companies. So if you raised the price, more people would stay home instead of coming to your restaurant, and then you have to do the math on whether the reduced sales volume or the reduced margins will hit you harder, and sometimes it will be the first one and you have to eat the second one.

> and it doesn't at all if you get charged a markup for paying with a credit card.

Also not true, because if you do raise the price then demand goes down, so instead of making lower margins you make lower sales.

Moreover, customers have a finite amount of income. If some amount of that is going to the credit card companies then it isn't going to the seller of whatever they would have bought if they still had the money in their pocket. Which sellers are getting screwed by that the most is a complicated question, but it's definitely somebody.

> Investigations do happen, and cost the card issuer money.

But how is the investigation worth anything? The bank doesn't have the capacity to do a real investigation.

Suppose you order some electronics, pay $5000, and then tell the bank that the seller sent you a brick instead of the electronics you ordered. How is the bank supposed to know who is lying? It could be a fraud by the seller (they actually sent you a brick) or by the buyer (you're trying to get refunded for goods actually delivered) and the bank has no way to know.

Whereas the police could do things like place other orders with the seller and investigate whether any of them come in as bricks, investigate the delivery driver to see if it was them rather than the seller who swapped it out, etc.

> and if they were then we'd all be paying more taxes to hire a lot more investigators and judges.

The premise of the criminal justice system is deterrence. If the government is willing to spend $50,000 investigating a $5000 fraud, and as a result the fraud doesn't happen because the fraudster expects to be caught and go to jail, the government doesn't actually have to spend the $50,000 in the large majority of cases.

Whereas if all that happens to a fraudster is that the transaction is reversed by the bank 90% of the time, they're turning a profit because they get to keep the money the other 10% of the time and no one puts them in jail, and then you get tons of fraud.

So why are we trying to get the banks to do this at all? They have no real investigative powers and essentially no meaningful information about who did the wrong.
by ef2k | 2026-03-04 07:25:00+00:00
I hear you, a lot of engineers have been there. Things are changing though, roles are evolving and the org chart is starting to flatten.

A couple of things worth separating: strategic direction in most orgs is already handed down from the VP or exec level, the PM is usually executing on that mandate.

Now that coding agents exist, both the PM and the engineer end up prompting a coding agent. So, over time, the roles converge and product ownership just becomes part of building.
by mdp2021 | 2026-03-04 07:25:01+00:00
Description:

> Looks like Sam Altman regrets making ChatGPT available to the Pentagon. And he should, Dave Lee says

(«Dave Lee is Bloomberg Opinion's US technology columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the Financial Times and BBC News»)

Transcript:

> Sam Altman admitted his company looked sloppy and opportunistic when it agreed in something of a hurry to make chat GPT available on the Pentagonʼs classified networks. Hereʼs why I agree with him. It was sloppy and why I think heʼs made a significant mistake.

> You may have heard that Anthropic, the creator of Claude, has fallen out of the Department of Defense over the use of AI for surveillance and autonomous killing. Late last week, Sam Altman swooped in and made an agreement to replace Claude. Altman said he had secured protections against unethical use, but many thought heʼd been naive in making that deal, especially since heʼd made it so quickly, capitalizing on the chance to steal some business from a rival. But now itʼs backfiring. Since his announcement to work with the military, downloads of Chat GPT have fallen. While installs of the Claude app have surged by more than 200%, bringing it to the top of the app store charts after being outside the top 100 as recently as January. Chat GPT users on social media are angry with Altman over what they see as a capitulation to the Trump administration. Dario Amodei, the co-founder of Anthropic, has shown principle at a time when so few tech CEOs seem prepared to do so. However, if the Pentagon sees through its threat to ban any American company with a military contract from doing business with Anthropic, that could destroy their business. Anthropic has said it plans to fight that order in court, and legal observers believe they will probably prevail. Therefore, Sam Altmanʼs hasty moves might ultimately work in Anthropicʼs favor, gifting them millions more users and the kind of PR that money canʼt buy. The OpenAI CEO said he would treat the past few days as a learning experience.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-04 07:25:20+00:00
Is this feature gonna be on All phones including Low-end/mid-end (4-8Gb ram) and their flagship phones?

It's gonna be huge if that's the case because Pixel's here are expensive, their second hand prices are in "non-global" countries[0] and you have to pay a premium. Also I live in world's largest second-hand phone market and it can have its worries as well.

You can't say to anyone who wants privacy, oh just buy a second-hand pixel. It's just not that easy.

But if Motorola can launch multiple phones and there are always gonna be some deals one way or another (with cards) and as motorola phones are pretty competitive in price, Finally we can have phones worldwide where privacy isn't charged extra.

I have spent some hours looking at online second hand phone stores to find but due to its somewhat rarity, I always feel like being frugal, I am just paying extra for privacy and so I am really happy with decision from motorola using their supply chain of phones and partnering up with Graphene.

I was gonna buy a phone for myself, I was thinking a second hand pixel phone but given the things I said earlier at this point, I might as well wait for a few more months to get the moto phone.

I just hope that they launch an affordable phone with grapheneos. I really don't care about specs as I have been able to live my life with 7 year old motorola phones too in 2026 for sometime.

I will definitely recommend my family Motorola phones in the future and slowly convert everyone to motorola if motorola releases an affordable phone with actual privacy.

[0]:https://www.xcitium.com/blog/news/why-is-google-pixel-not-gl...
by solatic | 2026-03-04 07:26:17+00:00
Hypothetically, the amount of money that could be negotiated away is something like the sum of net incomes of US pharma/med device/insurance/healthcare, which is something like $100 billion annually. which sounds like a lot but it's only about 2% of annual $5+ trillion spend. You can't negotiate prices to be lower than the associated costs, the companies will just close up shop instead of being forced to take a loss.

At the end of the day, the fundamental drivers of high healthcare costs are (a) high labor costs of high-skilled doctors, pharmaceutical researchers, etc. (b) high cost of procuring land and construction of new hospitals in major metro areas. The first requires you to fix education first so that doctors etc. do not need to take out and later pay back what can now easily exceed $500k in combined tuition and living expenses. The second is politically unpalatable.
by wobfan | 2026-03-04 07:26:25+00:00
The biggest argument for me to buy one of these phones - when they actually arrive - next to running GrapheneOS, will be whether these phones, like all others, are way too big to use with only one hand. Like, I don't have a lot of requirements. Just make it run GrapheneOS and let it be >6 inches. I'll immediately buy it.
by worldsavior | 2026-03-04 07:28:13+00:00
I'd say you're paranoid. Nobody cares about you, and they won't invest billions just so they can see your hot nude pictures. There are much easier ways to get information out of a phone, no need for a backdoor.

If there were ever any backdoor in some phone, it would have been found. No smartphone company is gonna take that chance that someone will find their backdoor, it will literally kill the company.
by brazzy | 2026-03-04 07:28:41+00:00
The "Engineer A vs. Engineer B" scenario where B gets promoted for overengineering glosses over the fact that A would be delivering features much faster - you really think that would not get noticed?

I think overengineering leading to promotions can only happen in organizations so large that engineering managers are isolated from business impact considerations, because that is usually the overarching metric.
by deafpolygon | 2026-03-04 07:30:03+00:00
electron=js/node

it’s about cost. develop once, deploy everywhere. web solved that. web devs are a dime-a-dozen (i’m not saying web dev is bad… just that it’s a saturated market) so the cost is already scraping the bottom of the barrel.

now, compare this to deploying native apps, we need:

- a macOS dev/team

- a windows dev/team

- a linux dev/team

- a web dev/team

- testers for each of those platforms

- coordination between the teams so the UI looks consistent

that’s a 4-5x larger staff

AI is a force multiplier, sure.. but it’s not a 10x force multiplier. it’s 2x at best, but probably 1.5x in practice (and averaged across the board).
by hydroreadsstuff | 2026-03-04 07:31:36+00:00
The 4x comes from the neural accelerators (tensor core in NVIDIA jargon). It's 4x fp16 over the vector path (And 8x compared to M1 because at some point they 2x'd the fp16 vector path). Therefore LLM prefill(context processing/TTFT), diffusion models (image gen), and e.g. video and photo effects that make use of them can be up to 4x faster.
At fp16 that's the same speed at the same clock as NVIDIA.
But NVIDIA still has 2xfp8 and 4xnvfp4.

Batch-1 token generation, that is often quoted, does not benefit from this. It's purely RAM bandwidth-limited.
by zmmmmm | 2026-03-04 07:31:43+00:00
What is truly amazing is the M1 Max is 400GB/s. 5 years later and we still only hit 1.5x on memory bandwidth. It's quite fascinating how high Apple spec'd it back then with apparently little foreknowledge of how important memory bandwidth would become, and then conversely how little they've managed to improve it now when it's so obvious how important it is.
by EagnaIonat | 2026-03-04 07:31:52+00:00
> That said I had a maxed out Macbook Pro M4 Max on order but just cancelled it right now and will get this new M5 Max one for basically the same price.

You sadly just missed the window or cancelled too soon.

Normally if your current order is in progress they swap it out for the best closest spec for the exact same price you ordered the M4.
by MadnessASAP | 2026-03-04 07:32:14+00:00
Ya know just today I was thinking around a way to compile a neural network down to assembly. Matching and replacing neural network structures with their closest machine code equivalent.

This is way cooler though! Instead of efficiently running a neural network on a CPU, I can inefficiently run my CPU on neural network! With the work being done to make more powerful GPUs and ASICs I bet in a few years I'll be able to run a 486 at 100MHz(!!) with power consumption just under a megawatt! The mind boggles at the sort of computations this will unlock!

Few more years and I'll even be able to realise the dream of self-hosting ChatGPT on my own neural network simulated CPU!
by M95D | 2026-03-04 07:34:59+00:00
I don't know about the rest of the world, but in EU you can't write "milk" on the packaging unless it comes from cows/goats/sheep/etc. Also, you can't name it "honey" or picture bees or honeycombs on the packaging unless it's genuine honey from bees.

The solution is to write better laws and stop opposing regulations.
by Jensson | 2026-03-04 07:35:14+00:00
> who bombed them first and repeatedly? and embargoed and sanctioned them before that? and tore up the nuclear deal? and before that installed the shah so we could get the oil?

Not the people they are attacking. Intentionally attacking people unrelated to those you have a grievance with is terrorism, Iran has a terrorist regime. Russia doesn't do that, Ukraine doesn't do that, and so on.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-04 07:37:30+00:00
Oh, This might be one of the few ideas I approve AI use of.

Cursor spent like Million dollars on creating a browser which people were able to make later with a 200$/100$ subscription in the same amount of days as cursor with human assistance.

I don't think that this can be "autonomous", we assumed that making browsers could be autonomous process but it wasn't. That was the take I took from it all.

Will this be an example of autonomous tho? I think we still need a human experienced with reverse engineering in the loop but it might significantly improve their workflow

I wish if cursor, instead of having burnt million $ to something worthless essentially, Could have atleast done this experiment.
by milch | 2026-03-04 07:38:42+00:00
I live in Seattle and anecdotally I have seen the number of people running red lights absolutely explode in the last two years. Literally from seeing once or twice pre-COVID to at least one a day. This is not an exaggeration, there's a particular light on my commute that I see at least one driver run per day. My theory is that in an effort to make the intersection safer they adjusted the lights so now there's a period where cars all have a red light while pedestrians are crossing. Meanwhile a certain segment of the population sees all cars in the intersection stopped and decides to slam it. It's a recipe for disaster given there's a middle school down the road from that light...
by debazel | 2026-03-04 07:39:51+00:00
I actually think this would be easier to implement than many of the current ID verification methods I've seen being pushed. We already have the infrastructure for selling age restricted goods, this is nothing new. Manufacturers that are unable to restrict their hardware in a "child" mode don't have to do anything and could simply continue selling to adults only.

It's obvious we're moving in a direction where we are going to get these restrictions in one way or another, and this is the only way I've come up with that doesn't come with serious privacy implications.

Most importantly, this solution would be simple for anyone to understand. You don't need to be a cryptography expert to understand there are child safe devices and then there are unrestricted devices for adults.
by greybcg | 2026-03-04 07:40:52+00:00
At the same time, I remember growing up in the internet's wild west and bad encounters weren't an issue for me because of the golden rule I was taught from the start: you don't give your personal information and you don't interact with complete strangers. Learning to navigate the web instead of being in a walled garden was helpful in many ways.

The better question to ask ourselves is, does the capability to gather more information also lead to more power to act on this information? If the investigative resources are spread thin already it's not like they're gonna catch more criminals with investing more there. Repelling questionable individuals off the platform with lots transparancy -is- an effective way, but just a specific tool for a symptom.

I think a part of a better solution is to give parents and children better tools to manage their social graph themselves. Essentially the real problem is discovery and warding off of social outliers in a way that doesnt out all responsibility on opaque algos or corporations.

A part of their e2e keys could be shared using an intentionally obtuse way like mailing an item or a physical "friend code". That way parents and vetted friends can have their privacy.
You don't need to tie an id to someone's person to get positive confirmation on someone's poor behaviour. If someone crossed the line then parents can see it and escalate. In additon, what would happen to a child with abusive parents who can then arbitrarily restrict and deny a childs freedom to communicate? I did not have this myself, but without free access to other minds and information I would have been duller. Does a large information dragnet really serve our collective interests or are more precise tools needed?
by hleichsenring | 2026-03-04 07:41:10+00:00
Most multi-agent demos run parallel discussions that look impressive but are impossible to audit. No trace, no decision owner, no reproducibility. That's fine for atomic tasks but not for team based decision-making.
I built Agent Smith (open source) around a different principle: commands execute sequentially on a flat linked list pipeline, with runtime insertion. Roles (Architect, DevOps, Backend Dev, Security) discuss in structured rounds with explicit AGREE/OBJECTION verdicts. If consensus fails after 3 rounds, it escalates to a human instead of forcing a decision.
Every step is logged in an execution trail with command, duration, cost, and insertions. The question isn't how many agents you can run in parallel. It's whether you can explain to an auditor how the system reached its conclusion.
by gritzko | 2026-03-04 07:42:16+00:00
I only diff the changed files. Producing blob out of BASON AST is trivial (one scan). Things may get slow for larger files, e.g. tree-sitter C++ parser is 25MB C file, 750KLoC. Takes couple seconds to import it. But it never changes, so no biggie.

There is room for improvement, but that is not a show-stopper so far. I plan round-tripping Linux kernel with full history, must show all the bottlenecks.

P.S. I checked lix. It uses a SQL database. That solves some things, but also creates an impedance mismatch. Must be x10 slow down at least. I use key-value and a custom binary format, so it works nice. Can go one level deeper still, that may be another x10 improvement (custom storage engine).
by siren2026 | 2026-03-04 07:43:01+00:00
I have been both an EM and a Staff software engineer at a bigtech.

Both are great career choices but lately being an EM means spending over 6 hours a day in meetings and having very little agency over your time. Your whole job is basically being in meetings and being a human router for information between people.

This changed when BigTech redefined the roles of an EM. Back in the days, the EM would naturally be the best engineer in the team that wanted to stay technical and grow the team. Since 2010, Bigtech has decided that EM should especially NOT be technical. They should do "People things" only. I think that was a turn for the worse in our industry,

As an IC I have way more control over my time. I can decide when I work.

That being said it depends what I want to optimize for. I think if your goal is to climb up the ladder you will do that more easily as a driven EM than a driven IC.

As an EM if you are driven and put the hours in and play the game well, you could get promoted to Director/Sr. Director. The skills here are not especially difficult. Getting promoted is all about being at the right time at the right place and playing the right game. If you are an EM in a growing company, you will almost certainly grow with the compant and get more scope.

As an engineer it feels way more difficult to get promoted past Staff. After Staff you are competing with people that are absolutely cracked coders and dedicated 12+ hours a day working. Most of them have a talent level that is almost unmatchable.

But really, if you want to manage your time, don't become an EM.
by solatic | 2026-03-04 07:43:20+00:00
This is Netflix, they have thousands of engineers. So you have two approaches to solve the problem: either write enforced policy-as-code to prevent people from deploying images with too-high layer count (and pray they never need to rollback to an image from before the policy was written), thus incurring political alignment costs around the new policy and forcing non-compliant teams to adapt (which is time not spent on features); or, solve the problem entirely at the infrastructure level.

It's hardly surprising that companies consider infrastructure-level solutions to be better.
by devmor | 2026-03-04 07:43:53+00:00
I think that proof of concepts are PHP’s greatest strength, actually.

These days it can be almost as strict as you want it to be, but it’s always been a “loose” enough language that you can implement things that work in very fragile ways and iterate at incredible speed.

When I am designing PoC microservices that will eventually end up running as Go or Rust, I often start with a prototype in PHP.
by wiseowise | 2026-03-04 07:44:12+00:00
Using just one $200 Claude subscription? What is that? 2024? Managers? Get on my level, son. It’ll be one man unicorns, new breed of CEOs running army of openclaws. I’ll have you fucking know that I’ve just launched “build me a next unicorn” prompt and 1000 agents have been running nonstop for a week. See me at the top of the AngelList, chump. Though I’ve probably won’t see you while you collect your unemployment check and food stamps.
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-03-04 07:44:40+00:00
> Blocking said search indexes is probably a good thing.

I feel like "we should ban all search engines" is going to be pretty unpopular.

> And when you use a token the site gives back a session key

And then you have a session key, until you don't, because you signed out of that account to sign into another one, or signed into it on a different browser or device etc.

> The server that issues the tokens restricts the number of uses of the credential.

Suppose I have a device on my home or corporate network that scans email links. It's only trying to filter malware and scams, but if a link goes to an adult content barrier then it needs tokens so it can scan the contents of the link to make sure there isn't malware behind the adult content barrier.

If I only have a finite number of tokens then the malware spammer can just send messages with more links than I have tokens until I run out, then start sending links to malware that bypass the scanner because it's out of tokens.
by praseodym | 2026-03-04 07:45:32+00:00
They sent out an email to clarify that there will be no age verification and that the '18 or older' rule was introduced to avoid that:

> You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service (Zed’s AI-enabled software-as-a-service offering, including features like account creation/sign in, Zed Free and Zed Pro, and collaboration). See https://zed.dev/terms#21-eligibility. We set the threshold at 18 due to children's data privacy obligations under COPPA, equivalent international frameworks, and an increasing number of state and regional laws that extend protections to anyone under 18. Those regulations require parental consent verification, age-gated data handling, and separate retention policies for minors. Building and maintaining that infrastructure is a real cost for a small team, and getting it wrong carries regulatory risk. Setting the line at 18 lets us maintain a single privacy framework for all account holders without carve-outs.