MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by another_twist | 2026-03-05 23:40:18+00:00
GPT doing a great job summarizing and providing a counter:

what's they key thesis here and the argument ?

*Key thesis:*
When technology eliminates meaningful performance differences between products, industries shift from competing on *engineering and function* to competing on *brand and status*. The Swiss watch industry after the quartz crisis is a clear example: mechanical watches stopped being valuable tools and became *luxury symbols whose value comes mainly from branding, scarcity, and signaling wealth*.

*In one sentence:*
The essay argues that when technology makes functional differences between products disappear, industries shift from engineering competition to branding competition, and the modern luxury watch market illustrates how that transformation works.

---

If you want, I can also explain *why this essay is controversial among economists and designers*—there are a few big assumptions in the argument.

And the counter
A few places the argument is debatable (even if it’s persuasive as a narrative):

It treats “brand” and “engineering” as mostly opposed. In practice, luxury buyers often do pay for engineering (finishing, durability, serviceability, movement architecture), and those technical choices can reinforce brand rather than fight it. The tension is real, but not always zero-sum.

It downplays other drivers of the Swiss recovery. The rebound isn’t only “they discovered brand.” Things like Swatch’s role in recapitalizing distribution/production, industry consolidation, improvements in manufacturing, and globalization of luxury demand can explain a lot of the late-1980s revenue surge alongside marketing.

The “artificial scarcity = managed asset bubble” framing is provocative but contestable. Scarcity can be interpreted as: capacity constraints, quality control, long-term brand stewardship, or channel strategy—not necessarily “bubble management.” It may function bubble-like in resale markets, but that doesn’t prove intent or fragility in the way financial bubbles work.

Some claims are asserted more than demonstrated. Examples: Rolex “abandoned research” after ~1960; “only three survived as independents”; “most brands are owned by six holding companies”; “they rebuy hundreds per year.” These might be true in broad strokes, but the essay uses them as load-bearing supports without showing evidence in-text (beyond a couple notes).

The design-history claims are simplified. Watch size and shape trends aren’t only branding; they’re also driven by changing tastes, ergonomics, manufacturing norms, sport/tool styling, and shifting notions of masculinity. “Big = cheap historically” is directionally true in some eras, but not a universal law.

The gender section is especially shaky. “Women never really went for mechanical watches” and the steam-engine analogy read like overgeneralizations—there are strong counterexamples (and cultural variation) that complicate that story.
by adrianwaj | 2026-03-05 23:40:47+00:00
I still think it's a good idea. Apple could do it.

I think you'd want a tiny switchboard where you could manually-override powering up/down parts of the system. Also, just because you're at a desk doesn't mean you want all cores going and when traveling only a couple - it could be on-demand. The other key thing is damage resistance. Just because you've got it in your pocket doesn't mean you want to risk it being damaged. Maybe a free-floating housing for traveling like with the old Sony Action cams.

"The X3000’s entire lens and sensor unit moves physically inside the body to compensate for shake. It is widely considered some of the best stabilization ever put into an action camera."

https://gemini.google.com/share/2839d2aa0a68
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-03-05 23:40:49+00:00
For China it's an existential threat. They cannot let US corporations have exclusive control over this. And they are unlikely to catch up. So by tossing open weights model (note: not open source) out there for the public to use, they are destroying the possibility that Dario and SamA can build a monopoly/duopoly.

I think we are now in the era of oligarchies, and oligarchies maintain power by being highwaymen and extracting tolls, in a kind of rentier capitalist structure.

By throwing LLM models out into the commons, China is disrupting the possibility of this taking hold there.

God bless 'em
by akoboldfrying | 2026-03-05 23:40:59+00:00
Might be worth doing the kind of "manual ECC" you're describing for a small amount of high-importance data (e.g., the top few levels of a DB's B+ tree stored in memory), but I suspect the biggest win is just to use as little memory as possible, since the probability of being affected by memory corruption is roughly proportional to the amount you use.
by dygd | 2026-03-05 23:41:06+00:00
> Each SDK might be tattling on you, but unless you give them a key to match you across apps, each signal from each app is unique

You'd be surprised what can be done when data from different source is fused together.

Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139716

Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf
by Modified3019 | 2026-03-05 23:42:47+00:00
Thanks to asrock motherboards for AMD’s threadripper 1950x working with ECC memory, that’s what I learned to overclock on.

I eventually discovered with some timings I could pass all the usual tests for days, but would still end up seeing a few corrected errors a month, meaning I had to back off if I wanted true stability. Without ECC, I might never have known, attributing rare crashes to software.

From then on I considered people who think you shouldn’t overlock ECC memory to be a bit confused. It’s the only memory you should be overlocking, because it’s the only memory you can prove you don’t have errors.

I found that DDR3 and DDR4 memory (on AMD systems at least) had quite a bit of extra “performance” available over the standard JEDEC timings. (Performance being a relative thing, in practice the performance gained is more a curiosity than a significant real life benefit for most things. It should also be noted that higher stated timings can result in worse performance when things are on the edge of stability.)

What I’ve noticed with DDR5, is that it’s much harder to achieve true stability. Often even cpu mounting pressure being too high or low can result in intermittent issues and errors. I would never overclock non-ECC DDR5, I could never trust it, and the headroom available is way less than previous generations. It’s also much more sensitive to heat, it can start having trouble between 50-60 degrees C and basically needs dedicated airflow when overclocking. Note, I am not talking about the on chip ECC, that’s important but different in practice from full fat classic ECC with an extra chip.

I hate to think of how much effort will be spent debugging software in vain because of memory errors.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2026-03-05 23:42:50+00:00
The keywords "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted exactly as how much we do not want to review your generated submission.

I know it is in jest, but I really hate that so many documents include “shall”. The interpretation of which has had official legal rulings going both ways.

You MUST use less ambiguous language and default to “MUST” or “SHOULD”
by fckgw | 2026-03-05 23:43:40+00:00
Do you have your adblocker on?

The video is simply a small form of content that they can run video pre-roll ads on. There's like 3 or 4 total on the site, all many years old at this point. The only reason they exist is to fulfill a specific type of advertising method on the site.

If you turn off your adblocker you'll see what I mean.
by dkatsura | 2026-03-05 23:43:54+00:00
Maker here. If you think this is security theater, please don’t be polite — pick one and attack it:

1. “policy travels with ciphertext” — why is that a bad idea vs external workflow?
2. geo/time gating — useless gimmick or actually valuable friction?
3. visual key — dumb novelty or practical multi-party secret?

I’m genuinely trying to find the sharpest criticism, not compliments.
by dogma1138 | 2026-03-05 23:44:17+00:00
Uplink alone can be significant for clandestine operations.

You can have a stealth drone which is effectively invisible to SIGINT transmitting real time intelligence to a satellite whilst either operating autonomously or receiving commands via a wide area encrypted broadcast (yes I know you can theoretically detect receivers through signal attenuation but at these distances it’s effectively impossible to do).
by svachalek | 2026-03-05 23:44:33+00:00
It's much more consistent. Only 3 lines, numbered 4.6, 4.6, and 4.5, and it's clear they're tiers and not alternate product lines. It wasn't until recently that GPT seems to have any kind of naming convention at all and it's not intuitive if every version number is a whole different class of tool.

The pricing is more complex but also easy, Opus > Sonnet > Haiku no matter how you tweak those variables.
by Zak | 2026-03-05 23:44:53+00:00
This doesn't cover in-app adds on phones over mobile data, which is probably the main vector for the tracking discussed in the article. For that:

1. Adblocking via private DNS (e.g. https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls)

2. Prefer websites over native apps wherever possible

3. Browser adblocker

Hosts file adblocking is also possible on a phone where you have root.
by cranky908canuck | 2026-03-05 23:45:16+00:00
Seems like the answer is:

What will you pay me for a day of my time?

At this point, they've already invested their resources (and also you, yours).

If employed, then it's easy to point out that that's your cost in a vacation/PTO/"sick" day.

If not, point out that you are not currently working at mickydee so your time is worth more than minimum wage. If they stick at that, make out a reasonable guess at their cost of this process and point out that a day of your time is not a massive additional fraction. If they stick at that, ask if this means you are on the "short list", and how many others are on it. If they stick at that, then you have useful information about what they think you are worth and are likely to offer.

This does assume some flexibility, and leverage.
by jcgrillo | 2026-03-05 23:45:47+00:00
It really cannot be both ways--the tech industry cannot both be producing critical infrastructure and be immune from liability. We've tried this experiment before, and millions suffered and died needlessly. We have electrical codes, building codes, automotive safety standards, etc., because many, many people died preventable deaths. With the amount of leverage tech has over the economy I don't think it's reasonable that we don't have software engineering codes and professional accountability. But I have absolutely no confidence we'll get there until there are multiple deadly catastrophes over a series of decades.
by prepend | 2026-03-05 23:46:59+00:00
There is no Chromebook with the same build quality as a Mac at a comparable price. Thomas try for $1000 MacBooks and even more so for $600.

This is an important feature as kids are rough on machines.

Security on Macs is good and I’m not sure why you think management is so hard as it’s not the same as windows, but still easy enough to manage a few hundred or thousand for a school system.
by hagbard_c | 2026-03-05 23:47:42+00:00
The CGA colour palette was horrid on RGB monitors but on Composite it could look quite good for its time. Not Amiga-level good but good enough. Of course composite monitors were not really a thing in the IBM PC world so it was to little avail. Here's an example of a screen in the mentioned horrible hot-pink palette:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

...and here's the same screen viewed on a composite monitor:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/20...

These images come from this page:

https://www.pixsoriginadventures.co.uk/cga-composite-graphic...

If this isn't enough it seems to be possible to coax ~1000 colours out of these cards as well:

https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-...
Show HN: Console2svg – Convert terminal output to crisp SVGs
by arika0093 | 2026-03-05 23:48:22+00:00
I built a CLI that turns terminal output into vector SVGs.

It supports truecolor, animated “video” mode, cropping by pixels/chars/patterns, and optional window chrome/backgrounds.

Available via npm, dotnet tool, and standalone binaries.

Repo: https://github.com/arika0093/console2svg
by Yenrabbit | 2026-03-05 23:48:34+00:00
Nice build. There are cheap (<$20) commercial versions, often targeted at kids. They make fantastic gifts, I thought it would be a bit of a gimmick but having instant printouts capturing happy moments added a fun dynamic to a few family trips, and our fridge is covered with an ever-rotating cast of family pics. And because they're ~free, it overcomes the blocker of a polaroid having to be 'special' while still keeping some constraints vs just snapping a cellphone pic.
by shimman | 2026-03-05 23:49:28+00:00
Hey buddy different words mean different things to different groups, if you can't understand how insidious it is to conflate democracy with the actions of private business then there's nothing to discuss further.

I reject notion of watering down concepts so dishonest actors can contort their meanings so poorly that a large percentage of the populace believes that consumerism is a noble thing and not the sign of a decaying society; but hey maybe we're just trying to democratize slavery and alienation to the masses so who am I to judge?
by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-03-05 23:49:54+00:00
Govt. contracts and terms allowing autonomous drone machines which can kill without any human in the loop have a very large difference

I know the difference between this is none but to me, its that Anthropic stood for what it thought was right. It had drew a line even if it may have costed some money and literally have them announced as supply chain and see all the fallout from that in that particular relevant thread.

As a person, although I am not fan of these companies in general and yes I love oss-models. But I still so so much appreciate atleast's anthropic's line of morality which many people might seem insignificant but to me it isn't.

So for the workflows that I used OpenAI for, I find Anthropic/gemini to be good use. I love OSS-models too btw and this is why I recommended Kimi too.
by freetime2 | 2026-03-05 23:50:30+00:00
Additional ports would complicate the user experience. The Studio Display has no buttons on it, but if you added additional inputs, you would also need to add a button for input switching at least. And potentially other buttons for brightness and volume settings.

It may not sound like a big deal, but I have an LG monitor that uses a remote for input switching and volume controls, and a BenQ monitor that uses buttons, and both provide a noticeably jankier experience.

The Studio Display provides a very clean user experience when paired with a Mac. You plug it in, it turns on, and all other functions (volume, brightness, colors, camera, etc) are controlled via MacOS. Personally I'm happy for Apple to optimize for that experience, at the cost of not working with non-Apple devices.
by crcastle | 2026-03-05 23:52:06+00:00
This is one of the more level-headed and empathetic writings that I've seen on the impact of LLMs on software engineers and our (or at least my) current strange combination of unbridled enthusiasm with existential dread. And it finishes with actual practical advice. (the post was derived from a talk the writer gave at his company)

> there’s fear in the air. You’ve heard that if you don’t learn these tools, you’ll be unemployable. That sounds pretty awful to me. What if none of us have jobs at the end of this?

> The industrial revolution didn’t eliminate human labor. It changed what human labor meant. Human labor still mattered at the end of it. The people who adapt to major technological shifts don’t just survive—they become more valuable, not less.

> I’m here to tell you it’ll be okay. You are smart. You can adapt. I believe in you.

> It’s not about 20x the number of lines of code you write, though you can do that. It’s about doing things you wouldn’t have attempted at all.

> A refactoring you’d never have had time for.

> An analysis you’d never have bothered with.

> A prototype you’d never have built.

> I’ve been doing this for nearly thirty-five years, and this is the most exciting time to write software I’ve seen. Yes, there are pleasures lost here. I love the flow state of writing code, just like I love printing black and white photographs in the darkroom. I don’t have to lose either one. I can still do both for pleasure. Black and white photography isn’t part of anybody’s journalism workflow any more, but people still do it. There’s a place for it all.

> The tools make it easy to produce a lot of code fast. They do not make it safe to skip evaluating what it did. Nobody is exempt. Don’t make our security team have to file disclosure reports, or clean up our messes.

> Two facts:

> We are responsible for what we ship.

> We can’t skip evaluating the work.
by shimman | 2026-03-05 23:52:29+00:00
If they're so popular and so great, why are they struggling to make profit? Why are they struggling to show large returns? Why are they all trying to use the strategy of securing corporate welfare to enrich themselves?

These things are enabling mass surveillance and human misery, maybe instead of constantly chasing the shiny and letting SV dictate the direction of tech in the US we start introducing public alternatives to this mess?

Something tells me that if you gave $100 billion to a consortium of devs across the US they would come up with a better plan to enable technological flourishing rather than mass inequality.
by cermicelli | 2026-03-05 23:52:39+00:00
For what it's worth govts should have the final say over companies they do business with anyone saying it's illegal is insane.

Now the separate question is of collusion or bribery. Which might be illegal but Anthropic has to go to court for that..

And in US bribery aka lobbying is legal as well so honestly. Anthropic is just slow on the uptake.

No pun intended, but get in bed with snakes and you should be happy if you survive getting bitten.
by constantius | 2026-03-05 23:53:39+00:00
As I started reading through the report (published in the Telegraph, almost entirely about bias in BBC Arabic coverage), I found it rather humorous: the incidents mentioned are undeniably instances of bias, but the few cases the author of the report was able to painstakingly find over 2 years of coverage were a rounding error in comparison to the daily pro-Israel bias in every major Western publication.

It stands to reason that it'd be a rounding error, both because of the overwhelming, omnipresent pro-Israel bias displayed by the mainstream media and almost every government, in full opposition to the popular sentiment and the communications of NGOs or humanitarian law institutions, and because of the complete disconnect between the casualties on the Israeli side versus the many tens of thousands of dead in Gaza...

Then I got to the section of the report that questioned the casualty numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health... This has been a consistent target for criticism by Israel, but the criticism has repeatedly failed to find any purchase: the MoH methodology is widely understood to be a (severe) undercount of the dead, there has been no reasonable deconstruction of the methodology, there has been no estimates (outside of genocide apologists) that have been below the MoH numbers. At this point, criticism of the MoH methodology is about as credible as descriptions of Gaza protests as "pro-Hamas protests".

So when I got to this section, I just stopped reading, because every other claim, which had already been laughably limited in scope, became outright questionable.

Just posting this here to avoid someone seeing 2 links (including "honest reporting"...) and believing that the "pro-Hamas bias" accusations against the BBC are in any way robust.
by zahlman | 2026-03-05 23:55:35+00:00
> pg has the fortune or misfortune to write in a way that feels like some LLM writing, when he's writing well.

It pains me to think how simplistic some peoples' LLM writing detection heuristics are (or at least appear to be). Prose such as in TFA is really obviously human-written to me. It's using those choppy sentences properly. It doesn't strike me as "less well-written" at all; the resulting contrast is clearly very intentional.

Although, of course, what you describe is still a couple levels above "Behold, what doth mine Ctrl-F espy but U+2014 EM DASH! Hie thee hence, O wretched automaton!"
by shimman | 2026-03-05 23:55:52+00:00
My alternative? Nationalize the company and implement a workplace democracy to replace the executive team + board.

I trust the workers more to dictate the direction of a company than most executives.

They can't do worse.

edit: or what another commentator said, fucking academia. Public universities have done more for humanity than nearly anything to come out of SV. Surveillance capitalism, mass misery + psychosis; it's very telling what our society values when mass amounts of the Earth are desperately trying to ban these very same services to protect children.
by alexpotato | 2026-03-05 23:57:17+00:00
There was a recent anecdote from the head of radiology, Mayo Clinic I believe, that went something like this:

- AI has allowed radiologists to review a much higher rate of x-rays

- The above has led to a dramatic increase in need for faster processing, more storage of scans etc

- which in turn led to needing a bigger IT department to manage all of the additional workload

There was a similar anecdote about the IRS where the claim is they went from having N accountants to having much fewer accountants but now they need N IT people to manage the new systems.
by zahlman | 2026-03-05 23:58:12+00:00
> Enough commenters didn't like the idea that everything they write publicly online is fed in as training data for AI that there's been a shift in this site's community.

Pardon; your theory is that this attitude was prevalent among people who like discussing pg's writing, and that they have left in favour of a new crowd that doesn't care about pg but is also pro- the AI companies?

... Because that doesn't seem to line up with the general tenor of discussion in threads about AI companies doing things.
by mr_wolff | 2026-03-05 23:59:34+00:00
Location: Western Europe
Remote: yes, prefer hybrid
Willing to relocate: yes

20 years of experience in Telco and FinOps industries. Focus on system administration, project management and team/tech leadership.

Experience :

Team Leadership and Project Management (Technical Team Leadership, Project Management (PMP certified), Stakeholder and Vendor Management, Incident and Risk Management, Regulatory and Enterprise Environments)
CI/CD, DevOps, GitOps (git, Jenkins, ArgoCD, artifactory, ClearCase)
PKI Service Stack (UniCERT, MSCA, EJBCA, HSMs - Thales, EnTrust, Cloud KMS)
Virtualization & Cloud Platforms (VMWare, RHEV, GCP, Azure, AWS)
Languages (Crotian, English, German)
Cybersecurity (OpenAM, IIQ, CyberArk)
Certifications (RHCSA, RHCP, CCNA, CCNP, ITIL, PMP)
Automation, Integration, Orchestration, Operational Support (Satellite/Foreman, RHEL based OS, Debian based OS, Puppet, LDAP, ELK, DNS, DHCP, NTP......)
Container Platforms (Kubernetes - GKE, OpenShift, Docker)
Automation & Scripting (Bash, Python, Perl, Ansible)

Looking for a team/tech lead position.

Email: nikola.kresic@gmail.com