skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't disagree with anything specifically, but think this is naive.

First, startups are deeply intertwined with monopoly. Financially, a startup is a small chance of huge success. The ultimate win scenario is becoming a monopoly like Microsoft or Amazon did. The next best thing is being acquired by one. If they can't become monopolies, there's a lot less reason to fund, found or work at a startup.

A startup that plans to participate in a competitive market is low potential. Making great apps isn't a good startup goal. A proper startup goal is to make the appstore.

Do startups, as we know them, even exist without monopolies?

Second... Abstract economics is abstract. Creative destruction doesn't exist in the way that economic theories want it to. It's almost non-existent at the enterprise/monopoly level. How many S&P 500 really become defunct? Creative destruction doesn't exist here unless you really squint. It exists in some places. Restaurants rise and file rapidly. So do barbers and many types of small business. Creative destruction definitely happens to startups. Most die.

Overall though, if take a cold empirical look... Creative destruction is orders of magnitude stronger or weaker, depending on sector. It's effectively a non existent dynamic for Microsoft, Loyds & such. You could argue that creative destruction is out of control in other sectors. The theory though, the theory abstracts all of this away. A firm is a firm. Parts manufacturer, energy supplier, record label or software company. The gradients of reality outweigh the abstract description.

This is true about a lot of economic concepts. "Normal" economics like market determined prices, broadly representing marginal costs in an industry... those are inapplicable concepts to most tech giants. They're not really applicable to government adjacent industries, creative industries, financial industries...

I don't mean that you can't use "normal economics" to describe these industries. I just mean that it's less describing a textile or commodity electronics manufacturer this way.

One striking difference between many monopolies of today and those of the past is the alternative. The alternative to Twitter or Facebook is simply "no Twitter or Facebook." If Toyota stops making cars, either someone else makes more or everyone has less. If facebook stop making facebook... social media is not scarce. People will still consume as much social media as they want.

This isn't like Bell. A court will never have to analyze Facebook's business in order to reorganise it into viable smaller companies.
It's about making it easier to click on bookmark instead of one level deep.
I heard they have pipes that big at the Liverpool cathedral, but they only use them when the Queen was there, as they are literally wrecking the cathedral.
I'm running ethicalads on my site (vadosware.io) and it's been pretty great so far (though I suspect revenue is much lower than other alternatives) -- they also have an open source server which they run an instance of and give you access to:

https://github.com/readthedocs/ethical-ad-server

Stats and lots of information about the advertisements and click rates/etc is available.

Been pretty smooth sailing so far, was going to write about it in the future.
Phrased differently for effect. Analytics data can be 9x larger than core data.
I don’t think bigger always needs to be more complex.

For simplicity sake, a 10% tax on income would scale infinitely, no matter how big an economy grows (I’m not arguing in favor of this tax).

But the point of the article, in my opinion, is that US has a large problem, costing tax payers an estimated 40 billion in labor figuring out their taxes, where other countries have almost automated the entire process.

I think there is something to be learned from there, as most people would agree that the US tax system is a mess.
The Open-World Game Pioneer
This is about an early video game made by Steve Grand who became famous for the Creatures series.
We’ll see how this turns out, but if we’re in the “this is clearly a lie” phase of AI progress then that seems pretty big.
It's like the old academic line about Wikipedia: a good starting point for research, but never trust it.

I appreciate the mention of rubber ducking, that's where ChatGPT can really shine. Just exploring new ideas without trawling through mediocre web pages.
I'll finish my UX studies in 6 months but I reckon i will keep taking course and learning new topics because the field is so vast. I want to focus more on agile and product discovery so any recs are appreciated.
I've already started improving my C++ knowledge with www.learncpp.com and Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language (4th Edition)" because my PhD supervisor is into C++ and I've got a few projects with him coming up where I may need to read and write C++ code.

One of the projects will also involve using a supercomputer, so I think I'll have to learn some of the various ways of interacting with that (Slurm, OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, GNU Parallel? I don't really know anything about it yet). I imagine I'll mostly learn about this from dipping into various guides and manuals and playing with examples rather than a proper book or course.
Please don’t film me in 2023
The Pendulum Swings: How to Respond to Tech's Downturn
I think the art is to find the best abstraction/metaphor for the problem needed to be solved
that is both easy to reason and maintain.
> In India, a Lady, Nupur Sharma merely quote the Hadith about Mohammad's marriage to Aisha and she had to go underground.

This is not equivalent to the case in question (to be clear about my stand, I think the firing of the lecturer was completely wrong). However, there are few things to consider in Nupur Sharma case:

1. Nupur Sharma is not a random Lady, she was the spokesperson of the ruling party BJP. As part of the ruling party, she had the responsibility of acting as is appropriate for a national-level party member. More so as being the spokesperson, her views could be seen as the views of the party. See point #3 on why this is relevant.

2. Her comments were not part of some art history or philosophical discussion. By her own admittance, she couldn't accept the insulting of Hindu god Shiva and retaliated by making comments about prophet Mohammad.

3. Her comments were not made within the confines of a classroom where free academic discussion is paramount; she went on three national TV channels and basically tried to make the same comments deliberately knowing well that in a deeply religious country like India, such actions have far reaching consequences. My personal view is that one should be free to insult any god, Hindu or Muslim or any other religion; however, practicality demands that care should be exercised by members of political parties on such public platforms (if she was a Muslim leader who insulted a Hindu god, the point would still stand i.e. her behavior was irresponsible).
They can be. But when you say “premium placements” and “take-overs”, I hear “banner ads” and “pop-ups”. They didn’t go away for regulatory reasons so they can absolutely return if there’s a financial incentive to make them.
Japanese startup creates wearable that lets you “smell” anime
Calling someone a "transphobe" is not strictly informational. What does that even mean? There are trans people who are against the trans self identity movement. And there are trans people who think that gender != sex.

On that note, why does the trans activist movement require that trans people must LITERALLY be the sex they self identify as? Why is that the one criteria?
Fyrox 0.29 Feature Highlights
Have you read Littman's research yourself, or just read about it?
It's possible a life-like system might have parts that, on their own, don't seem like-life. Human economic activity would fall under the category of "metabolism" that I used, for example. Cars are not alive either; but they, are, in the loosest sense, part of a living system. Fossil fuels for shipping food around are a part of the larger system of metabolism, ultimately enabling viruses to replicate in their human hosts. Viruses are dependent on metabolism, too; even if they can't do it themselves.
I inferred no ideaoligic reasoning in my post. I only referenced financials I hadn't thought were public (which I've since learned were). Perhaps ideology is being injected?
Last time I checked, C++ used function pointers behind the scenes to achieve virtual method dispatch.
"The universe is not deterministic." Maybe not. I think that's a big claim, and it's being made, not proved.

But let's say it's right, ignoring the massive burden of proof. We can hook up a quantum random number generator to GPT-3, and suddenly it can be conscious? If that's the whole argument, it seems like a useless point anyways.
Why Some Students Are Skipping College
As many others have also commented here, I strongly disagree with the author's argument that fraud prevention is legitimate: the word "fraud" here is tantamount to propaganda - the only thing being defrauded is a system of surveillance that shouldn't exist to begin with, and that every non-internet form of advertising has done perfectly well without.

The other argument about the Der Spiegel paywall-or-ads model is also tricky. I do understand where they're coming from, but the argument only holds in a theoretical situation of perfect knowledge (a visitor to your website fully understanding the implications of accepting ads). Requiring this level of consumer understanding isn't reasonable imo. This doesn't even work in Der Spiegel's favour: the only reason to offer the free ad-supported model is that they're forced to compete with free ad-supported alternatives. Otherwise the incentive to pay would be higher for visitors.

Ultimately though, the biggest argument to allow things like the above is corruption: currently we're very slowly seeing the GDPR being enforced many years later in just one or two large cases. There are millions of potential cases that'll never be prosecuted, not only because doing so would generally be unviable (it could still be an effective disincentive) but also because there's massive amounts of government lobbying to disincentivise prosecution and to defund independent data protection offices (keeping the level of enforcement even further below what it should be).
The GDPR definition of "freely given consent" is explicitly written to exclude "sale of consent" - if you say that you'll give you $1 (or some other benefit) if you consent, then according to GDPR that consent is not freely given and thus does not grant you the right to use that PII. In essence, "GDPR consent" applies when people really want you to do that thing with their data, and does not apply if they'd rather not but it comes as a requirement for something else or "bundled" with something desirable.

Also, if consent is the legal basis for processing, it must be possible to withdraw consent without any adverse consequence, so if e.g. you give a discounted subscription to people who gave consent, then you can't revoke that subscription or discount if the data subject withdraws that consent a minute later. If you say that you'll provide some service only if the user "consents", then GDPR presumes that the consent is not freely given (e.g. recital 43 of GDPR).
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I would describe myself as progressive, and I think the actions of the university —letting the professor go, if described accurately in the article — were clearly ludicrous and indefensible, and I can’t think of a single one of my friends or acquaintances who would think otherwise.
Part 2 to the above lwn article: https://lwn.net/Articles/446317/
> This argument is not convincing to me.

It shouldn't be because it's trivially false: create a Turing machine that enumerates all other Turing machines. All computable ontologies are so discoverable, no matter how seemingly "novel".
Big sites (newspapers) could do it the same way - maybe independent reach surveys could be the data that they use to back up their web ad pricing.
A company will grow up to the point the market needs it to grow.
In a pure capitalist market without government I would expect to see a few large players where replicating the technology is really hard and then a bunch of large companies being killed by newer competitors.

We kind of see these mechanics in our market but nowhere close to enough.

The distortion in our model of crony capitalism is that our centralised government gives unfair advantage to existing corporations in the form of bailouts (hey, too big to fail!) and regulations (easy to implement when you're Amazon, a business killer when you're small).

I would love to build a fintech startup and do what banks are doing for cheaper, but regulations in the banking sector make it a very expensive endeavour.

Anti trust is not the solution, it's merely a small patch which gets applied incoherently and used as a weapon by governments to steal more money from massive companies.

I argue that no regulations would have a better effect on disrupting large monopolies, once there is enough money to be made with little risk.
Name a startup (not your own) that you admire. And Why?
You asked why people talk about flying. This is a problem that can’t be solved at just a single angle.

> And we certainly don’t want people driving 1000 miles instead of flying

Not necessarily true. A single person in a gasoline car, yes, flying is probably slightly less dirty. More than one person in the car? Driving wins.
Great summary:

>What we should avoid:

Getting factual answers and blindly trusting them

Trying to solve maths problems - for the love of everything that is holy stop trying this and then posting about how it failed

Anything that involves deep reasoning and deduction - it’s not a human brain

Things that I think are great for ChatGPT are:

Creating marketing copy - with a human reviewer in the loop

Generating code - but check that the APIs it suggests are real

Finding problems in code

Summarising code/text

Rubber ducking - talking to a computer can be a great way to work through a problem

Providing inspiration for ideas

And many many others…
Shorting Tether
Interesting to know this as well. I'm planning to "retire" to gamedev after a few years in big tech and I've built up a safety net.

As far as I know, from second hand knowledge, it's a lot higher risk and generally lower paying than other software industries. But if you have a passion for it, there is probably nothing better for a programmer.

I'm guessing it also requires a fair amount of luck and/or experience to work on interesting games. Most gamedev are working on games they'd never play themselves I think.
In the UK, less than 10% of the population even file a tax return. For 90% of people tax is just taken at source. Unless you have a small business, rent out properties or work abroad, HMRC already knows what you needed to pay and get's it right 99% of the time and your employer/pension provider just withholds as required. It's always baffled me that so many rich countries don't operate like this...
You don't need to memorize each word's combination, although you eventually will as you type them frequently enough. It's shorthand for typing, where you can transcribe any word. You are chording syllables and in many cases, entire words, but you are not spelling each letter of a word. I am no steno expert, and my speed is not there yet, but I am benefiting from less finger movement and stress. It is also neat to rewire your brain to do something different. I am learning Colemak layout as well for touch typing.
Mmm :) I think definitely what we see is the perception of Apple. We find there what we bring to it. Our own internal experience of Apple, our own personal meaning-experience function F(Apple), is different for each of us. Tho probably for most of us in the same vector basis, tho maybe not, heh :) Anyway, multiple levels it's not reality: visual system does all sorts of tricks that you can see with those visual illusions (I'm sure you're aware); then meaning making--maybe what we saw was an interdimensional UFO and our mind just interpolated an apple because that was all we knew in our experience that roughly perceptually matched this improbable event; then like a Buddhist type of system/perspective: all forms are not really individuated phenomena they are the conditions that arise from a multitude of causes, so you are not really seeing an Apple, you are seeing everything that ever led there to be an Apple there, and to you to see it, no intrinsic separate reality to that Apple you only think you are seeing--all forms are illusion in other words. :)

As for consciousness, nope! Not touching it here :) That's a whole other kettle of fish, I think. We can have AGI without consciousness, at least conceptually / computationally, ignoring what the real world would do with that (ie, would the real world's consciousness field "insert" a consciousness unit into any robot/agent that crossed some AGI threshold? Would AGI attract consciousness? Again, not touching those questions here :))

As to your first link, interesting. I think that's personal for each person. As in, some people think in words, some in images, some in other things...some in mix. Great flexibility, but not the main question here I think :) ;p

But I also see what you were saying about the Apple's representation is slightly different to what I first thought in paragraph 1--hmm, I think the mental field exists both within us and around us. We are in unity with it (or it's a thing which is both a unity, and a duality, at the same time)--people's awareness of that of course differs. Again, not touching these questions here as this is HN, and one occasionally finds an unpleasant militant materialists here, and I'm a little scared to speak such things above a whisper as I don't want any unpleasantness :) Sayonara for today.
I'm interested. Only time is really a problem.

I think Python makes more sense than Nim.

So, Python, but what GUI framework? Use an existing one? Which one? Qt? Or some web-based backend, so it could get packaged as Electron app? Or new simple framework? But this is too much effort I think.

And how to do the IDE with integrated GUI designer? New from scratch, or use sth existing? Maybe based on PyCharm?
AI assisted graphics have the potential of allowing small teams of developers (3-10) to create beautiful indie games without breaking the bank and letting them focus more on the story and gameplay mechanics. We already have 2D masterpieces like Hollow Night made by 3 people, I would love if this tech lead to more decentralization in game publishing so instead of 100 people making a single game we had 5 teams of 20 people making 5 equally good games
When the hardware scales, the tricks to wring maximum performance out of it change.

When you come back to build the new version of your game on the next gen console sure you can now add all those features but the processing pipelines are different now and the disk performance and memory to cache ratios have changed - getting your hyper optimized code to work in the new platform takes a ton of effort - so you either run it in some kind of emulation mode, sacrificing some of the performance for productivity, or you rewrite it.

Same happens with new generations of server hardware. Your clever hack to maximize NUMA locality of data to each core becomes a liability when the next hardware gen comes out and on-die caches are bigger. Decisions about what should use RAM get invalidated by faster SSDs.

Maybe you can build a service this way - hardware first. Pick a server platform for a couple of years; build to that capacity; ship; then start designing the next gen service to run on a new set of hardware?

To some extent this is how database or virtualization systems software is written. And if I’m not mistaken Twitter actually did develop their own database stack to optimally handle their particular data storage model, and I assume that was done pretty close to the metal.
You can definitely do that right now in midjourney 4, go on their discord and search for "character sheet" or "character design" and you'll find high quality examples with coherent front/side/back view

Once you know what tokens trigger the right answers it's relatively easy to get where you want, as usual with these tool you should be flexible when it comes to details, but the overall design can be defined
Strongswan, the open source IPSec VPN software (https://www.strongswan.org/) is written in object oriented C. Ref: https://docs.strongswan.org/docs/5.9/devs/objectOrientedC.ht...

I have not looked through the source myself but thought this might be an interesting reference.
> The universe is not deterministic. There is one brain state at time T, but at time T+1 there are many possible brain states, all with different possibilities.

There is no proof of this. There are deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, for instance.

Also, there is little reason to think our brains depend on quantum indeterminacy, even if it exists. After all, a brain that behaves erratically/non-deterministically is the exact opposite of useful. Once you learn how to walk, you want to be able to rely on that ability. Once you learn what food is, you don't want to erratically start eating rocks or twigs.

Non-determinism in the brain would be selected against, not selected for. Flexibility would be selected for, but flexibility can be deterministic.
It's a response to both. Der Spiegel could allow unadvertised access to its subscribers, and untargeted access to the general public. Es könnte sein.

Sure, "circulation" is not so well known, but was it ever exactly known for broadcast* television? free papers on trains? 50% of all advertising is worthless, anyway: to what extent do we have any idea that even fraud-detected CPM ever converts to actual sales? Why does anyone do "corporate identity" placement on PBS?

Finally, I'd have no problems (hint: how many targeted placements do you see on this webiste?) if a certain percentage of the internet disappeared because it was not economic to continue it without targeted advertising "revenue". If the market speaks, then let the market speak.

* my dorm was once a Nielsen household for a week or two. They were warned, but accepted 80 as our household size.
This is beyond optimistic updates (which twitter also has plenty of issues with - you'll reply to your tweet and it'll jump immediately to two replies, but on refresh just show your one).
Only for content Paizo makes that's based off of OGL 1.1

What's WotC going to do about all the Pathfinder books out there? Round them up and burn them? Those Pathfinder books are still licensed OGL 1.0 by Paizo.
> A university acquaintance went acute schizophrenic shortly after developing a pot habit,

That's the age most people find out they're schizophrenic
That's why, in my experience, it usually comes out of the CFO org. At the end of the day, they have the actual opex/capex numbers.

And I am sympathetic to the other side of the equation: continually asking people to justify their work ends up with a lot of useless-but-visible or sub-optimal work being prioritized (e.g. Google's lack of strategic attention to bugs/maintenance).

Self-destructing, temporary policies and teams seems like a nice balance. And maybe a cultural expectation that most teams will be disbanded and reformed after X years.

It'd also be curious to have an org where manager-back-to-IC was more normalized. IOW, manager is a role everyone is expected to serve a stint in, but then relinquish without salary/title penalty.
Tell HN: Ada Lovelace has died (1852)
She was only 36 years old, too. An incredible pioneer in our field, will be missed.
Why people still quit jobs with bad bosses?