skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've described why older companies do not inevitably grow into monopolies and take over the world. They get so set in their ways and bureaucratic that they get destroyed by the next wave of upstart companies.
It is not a feature it was forced down by the EPA :/ I have such an SUV and a $20 part wired into the fuse box fixes it.
Stupid ISO charging money for standards.
If you start thinking that CEOs aren't special and unique, then you might start thinking they don't need to be paid 350 times what the average employee does.
This reminds me of the "Explore/Exploit" chapter from "Algorithms to live by" :)
Reminds me of this (first one): https://www.muddycolors.com/2011/09/artistic-insults-from-fa...
I wonder whether dark money also paid for this article?

Dark money sounds like all political funding to me understanding of how these things work
When I installed Windows 10 Bitlocker was turned on from the get go. I didn't choose it. Then it grumbled that it was "waiting for activation", which led me to the superuser post I linked to.
Ask HN: Black Friday Deals for Software?
Over the years I've purchased variety of software from software VPNs to text editors from BlackFriday deals. This years I don't have anything specific on my mind, so I thought I might as well ask the hive mind to send pointers to BlackFriday deals for (great!) software. Thanks!
While I don't think mentioning her by name was necessary (she's just an example of the culture of bad middle management he's calling out), I do think highlighting her race as a meta-criticism does neither the OP nor Banks herself any favors.

My rule of thumb: unless given an obvious reason not to, assume good faith on the part of individuals.
Candid means speaking your mind; truth. "Consistently candid" therefore means consistently telling the truth, perhaps even to a fault.
And people continue to blindly trust big pharma with their health. What other proof of deep corruption is needed?
That is funny. Interesting career trajectory.
I bought one recently, and it sounds awesome, despite the fact that there are still some minor issues even after firmware update.
In exchange for how many extra cycles?
It makes sense because the market seeks net profit opposed to efficiency or percent profit.

That means it is better to make $101 with 20,000 employees than only $100 with 2 employees.
I think with some of pg's tweets he definitely seems to be laying it bare, but only for those people that know what to watch out for.
> Regulatory and PR risks are similarly grave. For example, Google couldn't have pulled off something like TikTok without all kinds of regulators jumping at their throats right away. They had to wait for ByteDance to clear the way and then launched their own "also-ran" clone. It's the same story with ChatGPT: Google had the tech but not the freedom to let it loose.

I think this is directionally true: Google would have taken a lot longer to release something like Bard/ChatGPT if their hand had not been forced, but I don't think pr/regulatory pressure was the reason YouTube Shorts was not done before TikTok.

I think short form video is just hard to monetize in comparison to long form. Why would you make a product that has uncertain appeal and is likely to be a money loser if it does succeed?
Yes, if you restrict it to web browsers, and more specifically HTML (not Canvas, WebGL).
https://archive.ph/3FLF8

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12625642
If she is in fact "par for the course" and the failures of that department were at multiple levels then that type of criticism is certainly suspect. I give you a C- at attempted strawman though.
True story.

This reminds me of The Cult of Done Manifesto. Nicely put.

https://medium.com/@bre/the-cult-of-done-manifesto-724ca1c2f...
Results matter.
I have hung out on HN for over 14 years and took a personal interest in "How in the heck did a pretty young woman co-found a company with three men, date one of them and not have this turn into a debacle and scandal in the headlines???" It took quite a few years for the details behind the founding of YC to come out:

1. Jessica Livingston did not co-found a company with three random men.

2. She and Paul Graham were dating, she was job hunting and being jerked around and he said one day "Why don't we start a company?"

3. Within a day or so, he called his two co-founders from Via Web and asked them to come on board like part time or something and they said "yes."

4. They initially hid their personal relationship as a dating couple to try to appear professional.

So they have a long history of being very private people and because I am a woman who has struggled to get any traction and blah blah blah, when I learned Sam was gay, I figured "Ah, that's probably the real reason he was appointed President of YC: Paul Graham wanted to protect his marriage while retiring from YC and was concerned about his pretty, younger wife working closely with a man other than himself. So he appointed a gay guy to take over 45 percent of his duties."*

So if that had anything to do with the hiring decision, not announcing the firing would be in line with long-standing personal policy to keep his private life private and not talk to the world about his marriage to Jessica Livingston and it wouldn't exactly be shocking if that meant it (hiring him) wasn't the wisest business move.

She eventually also retired from YC, so her being there while Paul Graham is home with the kids is no longer relevant to who runs things at YC. They are both founders and presumably major stock holders, I imagine they both still have influence there.

/"wild speculation" from an outsider who has never met any of these people but did sort of politely cyberstalk Jessica Livingston for some years trying to figure "How does a woman become a successful business founder?"

* "45 percent" because Paul said somewhere that he continued to do "office hours" with program participants and called that "10 percent" of what he did at YC before retiring. They also hired Dan Gackle to take over as moderator of Hacker News when Paul Graham stepped down.

So Paul was not replaced by Sam Altman. They hired two full-time employees that I know of and Paul continued to work part-time at the business while his wife worked full-time and presumably kept Paul up-to-date about daily goings-on over breakfast/dinner, so he likely continued to have significant influence on company decisions and day-to-day stuff invisibly via his wife.
It seems like a meme that GPL software developers are more ego driven than BSD/MIT software developers, and so bike shedding and new features take precedence over correctness/simplicity/beauty. I was a decade long Gentoo user who was frustrated by crashy software, switched back to pirated windows (I would never be caught dead paying for windows), only to find out the same trash developer habits carried over in my absence and now windows sucks just as much plus IT SPIES ON YOU!!! I'm now on Qubes OS hoping Xen is well enough built to assuage my anxieties.
It's obvious this class of people love their status as neu-feudal lords above the law living as 18th century libertines behind closed doors.

But i guess people here are either waiting for wealth to trickle down on them or believe the torrent of psychological operations so much peoples minds close down when they intuit the circular brutal nature of hierarchical class based society, and the utter illusion democracy or meritocracy is.

The uppermost classes have been trickters through all of history. What happened to this knowledge and the countercultural scene in hacking? Hint; it was psyopped in the early 90's by "libertarianism" and worship of bureaucracy to create a new class of cybernetic soldiers working for the oligarchy.
I must be missing something here; if I understand this right, the woman set her dad's house on fire in 2013, the police ignore her for 10 years, and then suddenly they decide to investigate her? Are New Zealand police that backed up that it takes a decade for them to complete an arson investigation?
Yeah it's odd they chose Palm 2 to compare against. Not a very strong model by most measurements.
OpenAI developers are redefining the state-of-the-art of AI each 6 months, if the company lose them they already can go bankrupt
Was that mission achieved by Google, or by Wikipedia?
> Google hasn't created a new major product in years

Indeed, and this goes back even further in time than you might think. All their best products came from acquisitions: Maps (KeyHole), Android, YouTube, Google Docs. The only truly original Google products that I can think of, other than Search, are GMail and Chrome (which was largely powered by WebKit anyway).

But they do deserve credit for nurturing those products. Maybe that's where their strength lies: in throwing a massive amount of elbow grease and server power at problems that can't be solved any other way. Nobody is innovating their way to a new Web browser or maps platform. Those products need a massive organization behind them. Google seems to have a good formula for keeping these large projects on track. What they've been missing since 2005 is the ability to start a new project from zero.

And you know what? Maybe that kind of innovation is actually almost impossible, like winning the lottery, and it's unrealistic to expect one organization to strike gold more than once, or a handful of times if they're really lucky.

The same pattern is observable at Facebook - they've got one flagship product, an undiversified revenue stream from ads, and a bunch of successful products they acquired. But has Facebook really innovated since their original product?
>being a board member is a responsibility

And that responsibility is defined as a fiduciary duty to the mission of the organization as defined in the charter.

As a fellow board member, if Sam thinks Helen's behavior is in conflict with the mission of OpenAI as defined in the charter, he is free to push for her removal.
Old proverb that I think applies here: A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.
It's the old: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Gonna be awfully hard to comply with all the consent decrees and regulatory scrutiny with zero bureaucracy.
> ...the level of genuinely well-intentioned work that the public is unfairly (and often viciously) critical of the motives of, and also the (at this point) complete absence of concern for the user, the long term...

If there is lack of concern for the user and the long term, how can work be "well-intentioned"?

Intentioned for whom? And why should the public perceive it as good?
Yeah, it’s hilarious people think you just get to travel around the world and glad-hand heads of state without “friends” among the three-letter folks. And even more so when you’re doing it in the context of selling a technology with quite obvious intelligence service and military applications.
To me, commentary online and on podcasts universally leans on the idea that he appears to be very focused on money (from the outside) in seeming contradiction to the company charter:

> Our primary fiduciary duty is to humanity.

Also, the language of the charter has watered down a stronger commitment that was in the first version. Others have quoted it and I'm sure you can find it on the internet archive.
The difference between unsafe AGI and an unsafe plane or car is that the plane/car are not existential risks.
wow i did nazi that coming
Some of the causes for bloat apply to both commercial and floss projects:

- heavier use of serialized I/O means much lower risk of pointer corruption or related threats, but adds overhead

- so do simple safety/sanity/security checks - each by itself is harmless, but over 10-20 years they add up

- more abstraction layers and more bookkeeping to handle much more complicated hardware setups, or just the passage of time (a Y2K secure date field takes two more bytes, a 64-bit time_t takes 4 more bytes than a 32-bit one, etc.)

- userspace devs are as lazy as they can be. Gnome these days is mostly Javascript to make the constant pointless rewrites faster, something that would've been unheard of 20 years ago. (The *box WMs meanwhile are still as fast as before.)
Nice essay but one of the main assumptions is false

> Given some random goal or goals, if you let imaginary humans, even bad ones, with unlimited capabilities optimise the world accordingly, the result should be compatible with human existence, because as humans they will respect all the constraints that go without saying, like that the atmosphere should be breathable.

Maximizing profit does not have anything to do with a viable biosphere. Obvious example is plastic pollution and its effects on biological functions. Cancer incidence is higher in areas with large amounts of synthetic chemicals in the soil and water. The companies producing synthetic chemicals are large conglomerates of people but their overall chemical metabolic output is detrimental to people.

Essentially, any argument that assumes people optimize for a viable biosphere is generically invalid and must contend with the fact that maximizing profits has ended up with the current ecological disaster. There is no need to invoke misaligned AI for ecological destruction, profit aligned corporations are more than sufficient. There is no point in worrying about super advanced intelligence that suddenly makes people extinct because the slow deterioration of the ecology necessary for human life to persist is already underway and AI/AGI/profit-maximizer is only going to accelerate that trend.
Product is legal, but the way to use it is likely not.

Knives are legal, but likely wouldn't be advertised by showing a scene of stabbing someone.
Or Visa payment cards are legal, but you wouldn't show how to use them to bribe an official in the commercials.

Right?
Stop dreaming about alignment. All bets are off. This is the start of AI arms race. Think globally for a second. Yes, everybody wants to be a millionaire or billionaire. This is the current culture we are living in. Corporations have unprecedented power waved into the governments, but governments still have a monopoly on violence. People cannot switch to the new abstraction layer (UBI, Social Rating) for two or five years. They will keep a consumer-oriented mindset before the option to have one is erased. Where you think this is going? To a better Democracy? This is the Cold War V.2 scenario unfolding.
I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, but in my personal experience this was Autodesk's strategy with AutoCAD. Get market saturation by being extremely light on piracy. Then, once you're the only one standing lower the boom. I remember, it was almost like flipping a switch on a single DAY in the mid-00's when they went from totally lax on unpaid users to suing the bejeezus out of anyone who they had good enough documentation on.

One smart thing they did was they'd check the online job listings and if a firm advertised for needing AutoCAD experience they'd check their licenses. I knew firms who got calls from Autodesk legal the DAY AFTER posting an opening.
John Sculley as CEO of Apple :-/
https://x.com/kevin_scott/status/1726971608706031670?s=20
That makes sense. Cops spend much time sitting in their cars, parked, with the vehicle systems powered up.
This seems like a bizarre mid-representation of GPs point. They sated she was “par for the course” for that department. Meaning everyone was bad, not just her. And found it concerning she was the only person they singled out.
Ask HN: Where do you host your own-domain email?
I've been using Google Apps/Google Suite for the past 10+ years, recently upon clicking the "Not Spam" button I had an email (from a govt agency no less) be gone from the account, the experience with support for a service I do pay for has been abysmal and I want to switch, but don't know where - especially given the integration Google has with everything nowadays. I have used Tuta before and did not enjoy it.
What does "actually open" mean? And how is that more responsible? If the ethical concern of AI is that it's too powerful or whatever, isn't building it in the open worse?
As the other commenter mentioned, silos are not inherently bad. Indeed, in a large company, they're necessary to avoid dysfunction. You want stable groups of competent people who share priorities and lore, who own well-defined parts of the business, and who have the autonomy to set the strategy for their thing.

"Founder-led" companies are more dynamic mostly because they're smaller. Once they get to 100,000 employees, they will not be distinguishable from Google, Apple, or Microsoft.
i'm not a fan of adobe but they are an industry standard and have a deal for 50% off the full suite 1 year plan which strikes me as a decent deal
And yet Spotify still has a larger market share.
OpenAI workers has shown their plain support to their CEO by threatening to follow him wherever he wants, I personaly think their collective judgement on him is worth more than any rumors
> the economy diversifies, and services improve

Pure wishful thinking. Is there any empirical reason to believe this would be more true with everyone living in a couple of dozen large cities (as if that can even happen - see later) instead of in a greater number of more self-sufficient smaller cities and towns within a region? It's not like every company even in your own metropolitan area wants to be in "Seattle proper" is it? I used to work at a large one that basically moved out and they're not the only one. Investors didn't seem to mind one bit.

> Why do any more suburbs need to be built at all

I never said that they should. They need to be rebuilt, not built anew. More precisely, they need to be reconfigured to avoid the waste and ecological damage of tearing down one place and then building somewhere else.

> Fix the cities and there will be plenty of space.

Fix the suburbs and you'll have plenty of space too. Consolidation can happen as easily in each town as in the central city, and without some of the downsides - increased prices and decreasing affordability (already a major problem in Seattle), power distribution, waste disposal, what traffic still (and necessarily) remains, etc. I've been to Seattle. Consolidating most of the region's population into Seattle city limits would not be a utopia; it would be a nightmare even from a new-urbanist perspective. Ditto for the many other cities I've been to. A certain level of geographic expansion is inevitable, but not all such expansion is sprawl.

More importantly, restructuring suburbs in place is the only way this can happen. People just won't move to the cities en masse. The current milieu of property values, school funding, etc. won't allow it. Changing those realities would be even harder than adopting a strong towns[1] or missing middle[2] approach in the places where people are and will remain. And that requires people voting where they are instead of running away.

[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/

[2] https://missingmiddlehousing.com/
Evolutionarily, I would assert this is our first brain, and the cerebral brain is the jumped-up newcomer. It started as a glorified video card peripheral and motion tracker/planner, and developed delusions of grandeur.
Ollama is fantastic. I cannot recommend this project highly enough. Completely open-source, lightweight, and a great community.
I believe the comment you are responding to is in jest, or sardonic.
He surely has connections in SV(he was even a Reddit CEO for a short time) but he has connections in the politics too as far as I can tell. He is representing US interests? Fine. OpenAI is an American company. This was one big marketing stunt, a balloon to see how the AI community would react. OpenAI is the innovator but the future AI innovations will happen somewhere else, that's what history of innovations teaches us. I remember when Elon said the Google is the biggest threat when it comes to AI, then he founded and funded OpenAI and now here we are.
Same thing if Chrome effectively nuters ad blockers, a critical safety component for web browsing.
At least as of last week, people (mainly at Collabora) are working on open-source support for Mali “Valhall” including the GPU in Orange Pi 5. It’s just sufficiently different from previous generations to need a new driver, and taking a while to develop.
Behind the Scenes of Sam Altman's Showdown at OpenAI
Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves in Three Generations
Affinity makes some great alternatives to Photoshop and Illustrator (and you only pay for it once rather than monthly). They have a 40% off deal for Black Friday. See https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
So I agree that for most jobs taking already more than 300ms, a 50ms per job will not be perceivable anymore. What matters is the DX and even though I'm very proud of our performance, a lot of our work is focused on providing a consistently great developer experience in all aspects (vscode extension, instant deployment, etc, etc).

However, there is one big benefit to being performant which is that you can use the same stack for performance sensitive jobs such as event-streaming use cases. That remove the duplication of infrastructure. The other benefit is that it improve the developer experience overall with fast previews.
Tuples are already fixed size by nature, so adding a redundant "fixed-size" in that description was confusing. I also thought you meant a predefined size like always 2-tuples or always 3-tuples.
> You'd think the latter would imply the former, but maybe not...

I wouldn't put C++ devs on too high of a pedestal. I got away with writing shitty C++ code for years before I really knew what I was doing. It still worked though.
I can write Fortran 77 in any language!
What was it like at the beginning of the Big Bang?
Not regular employees. Twitter is one method of communication.
49% stock (lower bound) + 90% of employees (upper bound) > board.

To be updated as more evidence rolls in.
Nah, people blindly trust "The Science".

It's just that "The Science" happens to be funded by big pharma, and only releases results that are in line with what the boards of big pharma want people to think.

Edit: and of course, any science besides "The Science" is "misinformation" and "conspiracy theories".
The best place for product reviews is … Reddit?
There are pretty few details for me to make a judgment to be honest. From me observing Ukraine war journalists at/or close to the front line are generally with mil. units at or near military positions. So how would you distinguish ?
The links you provide have 0 details other than journalists being in an area where active fighting or fire exchange is happening. If journalists are in an open area not near military units assets or positions and get hit that would obviously indicate they were specifically targeted.
> series of bad-to-disastrous leaders at the Director, VP, and SVP level

Isn't that exactly the job of an org executive? To hire and align competent senior leadership ?

I don't think he is criticizing her in particular as much as the archetype that she represents. She is a person who has never had a coding job & spent her early career quite far from the people who write code. I can't for the life of me figure out why you would put someone like that in charge of google-dev relations. That's a premier-IC-turned-leader position if I've ever seen one.

No wonder she doesn't have a strategy. That's a terrible match for a hire.
"Present company excluded"

It's a polite fiction.
Empire of the Summer Moon (S.C. Gwynne)

It's the story of the rise + fall of the Comanches in the late 1800s. So far, it's an unbelievable story, and if you're generally interested in the post Civil War era as the U.S. expanded into the west, you'll enjoy it.

Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurthy) is possibly my favorite fiction book of all time, and that got me increasingly interested in this time period.

I also started reading some of Cormac McCarthy's work after Lonesome Dove. Blood Meridian also takes place during this general time period, and it's possibly the weirdest book I've ever read.