skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>What a dumb requirement. It's like the cash-for-clunkers program requiring the engines to be destroyed.

The whole point of the "cash-for-clunkers" program was to remove as many older, more polluting, and unsafe, cars from the market as possible, to force an upgrade of the fleet, and simultaneously provide incentives to buy new cars.

It wasn't dumb in the larger scheme, but yes... on the individual level, it made it almost impossible to get an affordable good used car for a few years.

The locomotive is now only good for scrap metal, if the engine is similarly disabled.
The AI doomsday folk had an even worse track record over the past decade. There was supposed to be mass unemployment of truck drivers years ago. According to CCP Grey's Human's Need Not Apply[1] from 10 years ago, the robot Baxter was supposed to take over many low skilled jobs (Baxter was continued in 2018 after it failed to achieve commercial success).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
The horse isn't going to like that mounting method if the knight has spurs on.
I usually prefer the press release and only read a third party report if I'm looking for more context. So thanks for making it easy to find the primary source of the news here.
I have one close friend who uses ChatGPT regularly, to write office communications in his role as a manager at a non-tech company. I'm very glad he's not my manager!
There nothing in this article saying he’s in court for cloning animals:

“An 81-year-old Montana man faces sentencing in federal court Monday in Great Falls for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in Central Asia and the U.S. to illegally create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.”

The linked-to article https://apnews.com/article/wildlife-trafficking-giant-sheep-... says

“Using biological tissue obtained from a hunter who killed a wild sheep in Kyrgyzstan belonging to the world’s largest species of the animals — Marco Polo argali sheep — Schubarth procured cloned embryos of the animal from a lab, according to court documents.”

⇒ it doesn’t even look as if he did any cloning himself.
The brutally honest truth is no one in the global south cares about Ukraine. They are using these peace initiatives to cement their own claims at great power status.
Vue also does this! https://vuejs.org/guide/extras/web-components
We're talking about people like Marvin Minsky or Hilary Putnam, who have made very significant contributions to the discourse. And if Max Tegmark thinks your claims are a bit too far out, you've got your work cut out.
See, this is what I mean. People who take a skeptical approach to masks aren't doing it for scientific reasoning, they're doing it to avoid being a "cuck".

This type of mentality actively discredits skeptics, because nobody wants to be lumped in with that. There're genuinely very smart people who were/are skeptical of many Covid policies, but unfortunately, they have to stand next to you. Which, of course, makes them look very stupid. It's a tough problem.
That tight-knit environment couldn't last when they keep taking on a bigger volume of startups every year.

2005 - 8 startups

2010 - 63 startups

2015 - 216 startups

2020 - 435 startups

2024 - 509 startups so far (likely 600+ when the Fall batch is done)

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies
Any content you upload. PDFs, text, etc. Academic papers was one example I thought of (and have used).
See https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/britain-hired-astrologer-to-pr...
eBPF Data Collection for Everyone with Inspektor Gadget [video]
There was a lot of cross pollination between artists and academics in that 60's counterculture crowd. Ken Kesey was a brilliant author who was also on the forefront of experimentation with LSD. John Perry Barlow was a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and also founded the EFF.
Thank God we have scientists rallying against Wolfram, Penrose, et al. It would be great if next-up, you guys actually had the guts to challenge your _actual_ peers, who are turning tricks of mainstream scientific literature at the highest levels of academia. Bread and butter. Western blot party for everyone!
I think you mean PearAI[0], not to be confused with Pair AI[1], which YC also funded.

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pearai

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/pair-ai
> designed to get them stuck in an infinite loop of watching pointless "content" and as many ads as possible

Wouldn't TV have been the equivalent in the era OP is talking about?

Going on the internet and seeking out coding tutorials, as the article describes, is a choice most people didn't make back then; it's the most nerdy of kids doing this outside of school. While an addiction takes that choice away or makes it much harder, most kids are not addicted (~90% aren't in UK, ~55% aren't in India, for 11- to 14-year-olds per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problematic_smartphone_use#Pre...)

If you have a credible source on phones in 2024 providing fewer learning opportunities than computers in the <2000s, either anecdotal (kids who you observe are otherwise curious but don't seek out non-entertainment content) or by looking at a large enough sample to have some measurable difference in the population, I'm interested. It sounds like an assumption based on the (justified) negativity around social media as a concept rather than an actually observed effect
The article goes into it a tiny bit, but the cost is the mental cost of when you do need to work on it, understanding it, and I would add keeping the tooling the same.

Encouraging devs to have their changes include all modules, even those that are old and mature and don't need to be touched, is a good way of ensuring this doesn't build up to where it becomes a problem.
Common Closure Principle
I didn't say "whether", I said "why".

At the moment, you can't predict the future state of my brain for more than one reason, one of which is that you don't have much information about the current state (precise information anyway, you may have an opinion about the average state).
White mf's be like...
I guess the target audience is audiophiles that are willing to pay $100 for gold plated connectors.
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjlr/vol25/iss3/3/

Most of this is unlikely to be in training data.

Doesn't even mention the basics, like ethnic demographics of Fiji today. Confuses history as well (what happened in colonial times vs post independence)
I suppose this would be "Rickdriving"?
What do I want them to do? Pass a constitutional amendment that bans government invasions of privacy, legislation that extends those rights to individuals' interactions with private parties, legislation that funds the enforcement of those protections, legislation that creates civil penalties for violating those rights, and funds courts that hear those cases.

What do I expect them to do? Limit super-invasive spying to domestically-controlled companies.
> it is only us conspiracy theorists who suffer from delusional cognition

Of course not, but if you, say, think the Earth is flat you are delusional. That's just what it is, and I'm not gonna hand hold crazy people when I tell them they're crazy.

The issue is when crazy people assimilate, or rather try to infiltrate, groups of educated skeptics. Now they all look crazy, and that's a problem.
I have been following the conflict since the beginning in 2014. I've probably seen more combat footage than you ever will. Most of the real footage is on telegram btw.
The girlfriend heard it directly from the accused and testified to that fact. It wasn't hearsay. Despite claims to the contrary, she didn't request any money for the testimony.

Why do people keep ignoring the girlfriend's testimony?
Article's assumption is that a totally incompetent set of startup founders were admitted to YC because it "loses quality in exchange for quantity" (not a direct quote but the gist). And this startup was nothing more than a copy of a different startup.

Maybe it is the prestige game that became a death knell for YC. Because it is "cool" to be accepted to YC, the "cool people" with a coolness factor started applying and tried to game through the evaluation process into acceptance. But these cool people aren't really cut out for doing sweaty, gross, sleeve-pulling work. So they likely fail.

What does Sam do? Refocus the company to drift away from the "cool" tech sector where cool people are looking to make their name cool. And start doing stuff in multiple sectors (that will seem cool in the future!).

What didn't he do? Make the grind of becoming a YC selectee even sweatier and harder. Or change the selection process entirely so that all previous books trying to get you through the system fall flat on their faces.
And Evelyn (as in, e.g., Waugh, who pronounced it EEV-lin).
But since when has a toilet ever required ongoing maintenance by the manufacturer to remain functional in the environment around it? In this case the dev will have to provide updates and bug fixes, committing him to a level of work in perpetuity, whereas the toilet maker builds the shitter and never has to work on it again.
Maybe a hotel will do? You can also rent an apt and buy a mobile AC yourself. Which i did this summer, for the few days it gets really hot.
Show HN: ScreenComplete (app agnostic AI auto-fill)
Hi all! Was finding myself consistently wishing I had the same basic ChatGPT capabilities built into slack/google docs/etc (without having to buy a subscription for every individual AI feature) so decided to take this up as a side project.

Plenty of copilot apps allow you to talk with screenshots, the main difference here is that it closes the loop and just converts your "prompt" directly into an auto-complete that it types back into the main app.
WPE not only releases everything under the GPL, they are committers to the upstream source. Or were, anyway.

It's true that Automattic could switch their to distribution to GPLv3 (unlike Linux, it's "GPLv2 or later"). This would release a shitstorm of biblical proportions from every WP host on the planet, not just WPE. It would guarantee at least one fork becoming adopted by many of those hosts. Certainly many hours of entertainment.
oops, thanks, fixed.
> You don't want to attract founders who figure YC is a low-risk alternative to grad school

Of course YC would want that (in the short- to mid-term).

The only thing YC has to do is produce a portfolio of companies that looks good enough that other VCs invest into that. This is completely disconnected to building viable businesses, as they just don't have to be the ones that are left holding the bag, and as an accelerator they are in the best position to do that.

The easiest way to fill that pipeline is to pair current hype XYZ with Harvard (or other ivy league) undergrads (or high-level ex-FANG people). As long as their ROI stays above a certain threshold, that's the main way to scale up YC.
Can you do one that counts how many people go directly from drinking in front of Mr. Liquor and then into their cars or dirt bikes?
Pixelated cover art conversions are a nice touch. How?
> if they can't reach the size demanded by their investors

In this sense, how is YC any different from any other VC firm?
Because it's a law that first intended to put opensource developers in jail.
I would seriously pay, even a subscription fee, to have that ability downloaded into my brain. The first few mentions of "like" don't typically get me, but the more it's used the irritation level grows exponentially...
Would be cool if this updated a playlist with everything heard, so we could follow along.
At some point, you have to turn reputational capital into real capital. The hope, then, is that you only spend the interest on that capital.
Related, the new edition of Pathfinder ditched weight in lbs and picked up a system of encumberance called bulk, I think, better represents real objects a bit more than just plain weight
That sounds right, I was judging by mac studio I own that is passively cooled.
Absolutely. I'm not against anonymity, but am rather cynical about it, and appreciate the freedom (I have lived in nightmare totalitarian countries, and my father was in the CIA).
I just checked on a private window there were no tracking cookies. And according to the FAQ if you want your account deleted you just have to contact HN.
I often manually switch to the built-in mic of my MBP [edit: while using Airpods for audio output]. To switch more quickly, I found that when you alt-click on "Sound" while in the Control Center, you can select audio devices for input and output independently of each other.
What I like about the author's idea is it is a technical solution to a technical problem. Taxes, incentives, or for that matter anything that requires large-scale public behavior change is:

a) not likely to work

b) equally unlikely to cause a change on the scale needed.

c) will likely come with unpredictable and unwanted side effects caused by trying to force society to change (which is most often requires threats of violence and the loss of civil rights)
I have to be honest, I search for files about once a year. Tops.

Now then in the browser, I start typing a URL and it's auto-completed from my bookmarks (and/or history). Even the most casual users do the same, just using search results instead of bookmarks.

The idea is fairly sound, but it relies on a bookmark usage pattern which I think is becoming more uncommon.
From the readme: "Open. Secure. You own your data."
Super awesome work btw, I was looking to move to Germany and my mind was blown with the weird notary monopoly when it comes to starting a business. I couldn't believe that is how it worked...
How to Deal with Anxiety at Work
Counter point: there are so many more accelerators now. It was basically getting into MIT/Stanford in term of opening up big doors. Now you have schools with accelerators right out of undergrads. So, YC has to compete in the space (sort of). It’s still one of the highest prestige (as in validation) you can get EVEN IF YOU FAIL.
Pylance is Pyright (open source) plus custom Small Language Models and other proprietary sauce.

Pylance isn't sabotaging Pyright, because it is built on top of it. You can find alternative extensions that are "just" Pyright. (They have a fraction of the users because the SLM-based magic of Pylance is a nicer experience if you can "afford" it [based on your principles].)

Pyright is maybe sabotaging competitive projects MyPy and Ruff by being "knighted" as a part of Pylance, but that's not generally how open source competition is seen to exist. There also doesn't currently seem to be competition for the proprietary bits of Pylance outside of the LLM space. That's maybe catching up quickly, but Microsoft's more dedicated SLM models might still be leaders in the space, and Microsoft wanting to keep models proprietary while they are competitive shouldn't be a surprise.
I use self hosted https://linkwarden.app/
Is it possible to eliminate the parameters?
Do you find OPs solution nonidiomatic? I do not. The sequence-number solution would probably have been fine too. How would an idiomatic solution look to you?
Show HN: Podverse – AI Superpowers for Podcasters
Hey HN, I’m excited to show off a project I have been building the last few months called Podverse — it automatically generates transcripts, summaries, and a chatbot from a podcast’s RSS feed, and makes it easy to embed AI features onto any website.

You can check it out at https://podverse.ai.

See it in action on an example podcast here: https://www.podverse.ai/podcast/omnibus

I’m a former engineer at Google and Apple, former CS prof at Harvard, and was a co-founder at Fixie.ai. I truly feel that LLMs are a revolution in our field, and I wanted to bring something to life that bridged between two deep interests of mine — AI and podcasts.

I’ve been listening a ton of podcasts lately, but it's frustrating to find relevant episodes, or even content that I had listened to previously. I also know that podcasters want to take advantage of the latest AI tech to connect with and expand their audience, but they're not usually equipped to bring all the pieces together. I wanted to build a complete, end-to-end solution for podcasters that is easy to use.

All you have to do is provide your RSS feed URL, and Podverse does the rest — automatically ingesting new episodes as you release them, generating transcripts and summaries, identifying speakers, and populating a custom chatbot that knows about all of the content of your podcast.

I built the site from scratch over the last few months (in my copious spare time!). It’s built entirely using Next.js deployed on Vercel — no backend servers beyond Vercel’s server components and API handlers. For running background tasks, like podcast ingestion and transcription, I used Inngest, which fills a big gap in the Next.js stack. Deepgram is used for ASR, which is fast, affordable, and very high quality. Supabase handles the storage, including the vector database (using pgvector). Auth is done with Clerk, which was super easy to integrate. Happy to answer any questions about the stack.

I’d love to get your feedback, and especially hear from podcasters to learn more about what features you’d like to see. Thanks!
I don't agree at all with this post. YC's mission is to help founders start companies and help them build sustainable businesses. Towards that they've made it super simple to get started and funded, and provide guiding principles and support in the form of advice and a strong network to help the startups survive. They were never about prestige -- that came as a byproduct.

Scaling this model is hard, however, and I think they may be running into scaling limits. There just may not be that many fast growing businesses (startups) every year. We won't know until years from now.
FWIW, I do believe there is a serious case to be made for Haskell… But it’s probably beyond the scope of this context / would require changing many other decisions.

If integrating with java tools was important then personally I’d ask “why not Clojure”.

:)
Thanks, but I’ll just read the webpage instead.
I think the assumption people are making is that the YC selection team are dumb idiots, and don't understand that all the founders of that project did was fork an open source project and ask them for some money.

(I'm not saying this is what happened; I know nothing about this project. I am saying this seems like the assumption the author of the article and some people in this thread are making. I bet that's not what happened, but if YC is actually full of dumb idiots who do zero due diligence whatsoever, then I guess I have to agree with the article's thesis.)
Same can be achieved in a few lines of Lua using Hammerspoon and hs.audiodevice API.

local builtinMicName = "MacBook Pro Microphone"
hs.audiodevice.watcher.setCallback(function(e)
defaultMic = hs.audiodevice.defaultInputDevice():name()
if (e == "dIn " and defaultMic ~= builtinMic) then
local builtinMic = hs.audiodevice.findInputByName(builtinMicName)
builtinMic:setDefaultInputDevice()
end
end)
hs.audiodevice.watcher.start()

It doesn't seem fair to pay $20 per year for this. I'd be fine with one time payment.
Also the main detractors have a reputation for not believing things that can be proven in general.
Official statement from Godot Foundation board
I think this is just literal rickrolling.
Congrats on building and launching the app. Building a little tool to solve a problem you have is great.

My only issue is that I'm mostly using the AirPods mic for meetings. I don't want to use my laptop mic because my impression is that it picks up too much background noise. AirPods do too, but I think less so?
Extensions (in Emacs lingo we call them 'packages') are not sandboxed by design. Because unlike VSCode, you are allowed to override any, just about any part of a package's code. You can, for example, grab a command introduced in a third-party or a built-in package and override only specific parts of it without having to rewrite the entire thing.

Of course, in many cases that can make your entire setup brittle - i.e., what happens when the package author decides to change some functionality that you carefully and tightly integrated into your system? At the same time, there's enormous, unmatched flexibility for making your own rules of the game - there's nothing that comes even close. You can change a function to do things that it was never initially designed for. For example, if there's a command that lets you perform GitHub search and open results in the browser, you can advise that command to change the behavior and instead of opening the results in the browser, send that data to an LLM and display it in a text buffer. You wouldn't have to rewrite the entire command; you would only have to override a specific part of it. In Vim, you'd have to rewrite the entire function. In VSCode, you'd likely have to make a separate extension. In Emacs, you wouldn't even have to save the damn thing into a file - you can write it in a scratch buffer and immediately try it out.
Nice job. Price seems fair to me. You’ve found a problem and fixed it. This crowd always bemoans paid (and closed source) things so I’ve come to largely tune that out because it’s just a given.
What's odd about the current moment is that in the very same era in which it seems there is conclusive evidence (LLMs) that quantum explanations are not necessary to explain at the very least linguistic intelligence as advanced linguistic intelligence is possible in a purely classical computing domain, there is at the same time an insistence elsewhere that consciousness must be a quantum phenemonon. Frankly I am increasingly skeptical that this is the case. LLMs show that intelligence is at least mostly algorithmic, and the brain is far too warm and wet for quantum effects to dominate. Why should intelligence be purely classical but consciousness (another brain phenemenon) be quantum? It lacks parsimony.