skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Had a look at the linked articles.

> Norway levies a net wealth tax of 1 percent on individuals’ wealth stocks exceeding NOK 1.7 million (EUR 150,000 or USD 160,000), with 0.7 percent going to municipalities and 0.3 percent to the central government. Norway’s net wealth tax dates to 1892. Additionally, for net wealth exceeding NOK 20 million (EUR 1.74 million or USD 1.88 million), the tax rate is 1.1 percent.

So if the post-$40m raise founder's share is $30m (number doesn't really matter), he'd have to pay 1.1% of that in wealth tax? So he'd have do dilute his share from e.g. 75% to 74.25%.

Moving to Switzerland of all countries over just that? Ironically one of the only ~4 other countries in the world with a wealth tax? Makes very little sense.

It's telling that he writes this whole article extremely critical of it all, without once mentioning the actual percentage he'd have to pay and is moving over. Surely that's the most critical information here.
"But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. " - Federalist 51
So the US could require transparency from everybody, not ban whoever they dislike or fear
Gluing together react components /s
Usually true, I agree. But there are a few quality brands. Lexus cars, for example, go forever.

Struggling to name another quality. Maybe some technical/ outdoor clothing brands.

Anybody got any suggestions?
Quick and safe docking with automated mooring for autonomous ship
upvotes tell you that people find it useful. we have ai now to effectively summarize the text if you want to avoid reading the whole thing.

this is a solved problem
The same way it's always been known: brand reputation and personal experience. Good examples are NFTs and cryptocoins. They have earned their online reputations as jokes and exotic investments. If I offered you a job that paid in NFTs and bonuses in spicecoins, you would be a complete fool to accept it.
LLM agents: not so much.

Actual real Intelligent Autonomous Agents - go to Mars, kick a rover... there's one. Go try front running on the markets, you'll meet about 6000 other ones trying to out run you.
I’ll tell you why this happens. You might use ChatGPT for a bit and your initial impressions will be great. It does what I ask of it! You might be aware that it makes mistakes sometimes, but when you use it, you don’t notice it because you’re using it interactively.

Now if LLMs are just effective as your experience says, they are indeed extremely useful and you absolutely should see if they can help you.

It’s only when you attempt to build a product — and it could be one person writing one Python script — that uses LLMs in an automated way with minimal human input that you really get insights into LLMs’ strengths and their limitations. You realize it could be useful, but you have to sometimes baby it a lot.

How many people get to step two? That’s a select few. Most people are stuck in the dreamy phase of trying out interactive LLMs.

This is a re-occurring issue with all new technology. Heck it happens with new software frameworks.
Yes, absolutely, they’re an ideal rubber duck and I’ve come to really value them for my work. Checking your sanity, pondering how certain operations might be implemented or how they could be optimized, finding where a logic bug might be in a snippet of code…
I also prefer SQL for this task than over-hyped MLOPS
I was in the school many years ago. The cell phone was still not invented (for other 10 years). But having ANY electronic gadget was no-go. Like, parents being cited, whole program...

When did that change?! A shame.
Absolutely vile how you can frame wanting to continue living as "punishing their kids".
I'm a FIRST Mentor Again
I think every country should develop their own social media. It would be best if it was federated-like services that smaller countries could just run the plain open source version of.

Any democratic country that has a large portion of their population using american social media is essentially a modern US colony.
I'm in the same boat. My phone keeps asking me if I want to update to Gemini, but I won't because Gemini just gives my typical LLM BS responses when I just want to do a basic Google search with my voice. Gemini just complicates my already complicated life, so I don't want it.
black and white thinking is considered a cognitive distortion

Irony of course has degrees.
I have reached the age (40+) and I need much fewer than I thought I'd need. I think the best way to reduce the number of lower quality buys is just to buy less, way less, while keep a large amount of $$ float in the market. Yes the CAD or USD also de-value in time but IMO they devalue a lot slower than most of the products on the market.

And when I buy I only buy second hand stuffs with a deep discount. I'm glad that a used workstation lives for 2+ years (in fact, all of my second handed workstations live for 2+ years for just $500 and less).
> Explaining code, reviewing code, writing code, writing test, writing tech docs.

people using GPT to write tech docs at real software companies get fired, full stop lol. good companies understand the value of concise & precise communication and slinging GPT-generated design docs at people is massively disrespectful to people's time, the same way that GPT-generated HN comments get downvoted to oblivion. if you're at a company where GPT-generated communication is the norm you're working for/with morons

as for everything else, no. GPT can explain a few thousand lines of code, sure, but it can't explain how every component in a 25-year-old legacy system with millions of lines and dozens/scores of services works together. "more context" doesn't help here
The Dumbest Dictator – Ceaușescu [video]
11B to launch 300 sats. Starlink costs SpaceX about $1M on the highest end for construction and launch per sat. True cost is likely lower by 20-30% for SpaceX and Starship will drop this further. Given the history of the EU, I think it's likely the environmental laws in will end up killing this before they can build a proper constellation, regardless of cost.

I think they got a bad deal.
Apple Intelligence is kind of uniquely bad. I don't understand how, but its AI message summaries often completely flip the meaning of texts I've received. I've gotten summaries that say "X person hates Y" and I read the message and it's them talking about how much they love it. It is impressively, wildly inaccurate.

It confuses things like people's names and the messages they're sending and sometimes will paraphrase names that are also english-language words into related concepts and blend them into sentences that make no sense.

The only thing it seems to do accurately is describe images that have been sent to me, though I don't really see the value in a 2 sentence summary of an image being sent (folks with limited visibility will probably feel differently.)

I have never received a summary that gave me any idea of what the hell the messages it was summarizing was about. It's impressively bad. I'm shocked apple shipped this.
The crypto industry is extremely untrustworthy, but for me, I don't think "there's no actual value creation at the bottom of it" is more true of e.g. Bitcoin than USD.

Assume USD is somehow attached to food, shelter, and other necessities (for the record, I agree that it is, but only indirectly). Those necessities are the things we need, but we don't need money to create them. We just need energy and physical resources (which, technically, also just require energy). All money is an accounting system built on top of the physical processes that we use to grow, gather, hunt, cultivate, shape, and build matter.

So there's nothing weird, to me, about money being built almost directly on top of energy usage. I think it makes sense.

Most money is built on top of gold or other precious-but-unnecessary materials, which I can't say seems more attached to real value than energy. But even if we assume 1 unit of money is 1 day's worth of food, who's to say that unit of food is actually a necessity for the holder? That food is a specialized form of energy; energy which has been used and which can't be unused. The food itself is an accounting of entropy. But it (mostly) can't be converted into shelter or other necessities, only traded or stored. So, again, I don't see "this money is an accounting of energy used" as outlandish, but reasonable.

Let me conclude, however, by roundly rebuking crypto grifters and the majority of the industry. They're generally not operating on the arguments I've made above anyway.
Right. I think if you’re not reliant on a few generalist operations where opencascade is weak —- it is not great at very marginal fillets/chamfers/thicknesses —- then FreeCAD is probably a good way to get programmatic, GUI access to OCC. It’s not the only way, of course, but it’s getting towards being stable.
AI in workplace is forcing younger tech workers to rethink their career paths
Dear Reg, it finally happened to me ...
https://archive.is/2024.12.15-195714/https://www.telegraph.c...
Those differences have only minor impacts on this issue. Civil law courts still have to make decisions about ambiguous or conflicting laws. They follow a different process but the fundamental problem remains. And parliamentary systems do nothing to ensure that laws are clear.
> I suspect many who find them useless and decry them were sold an exaggerated utility and then were disappointed when they tried to generate libraries or even functions, then feeling deceived when there are errors or flaws, etc.

No, I suspect the large majority (and this has been backed by surveys) of people that are dismissive of them are more senior and have been working in highly specific problem domains for a long time where this is rarely/never a good "general" answer for a problem, and have spent an inordinate amount of time debugging LLM-generated or LLM-Advised code by their peers that contains nefarious and subtle errors that look correct at a glance. I personally can tell you that for what I work on, in my domain, these tools have been a net time suck and not a gain, and I pretty much only use them to ask questions about documentation, which it often gets incorrect anyway (again, in subtle ways that are probably hard for someone who isn't very senior to detect).

Hope that helps.
Toyota and Subaru are just as reliable yet much cheaper https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-reliability-owner-s...
I'd say this was a bit over 3 weeks of full time coding, learning, and writing this blog post spread out over 1.5+ months. Someone with GPGPU/CUDA experience would've been able to do it faster. But I'd echo the other commenters here - just try writing some content and see if it works for you!
I was working for a fintech company that experienced a large growth (in the number of employees). The leadership team was keen to "grow fast" and on the surface it looked good: investors where happy, the company had a not so high yet but steady income (subscription-based) and each team seemed to have a purpose.

But in reality there were many issues:
- there was a culture of launching "project/initiative" to justify more hires and promotions, rather than improving on the key issues we had (that nobody wanted to tackle).
- People were often switching team after a promotion, for example leading a new team, and leaving their problems behind.
- On the technical-side it was extremely tedious to contribute, we started with a monolith, then moved a micro-service architecture (with k8s, kafka etc). There was a push to do things properly, but it translated in over-engineering parts (for the cool stuff) while the valuable not-so-cool stuff was left to rot. At the end we had to maintain multiple things and the engineering effort to do all these migrations was huge, and took us away from doing more valuable work.

Eventually the company couldn't sustain its workforce and we had multiple round of layoffs.

My key learnings are:
- Unless you are looking for a promotion before leaving (pump and dump), hiring a lot of people in a short amount of time is bad.
- Even in best scenarios, having more employees make things harder and slower. People are competing for projects, there is a need for more communication, more processes, more tools. Having a lean workforce as long as possible, focusing on what's really important is best.
- It's okay if we can't do everything we want. Not so many "ideas" are valuable and employees cost
- Before hiring for a new project, can't we move other resources? Is this project really important or just a distraction?
Yeah, they were pretty efficient so they were rewarded with monopoly. Now maybe they will become slower and slower over time.
Very clever. I hope there aren't too many engineering issues.
>as a judgement against them as developers

No one takes it as a judgment, and no one is offended. It's just a truth that when people make such claims, they're often exaggerating the uniqueness or novelty of what they're doing.

You described your work in another comment, and what you described is the most bog standard programming in the field. It's always the case.
no "Agents" have a specific technical meaning.. an engine is connected to tools.. simple example is a bash terminal environment.
Markets can stay irrational longer can you can stay solvent and all that. But you could have done pretty well with bitcoin if you got in early so long as you didn't jump out too early (or get scammed).
Sure, although I think it gets easier as time goes on; there a are lot of innovative people out there. But my point here is more about the reaction to it. If people say, "Well they're making lots of money, so they must be great innovators, great managers, and generally virtuous", then that's basically a religious answer. People who see markets as tools for efficiency will say, "Look at those sustained high profits. Is it really that nobody has figured out how to compete with them yet? Or are they misusing their market power or wealth in ways that limit competition?"
> I think every country should develop their own social media.

There is Mastodon already, which is federated. EU already set up their own servers.
You may be interested in Dan Luu's own postings on this theory: https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111068309548746696
I don’t give a flying fuck either way and I am astonished anyone thinks Eyes Wide Shut is some truth-based message to the world.
> Meanwhile, smart TVs made by Hisense and Samsung which were tested by Which? asked for people's postcodes during set-up.

I would guess that they would then sell that information along with the IP address to a company such as Maxmind who make IP location databases
East Meets West: The Legend of Makai
The article is specifically about what Apple calls “Apple Intelligence”, not about other AI/ML-based features they have incorporated.
The reason they dont exist (or rather that they exist but are rare) is because you, and me, are in the minority. Most people do not care if their tv is dumb and likely would be upset if their tv didnt have built in app support.

If there was a larger more vocal market for dumb tvs, they would exist more readily.
"Better" is subjective and debating such a vague generality will get us nowhere.

Instead, I will focus on more objectively measurable aspects such as flexibility and ergonomics. You may be getting the most flexible reading experience, but you are getting the most ergonomic reading experience. You also have to put in up-front work to get a better experience, or rely on tools like Reader mode.

If that's what you prefer, that's fine. If you weren't aware, in most browsers you can access the menu bar and navigate to "View -> Page Style", and set it to "No Style".

Then you're free to add whatever styles you'd like on top. Meanwhile, the casual, less technical, non-designer user can still engage with the content in an accessible and easily parseable manner.
Yeah that's the "pre" in "pre-pooping your pants"
Novel to the programmer.

Even the best programmers have very narrow skills relative to the whole field.

Yeah, I've used 20+ languages and hundreds of technologies and a variety of different types of product and can pick things up quickly. But it's still a drop in the bucket of technologies you can use and types of problem you can solve.

Programmer skills are deep but narrow. LLM skills are shallow but wide. It's an excellent complement for any programmer working outside their deep+narrow expertise.
> there's no underlying value, just a circus of greed

At least it keeps the clowns occupied.
I have some xiaomi bulbs that used to work until I needed to re-pair them to a new wifi and (unofficial) integration kept asking me for pairing code - which is nowhere to be found. I probably got rid of the boxes where it's supposed to be located. Wonder if there's a workaround for that.
This is not just about information asymmetry. If you want to do something well, you have to find someone that truly cares about doing it well. Price is almost irrelevant, in fact, it may actually be a negative signal, because the best performers are often not motivated by money alone.

> So, in Korea, there's some service like Amazon where you can order an item and, an hour or two later, you'll hear a knock at your door. When you get to the door, you'll see an unlabeled box or bag and the item is in the unlabeled container. If you want to return the item, you "tell" the app that you want to return the item, put it back into its container, put it in front of your door, and they'll take it back. After seeing this shipping setup, which is wildly different from what you see in the U.S., he asked someone "how is it possible that they don't lose track of which box is which?". The answer he got was, "why would they lose track of which box is which?". His other stories have a similar feel, where he describes something quite alien, asks a local how things can work in this alien way, who can't imagine things working any other way and response with "why would X not work?"

This gem near the end of the article ties in with Marc Andreeson’s quote at the beginning of the article. The fact that he thinks hiring can’t be more efficient sounds to me like typical American head-in-sand insular thinking. He’s stuck in a cognitive frame, and in a particular system where people can’t imagine doing things differently, because they simply haven’t seen anything else. Try living somewhere else for an extended period of time, and you’ll realize that a lot of things you didn’t even think about could actually be better. The author gives the example of deliveries in Korea. I say the same about many things in Eastern Europe, including deliveries, payment systems, and just everyday services like dentists - a LOT of things work better than they do in the West, not because of monetary incentives, but because things are simply done differently here, and some things are done better.
An anecote that helps you maybe:

I do contracting work, we're building a text-to-sql automated business analyst. It's quite well-rounded: it tries to recover from errors, allows automatic creation of appropriate visualisations, has a generic "faq" component to help the user understand how to use the tool. The tool is available to some 10.000 b2b users.

It's just a bunch of prompts conditionally slapped together in a call graph.

The client needed AGENTIC AI, without specifying exactly what this meant. I spent two weeks pushing back on it, stating that if you replace the hardcoded call graph with something that has """free will""", accuracy and interpretability goes down whilst runtimes go up... but no, we must have agents.

So I did nothing, and called the current setup "constrained agentic ai". The result: High fives all around, everyone is happy

Make of that what you will... ai agents are at least 90% hype.
I switched off of Fusion360 on to OnShape when Autodesk started mucking around with the free tier.
You’ve got the right idea, that’s a similar-but-different screen manufactured by the same company; the on I’m linking to in OP has a faster refresh rate with the tradeoff of less color saturation.

Edit: importantly, the screen you’ve linked(spectra) has been announced to have a new version with a backing plate of the same material as the one I linked in OP(Kaledo); which would allow a higher voltage and therefore a similar refresh rate to Kaledo with the higher color saturation of the Spectra panel. Would you be available to buy a panel and write a driver this upcoming year?
Hahaha. I dug into the setting on my newish tv and found an option for the tv to make a little chime when turned on and off. It is so nice because the sound will play right away even if the tv hasnt visibly started to turn on/off yet. It's the only thing that saves me from hitting power multiple times and being unsure what state the tv is in.
I agree, but based on their software track record over the last couple of years, I have little hope that we’ll get much beyond a disparate collection of mostly half-baked features.
Cannot wait for modern Dillo that supports Wayland.
If we're going to have a conversation about agents or agentic it is really important we agree on which definition of those terms we are using for the purpose of this conversation.

If you ask two different people in the AI space to define "agent" you almost always get two slightly (or significantly) different definitions!

Here are just some of the definitions I've seen over time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42216217#42228364

For the purpose of this thread the most cynical definition, "LLMs that do something useful", might actually be the best fit!
Apple Watch with Android
Devin is closest for me. I’ve had it implement additional language locales and add dark mode to our UI.
I'm really curious what makes you say feel that way, if you can put it into words?

I think his style is quite particular (I think I would compare it to patio11 a little bit?), and I understand it not being everyone's cup of tea; but one thing I don't think I would ever say it feels unedited.

To me, it feels _very_ edited — yes, there are occasional sentences with five sub-clauses in them, but they all feel very _deliberate_, and serve a particular stylistic goal.
Key takeaways from Innovation Day to shape your 2025 research plan
What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation?
The Power of Prototyping
Honestly, I'd probably look at Wirecutter and Cooks Illustrated, both of which I have subscriptions to. I'm not going to trust them on every product I might buy but for something like air fryers they're probably not going to steer me too far wrong.
Anatomy of an Autonomous AI Agent