skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> NPC coworkers

I suppose "the author can go fuck himself" is a frowned-upon response on Hacker News

Like what an incredibly egocentric, condescending, deplorable way to talk about other human beings with their own rich inner lives, desires, needs, relationships, etc.

"No, they're just pre-programmed, unthinking bots following basic algorithms."
I have noticed traveling that in many other countries it is the norm to have some type of totally waterproof flooring in bathrooms, kitchens, etc. so that it can be simply hosed down, and the inevitable leaks don't destroy everything... but in the USA it is the norm to put flooring that cannot handle getting wet, right near or under appliances and fixtures that will inevitable frequently leak.
If you're running a popular company then people will easily have a good understanding of the ballpark of your net worth anyway
Data is oil.
I'm not rich but after my first exit I went crazy investing in friends' ideas (including over-decorating my tiny SF apartment) and I actually came out a little ahead but I never bothered the failures because I was never expecting a return. It was super fun and I highly recommend it especially if you're rich.
There are also zero NFTs.

It's a solid guide, in other words.
Telephony switched to digital in the 90s. This didn’t miraculously change their regulatory status.

The early days of the internet were defined by copious options for ISPs because telephone lines were required to be available under common carrier conditions.

The only reason this situation deteriorated is that broadband infrastructure was classified as for “information” and not “telecommunications”.
I think he makes this exact point in the 5th and 6th lines of his comment?
I have a thesis that RDF is good for this sort of work (I gave a talk on it at Clojure Conj last year, https://youtu.be/OxzUjpihIH4 if you're interested.)

It's good for bridging the gaps between LLMs, ontologies, traditional structured data, and logic programming.
About two years ago my very elderly mother broke her hip in a minor fall and after recovering, is no longer able to drive herself comfortably and safely. So, it was time to sell her car, a low miles Kia sedan she'd bought used about four years earlier. She only drove it about once a week and only around town, so the car still had low miles. After checking online price guides, calling some car lots, and checking recent asking prices of similar cars - I had a pretty good idea what the car was worth and was about to sell it when a friend mentioned checking Carvana.

I did and was quickly given a firm offer from their algorithm which was several thousand dollars higher than the highest amount I'd thought possible. It was actually substantially more than my Mom had paid for the car used four years earlier. I was wary as this seemed too good to be true but proceeded through the automated process, which was simple and straightforward. This culminated with an appointment the following day where a Carvana rep came to our house and looked over the car. I expected at this point they'd suddenly "find things wrong" and low ball the estimated price - however, the car really was in exactly the condition I described (which was excellent) - and the rep gave us a check for the offered amount and left with the car.

It was fast, easy and substantially more than the 'market price' range for the car. I just shrugged and chalked it up to Carvana blowing investor money to acquire inventory during the weird post-Covid period when there weren't many decent low-miles used cars on the market. While Carvana might have managed to sell it for what they paid my mom, it wouldn't have been quick to find a buyer at that price and there was certainly no room for them to make a profit. So... I'm not surprised to hear claims that Carvana isn't financially sound. If true, it's unfortunate because buying or selling a used car is inefficient and needlessly painful. I'm pretty sure a well-run company could sustain a viable business in brokering used cars. The typical new car dealer trade-in offers are awful and used car lots are notorious for low-ball offers, so it shouldn't be that hard to do better enough to be attractive.
Of course not everyone is like that. The issue is you don’t know who is ex ante, and often people aren’t that way ex ante, but one thing leads to another to a total breakdown in trust and respect.

Even in the case you describe, it’s much better to gift it: “if you want or are able to pay me back some day, go for it, but I don’t expect or need it.”
> In this case this is a misunderstanding of the purpose of GitHub stars by these new users

Were we supposed to use stars some other way ?
Perhaps because the full title "to settle a lawsuit alleging that its voice assistant Siri routinely recorded private conversations that were then shared with third parties and used for targeted ads" was too long.

The shortened title only suggests the data only sat around on Apple's servers (which, of course, would still be a bad thing).
This is an argument that is made more potent by omitting the 60 years of legislative history that followed the Communications Act, which was enacted specifically and deliberately to unify regulation of the new medium of radio with that of telegraphy.
Other notes: use projects that are either supported by a community, or have a motivated developer (buy their a Patreon sponsorship if you can).
I wonder what prompted this renaissance. Always loved the language, never cared much about Rails. For a long time it seemed like Ruby was never going to catch up to Python and JavaScript which are the default languages everybody uses. Now every other day I see some awesome Ruby news about how it's getting better and faster. Not that I'm not complaining.
What this guy doesn't really get is that people don't want their own websites. What the hell would they do with a website? They love social media platforms. The why or where of how we got here doesn't really matter, it's the reality.

I think the only way forward is better and less evil social networks, or perhaps some sort of cyclical sea change where the Internet sort of starts over again, ala how civilizations/humanity have every XX thousands of years according to various esoteric Sikh/Hindu traditions.
Show HN: Kaomoji Collection
Show HN: Natural language interface for AWS cost analysis
I built a natural language interface for AWS billing that lets you ask questions like 'Where's our money going?' or 'Show savings recommendations' and get instant insights. Built because I was tired of digging through AWS billing dashboards.
Thanks Will! I think it was the microkanren paper (it's a few years ago now so i'm not 100% sure but seeing it seems familiar). I think I will try the tutorial and see if it helps make it 'click'.
Question:

I want to try miniKanren in my favourite game engine Godot Engine, how would I embed it?

The typical options are c++ and porting python to gdscript, but wanted to ask.
On (1), yes that is true to an extent - the domain discoverability is indeed mostly at the mercy of Google, and the whole "AI overview" is a garbage experience. However, looking at my own search console data (both Google and Bing), there are still quite a few folks landing on my pages through search, often for some obscure terms that I somehow documented, so it's still possible to get traffic that way. But again - the goal is less about "drive traffic ASAP" but rather point people from other networks to something you personally own.

On (2), they can, but if you use a more established provider like Buttondown or Mailchimp, and you are not actually sending spam, a lot of folks have quite a bit of success building an audience that way. I've used Buttondown (not affiliated with them in any capacity) personally before and haven't had subscribers complain about deliverability. I am planning on rebooting that this year to see how it goes. I've heard most deliverability issues arise when folks trying to roll out their own email server.
Many people con others into giving their emotional currency. Rich people are the worst about this, because it's the only value from the world they've failed to actually extract. So they want it from everyone.

Rich people have problems. This dude is clearly focused on himself. He doesn't need the emotional currency of others unless he's willing to give a lot more his (love and empathy).
I think you have this backwards, if I'm reading your thrust properly. The whole deal here is: if the Internet backbone is itself a telecommunications service, then maybe (but: probably not) the FCC can make up new rules about Internet service. If the Telecommunications Act of 1996 sees Internet service as something built on top of raw telecom circuits --- which I think it kind of clearly does? --- the FCC has no such power.
One did a lot of reasonable little stuff but never did anything with much impact again

This always stymies me. If I were to make it big, I’d want to go on to do other very useful things. But so commonly that doesn’t happen. Is it because they lost the fire? Because they were really lucky exactly once? Or perhaps their talents were suited only to that one thing?
He doesn't think his problem is money either, because that would have a trivial and obvious solution that doesn't seem to be under consideration.
Absolutely. I am a big fan of supporting independent software and bootstrapped services.
Gitee AI –– LLM Model Serverless API
The barriers/boundaries thing I think is interesting.

I've never really been able to identify with this sort of "make money and then fix the world" stuff because I feel that everyone hugely simplifies every issue and looks only at first or maybe second order effects.

You fix malaria/give to the poor/raise the minimum wage/etc. Cool, now we have a wealthier population with more people doing more stuff to modify the environment. We accelerate biosphere collapse and global warming. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

I think that if you're being truly logical about these things you could just as easily come up with a grand solution that's something like drawing a graph of social connections from you, go out a few layers, and then press the button to delete everyone else on the planet and rewild most of it. Or go back in time and don't discover oil (or was the suffering of the pre-industrial era worse? maybe it was, probably it was...!).

I don't think I'd be chosen to go to Elysium but I can't really see the logical flaw in the argument either. Why should the super rich care about the rest? Move forward a few years/decades; why should superintelligent AI care about humans? We don't care about mosquitoes.

Making a company that makes a prettier table or a faster car or whatever feels like it's directly solving a problem. Making a company that aims to "improve the world" just seems like a fool's errand to me, second law of thermo, that sort of thing.

Big waffle.
You can listen to their own description of their strategy and tactics. It was every different from the contemporary counterpoint. They reformed one system one subsystem at a time by working with the current owners and tech staff and teaching them their approach.

https://changelog.com/gotime/154

I knew contractors in their wake working at companies that grew out of their work in CMS, such as Ad Hoc (a name of the original team to not be called WHITE HOUSE HOT SHOTS or DOGE or something similarly jarring to thereby take agency away from the people who had to you know do the work once they knew they'd roll off) and Nava as they expanded beyond that one system 5 years later.

Let's see how the braggadocios we'll solve all the problems at once flavor of the moment goes, then judge the healthcare.gov teams.
Is your point that the money should go to companies that make things that people need as opposed to want? Or is your point that the money somehow flows to companies that make things that people neither need nor want?
I didn't say it was a big deal, but then, I think "net neutrality" is pretty silly.
This person is in a completely different class than 99% of HN readers. It is impossible for him to ever relate to others who are not like him because he is not like them, and not like us, the non-millionaire non-entrepeneurs. Unfortunately, this goes both ways, and is probably why I am not rich. Learning to bridge that human gap is far harder than becoming a multi-millionaire or climbing mountains in the Himalayas or working for DOGE for 4 weeks.
It cramps my hand pretty badly to handwrite the amount of notes I prefer to take in live meetings, so I really dislike that this is true. (And anecdotally, it is true for me.)
Shouldn't he start with math for the most valuable results? https://xkcd.com/435/
What are you even saying? These were not signifiers of “telecom providers”. They were elements of competition amongst ISPs. In what world was Usenet and web hosting part of historical telecom offerings?
The Roberts court is actually the least "activist" in modern history. His whole philosophy is all about maintaining precedent (obviously sometimes he can't get his way--which seems to be what happened in Dobbs, for instance).
" It just ignores reality."

Or it acknowledges reality as it is. (I have seen lot's of europe)

I don't see a need for universal regulation of everything, which of course will get messy and weird.

I do see a need for standardisation of infrastructure. Track gauge of railways. No expensive roaming for telecommunication. Energy grid. Education certificates. Europol. Those things - and the debate there can also get exhausting for sure, but must not be.

But whether I will buy polish meat in what shape, or french cheese in what condition, is something I would like to decide on my own and don't need EU intervention. So no debates needed there, no complications of things that need no regulation.

I also don't see a need for a parliament that big at all, or actually a european parliament that has to physically meet in the first place. So expert comitees, that work on the bordercrossing problems yes - and then all the local state parliament can legalize the implementation.

Pretty much what is happening right now, just with less complications.
You have hit the nail on the head but it doesn't even need to be wifi and it also doesn't have to be that complicated. They see that two devices are in the same area for a long period of time so they serve ads for other peoples web history. Jarringly enough ever since I had this realization I sometimes see ads for things that reveal something meant to be private of those I had just spent time with. Also, seeing peoples ads when they make desktop recordings of their screen can be extremely telling..
> Exploiting user-generated content.

You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transformed" to basically launder it via "AI", I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted.

I'd honestly rather see and think more about how to segment communities locally, and go back to the "fragmented" way things once were. It's easier to want to share with other real people than inadvertently working for free to enrich companies.
What help? He got lucky. Is he going to give someone his rabbit's foot?
The second you have a domain you can move it where you want. Change the software, look and feel. You keep subscribers. You don’t need to own every atom, just enough to give you options.

You can’t move your X or FB account. They can block you anytime, or reduce traffic. Way fewer options.
The author knows exactly what he wants to do. He wants to be Elon Musk. Sadly despite his successful exit he is still many orders of magnitude away from that level of wealth and power. I hope he can find satisfaction in lesser causes, otherwise he is going to live an unhappy life.
That's a fair call-out, but that's why in the post I mention this:

> Most people are perfectly content with everything living inside their Facebook account because it’s convenient and their family and friends are already there. Telling everyone to learn how git and GitHub Pages work to host their blog is not an effective way to drive change. But that’s also not the point. As I mentioned earlier, the goal is to start with a small niche community of people who are comfortable with building their own digital corners.

Not everyone needs to have their website. Not everybody wants to have their website. And that's fine. They can use the social platforms as-is. But for those that have the means and interest in building their own corners (say, they want to bootstrap a business), they should not limit themselves to the social networks as the only place for their community. There is a better way than be a sharecropper on someone else's land.
> having wealth is a social responsibility in itself

Warren Buffet has said that every dollar he owns is an IOU that he owes to society - somebody worked hard, produced value, he is in custody of it for the time being, but it has to be paid back by him.
I agree, which is why I'm shocked that anyone can act surprised: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't make this tired, poorly-designed argument: the prefatory clause isn't a limitation, merely a justification. The jurisprudence surrounding the "militia" prefatory clause is long-since settled.

Even if you do the mental gymnastics to rework the English language to make this mean what you want it to mean, the militia is composed of all able-bodied men between 17-45 per 10 U.S. Code § 246.

At the time of this country's founding, private individuals owned cannonry, ships, and ordnance far beyond small arms.

What purpose would letters of marque and reprisal serve without weapons?
No, the court never reaches these because the court holds that “a provider need only offer the ‘capability’ of manipulating information (in the ways recited in that subsection) to offer an ‘information service’ under § 153(24)” and “Even under the FCC's narrower interpretation of ‘capability,’ Broadband Internet Access Providers allow users, at minimum, to ‘retrieve’ information stored elsewhere.”

So even allowing users the capability of retrieving information is sufficient because the definition of an information service is “the offering of a capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications, and includes electronic publishing, but does not include any use of any such capability for the management, control, or operation of a telecommunications system or the management of a telecommunications service.”
You can pay off all my debts if you’re bored ;)
Yeah, I don't get this at all. Sure, if you follow the caselaw etc.

But this requires big picture thinking.

The internet is like the telephone is like the radio is like TV.

Ergo. THE FCC MAKES THE RULES.

Don't overthink it.
I spent my 30s in a VLCOL (very low cost of living) city. I’m now in my 40s and each year my sentimental feelings somehow keep growing. The small things in life: a local art museum, the local YMCA and its pickleball playing seniors, sauna, inline skating around lake paths, road cycling, local coffee roasters, a small upstart Italian restaurant, and of course my young kids. I’m absolutely in love with these things in a way that isn’t directly coming from them or a product or service… it’s coming from within me. Deep satisfaction. Not necessarily happiness. Somehow, these things define me in ways my business never can/could. I’m a participant in my community and it feels SO GOOD. I could optimize for something else … something “out there” but then what?

https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...
Yep, because communism is just an excuse to obtain authoritarianism (and get a dictatorship). He's already got that.
If we take the post at face value, OP is saying that he has too many ideas (robots! DOGE!) to have conviction around any, which is a pretty normal predicament for founders.

He also has a track record of having an idea, figuring out how to make the idea useful to others, and turning that into a self-sustaining machine.

All of these are much more important than an idea alone.

As everybody here knows, just having an idea for, say, an app is of very limited value. The trick is being able to mold the idea into what people actually want it to be, and find some model that lets you and them split the value, so the work can continue. The same is true in any kind of political or social activity. Ideas are almost worthless.

As in software, people who are capable of actually executing on their ideas for making the world better are almost always also capable of getting the funding they need, one way or another. People are always the bottleneck, not funding. (Ask anyone who runs a grant program about how hard it is to find effective people to give to.)

Sure, if OP runs into an extremely skilled world-changer with a great track record he should donate 10-50k and introduce the person to some other post-exit friends. But will that skilled and effective person find funding whether he donates or not? Definitely.

The post I was responding to was advocating for giving money to people with an idea for how to make the world better who would otherwise never be able to do it.

The existence of such people is almost a myth.

They do exist, but they're impossible to find in the haystack of people who are guaranteed to fail at executing their idea. If you look for people with ideas for making the world better who aren't doing them because they don't have the money, and give them money, nothing will happen. That's arson.

Also, in my example, you can't really do both. The most efficient system for getting a bicycle to everyone who needs one will involve selling the bicycles. Without capturing some of the value of the bicycles you're making, you'll never be able to make as many.
The US is rife with scams and has been for a long time, and the US has had the two party system for a long time. It would take a lot of convincing for me to believe that this time 4 more years of Democrat rule would have been when the they finally decide to actually do something about it.
Perhaps dark net still has. I think a deeper problem is that soon we may no longer be able to tell if a content is human-generated or not.
I imagine _a lot_ of iteration was involved regardless of the model.
Your phone can listen for “hey Google” because it’s only one phrase and the model can run at very low power on specialized hardware. If you want to add 1000 keywords the battery drain would be intense.
Most of my coworkers are fine. But some teams really are terrible. I don't want to be a leader. You don't actually have any real freedom or power as a leader at a large corp until you're way up the ranks.
I no longer use iTerm2 but it has tmux integration built in that's pretty nice if you take the time to set it up properly.
Nothing to disagree in this statement, for sure. If it's on the open internet, it will almost surely be used for AI training, consent be damned. But it feels like even at a rudimentary level, if I post a picture on my site that is then used by a large publisher for ads, I would (at least in theory) have some recourse to pursue the matter and prevent them from using my content.

In contrast, if I uploaded something to a social media site like Instagram, and then Meta "sublicensed" my image to someone else, I wouldn't have much to say there.

Would love someone with actual legal knowledge to chime in here.