skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rioting has its place, but I think we're at a point where that's become somewhat performative & police are now militarized with Trump holding a good bit of the slack on their leash.

Find the underground railroads. Build communities of care. We need to get better at caring for each other & collaboration. The other side has apps for that. Where are the developers making apps for the revolution?
The improved efficiency of steam engines in the past did not reduce coal consumption; instead, it enabled people to accomplish more work with the same resource.
I don't necessarily agree with the premise that simple language is more open to loopholes. However, even if it were true, common law systems [0], such as those of most of the UK and the US, are arguably intended to deal with ambiguities and the risk of potential exploits and loopholes, by offering judges significant leeway in their interpretation of a given law and establishing precedent. It is the civil law system [1] which is much more sensitive to precise wording.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
Given this comment, I tried it.

It's no where close to Claude, and it's also not better than OpenAI.

I'm so confused as to how people judge these things.
Zelle is run by the banks and transfers are instant and free.

https://www.zellepay.com/faq/how-long-does-it-take-receive-m...
Only argument I can think of is economics of scale. You need to have sufficient mass to enter the markets.

However even in this case customers, or Big Potato buyers, can simply ally and create a new supplier where they are shareholders.
> It’s purely about perception of value

All money has always been about perception, whether we used paper, shiny rocks, or sea shells as money, it’s always been about perception. Is it real or counterfeit, do you trust the person you’re transacting with, are enough people you know using it, and will people with weapons show up to protect your money if someone else tries to steal it?

The “people with weapons” part turns out to be a key component. The novel thing about crypto is that you are less reliant on the “people with weapons” to protect you and tell you what you’re allowed to do with your money, and more reliant on the “people with encryption”.
I can't say I buy this argument? I think for some of the cases (like Uber?) it might be correct, but are they sure there isn't another force at play in a lot of other cases?

I recall reading that with apartment rentals in NYC, the problem was (is?) apparently that there are literally contracts in place preventing landlords from deviating from the recommendation. That's the crux of the problem, not the app recommendation itself.

Are we sure the causes in these cases aren't analogously different? For example, the part about 97% of a market being controlled by one company sounds like a monopolization issue rather than anything to do with an app.
> Don't blame the potato theives or potato cartels, blame the politicians that built the system to work this way.

Blame both.
I remember reading about Monzo bank in the UK a lot some 5 years ago. I’m curious how they are doing these days. Seems like they’re still operating?
> east cost vs west coast

More likely population density/growth in the region. Most of the US was all Bell System at the time.

If the area was urban, or growing quickly (adding new phone subscribers), they'd get the newer electronic (ESS) switches first, starting around the early 1970s.

If the area was suburban and population-stable, the electromechanical crossbar switches would live on for another 20+ years.

There were some rural parts of the US using even older Strowger/SxS switches until the mid 1980s at least, probably later!

There's a great story about the development, by a Mr. Strowger, of the first electromechanical telephone exchange switch. Previously, calls were connected manually, by operators. Mr. Strowger was an undertaker, and he believed that the operators were sending callers to his competition unfairly. So he invented an automatic switch to remove the human element.
FOSDEM – Declarative and Minimalistic Computing Track
A track I'm quite interested in and that I plan to go to so I wonder if other people will join?
What white man is Chicago named after?
You don’t think massive conglomerates have additional advantages they can deploy against competitors in order to retain their cartels?
> The thing you're trying to do might be simple, but to do it, you might need to instantiate 8+ Java classes. It doesn't mean it's complex to read or hard to debug.

I’m skeptical that code that needs to instantiate eight separate classes will remain easy to debug in the general case.
When they say "in 20-50 years" it is implied that it might not exist ever. See nuclear fusion or AGI.
> This is just Trump being Trump, blustery and vague. It barely qualifies as saber-rattling. The guy loves to posture, but the level of hysteria around it is absurd.

It used to be posturing and blustering around acquiring territories was absurd.

People are hysterical because they aren’t sure if Trump is being serious or if he just is sh*t talking. Greenlanders who feel like they might be invaded by the US aren’t just being sensitive snowflakes.
Stop emissions, stop warming: A climate reality check
Did you ever read the personals section of a broadsheet newspaper?

Because it was the same thing.
Indeed.

I would reframe that saying: Ignorance of the law must not become an excuse.

The difference being: when a reasonable person would in fact be ignorant, that's a systematic problem with the legal system.
This is the kind of anti-pattern that can work on toy or small projects but doesn't scale well to larger projects or groups.

> 1. Very difficult for devs to expose SQL injection vulnerabilities because you need to use parameters.

You should use parameters either way.

> 2. Having all available filtering dimensions on a query makes it very clear what the type of filtering is for that particular query.

Code is easier to document well than a SQL query

> 3. Easy debugging where you can just throw your query into an SQL client and play around with the parameters.

Query builders will give you a query you can do the same thing with.

> 4. Very clear what the total query footprint of you application is (e.g. files all neatly listed in a dir).

This seems like a design/organization choice that is separate from whether those files are query or code.

> 5. Super readable and editable.

Doesn't scale as a project grows, you end up with massive unwieldy queries or a bunch of duplicated code across a bunch of files.

> 6. Code for running the SQL is pretty much: here is my query, here are my params, execute.

It is pretty much the same with a query builder, in either case the 'execute' is calling a library where all the actual stuff happens.

If you know your project is gonna stay small with simple queries and your scope won't creep, raw SQL files might the right choice, but they will create technical debt as the project grows. It's worth the time in the long run to get comfortable with a query builder.
I particularly enjoyed the "Optimized for Netscape Navigator." banner
Correct, which is why they agglomerated in the first place. Sectors where you see lots of agglomeration are ones where there are significant advantages to agglomeration.

And yeah, it’s hard to do once, but obviously it’s dramatically harder to do after someone has already done it.
Pepsi and Coke issue has been solved as there are multiple cola brands with store label or no label. You can buy cheaper cola and you do not need to buy Coke/Pepsi.
Leaving aside Tesla, banning direct sales is a boon to local car dealerships, who often fund some very reactionary local politics.
I get the feeling this was the plan from begining.
But ... the iNVIsiblE HAnD of thE FREe MaRKEt
Oh so it seems you are unaware that in modern societies, there is a thing where if laws are unjust, we have a whole system for changing them. It's called government. If your definition of 'unjust' is different than the political system's definition, you have to push for social change to change the political system. You don't get to short-circuit this just because you're an 'innovator'.

How do you feel about protesters who carry out acts of civil disobedience, violating laws to draw attention to the issue? Just curious.
I don't see how these two would be connected.

His SaaS solves a problem for a very specific industry that's quite small (his market research yielded about 6000 customers) so it's a small, niche industry where a lot of the small business proprietors know each other through a trade group and more or less have the same problem: the alternative solutions currently in the market are expensive, entrenched, legacy providers that operate through a POS while his solution is web-based and costs less.
This is a cross I will have to bear.
All about capital recycling and consolidation within the ecosystem.
Looks good, but come on… at least try to open your website on a mobile device.
>There is also a small chance that we could get the tech utopia our billionaire overlords constantly harp on about, but I wouldn't bet on it.

Mr. Musk's exitement knew no bounds. Like, if they are the ones in control of a near AGI computer system we are so screwed.
How does cost of housing figure into the consumer price index? It's complicated
And yet they’ve rejected my startup ideas several times. (:
you’re probably running it on ollama.

ollama is doing the pretty unethical thing of lying about whether you are running r1, most of the models they have labeled r1 are actually entirely different models
This is very important, but it would be nice to get ELON, and Emperor Kim Dong Kong, to play a few rounds of golf in Florida, you know to make sure the Emperor does not have too much advantage playing on his own course in Peonyang, welll that is if ELON has any time off from the ultra MMA circuit cage fights,beating up the other social media owners,
strait up all money to money, uh, moneo a moneo, ah, whatever right!
You can simplify things significantly if you can maintain a 1:1 mapping of log entry to transaction (in the business sense). This way you advance the state of your system in discrete steps by advancing in the log, and can make rewind easier too.
you’re not running r1 dude.

e: no clue why i’m downvoted for this
Tech giants are looking to strike deals with power plants to plug in directly
I don't see a scenario where reasoning AI won't be used in every context imaginable unless it is explicitly restricted and heavily policed. I also don't see a problem with using AI as an auditing tool to check for logical inconsistency, loopholes, conflicts with existing laws...

There are some areas were we will always want knowledgeable and trustworthy humans in the loop and/or actually doing the work. As a society, we should probably start to define what those areas are now and how we want to restrict people from using these tools. My personal opinion is that the legal system is not an area where we should heavily restrict the use of AI.
yes, this is all ollamas fault
This ^

I debugged an app a couple of years ago that from time to time brought entire MSSQL down. The server had to be physically restarted. Nobody could figure out for years what was going on, all the queries had been analyzed and checked for missing indexes, everything was profiled... Except when an app generated a query like this which did not go fine through the cached plan.
Spending more time than I should in a sunday playing with r1/o1/sonnet code generation, my impression is:

1. Sonnet is still the best model for me. It does less mistakes than o1 and r1 and one can ask it to make a plan and think about the request before writing code. I am not sure if the whole "reasoning/thinking" process of o1/r1 is as much of an advantage as it is supposed to be. And even if sonnet does mistakes too, iterations with sonnet are faster than with o1/r1 at least.

2. r1 is good (better than previous deepseek models imo and especially better at following instructions which was my problem with deepseek models so far). The smaller models are very interesting. But the thought process often turns to overcomplicate things and it thinks more than imo it should. I am not sure that all the thinking always helps to build a better context for writing the code, which is what the thinking is actually for if we want to be honest.

3. My main problem with deepseek is that the thinking blocks are huge and it is running out of context (I think? Or just kagi's provider is unstable?) after a few iterations. Maybe if the thinking blocks from previous answers where not used for computing new answers it would help. Not sure what o1 does for this, i doubt the previous thinking carries on in the context.

4. o1 seems around the same level as r1 imo if r1 does nothing weird, but r1 does more weird things (though I use it through github copilot and it does not give me the thinking blocks). I am pretty sure one can find something that o1 performs better and one that r1 performs better. It does not mean anything to me.

Maybe other uses have different results than code generation. Maybe web/js code generation would also give different results than mine. But I do not see something to really impress me in what I actually need these tools for (more than the current SOTA baseline that is sonnet).

I would like to play more with the r1 distilations locally though, and in general I would probably try to handle the thinking blocks context differently. Or maybe use aider with the dual model approach where an r1/sonnet combo seems to give great results. I think there is potential, but not just as such.

In general I do not understand the whole "panicking" thing. I do not think anybody panics over r1, it is very good but nothing more exceptional than what we have not seen so far, except if they thought that only american companies could produce SOTA-level models which was wrong already (previous deepseek and qwen models were already at similar levels). If anything, openai's and anthropic's models are more polished. It sounds a bit sensational to me, but then again who knows, I do not trust the grounding to reality that AI companies have, so they may be panicking indeed.
I assumed it was just more diagnoses than before. And the last paragraphs seem to suggest that as well -- that melanoma skin cancer is being diagnosed more often.

The article also points out that the death rate (from skin cancer) isn't increasing along with the diagnoses. The article raises the possibility of false positives -- but it could also be that early detection is preventing more people dying from skin cancer.
"Who is going to consume 1000 lines of code per hour?" he types into his mass-manufactured thinking machine running an advanced operating system, before clicking reply, sending it across a global mesh of said devices.
Corporations are owned by people. Profit is distributed back to the society thru dividends. The largest shareholder category is pension funds, not billionaires. So effectively boomers are robbing younger generations.
>
Does anybody know whats stopping ethical and slightly less greedy companies from outcompeting these conglomerates?

The customers who buy the product with the lowest price.

A very low price is much easier to achieve if you can make use of economics of scale.
Discoverability. Theres no money in promoting free stuff, so compact free solutions never make it to your suggestions.
> Don’t react to the Airbnb and Uber: read the article to the end.

Agreed, but it is IMO a flaw in the author's work that they chose to lead with Airbnb and Uber. You see this very often with criticisms of the tech industry, and while it is understandable (they're the 2nd and 3rd most visible examples of what the author is describing; I'd put crypto 1st, though), I think it just hurts the point and certainly the appeal of such articles. Frankly, if we ignore the real issues they cause, how many people in the real world actually care about Airbnb and Uber dodging regulations? The public-opinion tide miiight have turned against Airbnb by now, but I'd wager that for most people, Uber/Lyft are still fine, and an overwhelming improvement compared to the taxis we had before. (I don't even use them more than a handful of times a year, but that's way more than taxis.) Even for Airbnbs, I suspect most people think nothing of them; a small chunk see, like, those funky, slightly-cheaper, hipstery accommodations they might have stayed in once or twice; and a vanishingly small percentage actually care about property shortages or regulatory issues.

I realize I've detracted from the main point, and I apologize, but it is something people will have to deal with if they want to make this point (tech industry regulation) to the wider public. Using Airbnb and Uber as the headline examples of "tech dodging regulations" is an awful idea when most people are ambivalent, if not outright happy, that the regulations were dodged in those cases. We will need something a bit more salient.
LOL!

You don’t know me. Seems you are pretty bigoted towards people not like you. How not progressive of you.
> They are a net positive by a large margin
Maybe initially. The 'large' margin is getting smaller every day. Pricing is opaque and ever increasing. A subscription is slowly becoming a requirement rather than a ln add on. Most of the price increases are not passed on to the driver. Drivers in most markets are 'independent contractors', which they're realising is a bad deal.
They've only recently moved from market-capture mode to tighten-the-screw mode. Expect the enshittification to accelerate
> The vehicle handled similar to an electric vehicle except with about 5 minute "recharging".

This is because from the perspective of just the drivetrain, it is an electric vehicle, battery and all (albeit a smaller one).
One Uber founder is American and the other Canadian and AFAIK both lived in the Bay area, so they probably prefer staying where they were. How much harder would it be to get VC funding for a business in the UK? They already had VC connections in the US from prior ventures. Same issue probably true for engineers they could bring on board. The UK is a much smaller market.

Further, I don't think Uber started out breaking regulations. Initially you could only hail black limos and which were licensed. They only started offering rides from unlicensed drivers in response to competition from Lyft. Lyft in turn started as a long-distance ride sharing company which is also legal. So the hurdle for either company to move to the UK was even higher. Moving an established company to a less important market seems far fetched
Don't blame anymore because blame is an act of supremacy.

Responsibility says it's shared to varying degrees through various classes of equivalence among all.

The thieves are trying to eat or feed people in the context of oppression that capitalism is. Capitalism is a system of oppression that requires poverty to work, so is an economic system of oppression. "Crimes" committed in the context of oppression are required when "noncrimes" are insufficient for meeting needs.

Cartels operate without regard for human life and support the context of oppression. Totally different level of responsibility.

Politicians create the system based on choices made due to support from the cartels. They're in some classes of equivalence with the politicians because they're interacting in a way that promotes the context of oppression.

They're all operating within the context of oppression that is individualism.
The parent post started this by saying:

> 6k mortgage for a modest house in any decent area in US

I really dont consider a $1.8MM or $2.25MM house to be 'modest' by any stretch of the imagination.

and then another post after that said:

> 6k a month mortgage for a family of four seems low. It's at least double that in any major metro area.

so $1.8MM for a 'modest' house for a family of four is low in the US?

Im so confused, are people just so out of touch with reality that they think these prices are normal, or have I missed something along the way?
I was recently experimenting with local-only LLM coding assistant in JetBrains products. They did speed things up a bit, but I quickly realized that they were essentially automating the creating a copy-paste errors, resulting in time lost to debugging errors I never would have introduced myself, so I stopped using them.
Claude Sonnet. If your choices are to pay out of pocket for an offshore contractor and wait for weeks or pay $20/mo. for an LLM, it's pretty clear that even if you have to sit there for a few days until you get what you want, using the LLM is the better bet if you're non-technical. In either case, the code would be of questionable quality and a non-technical person would not be able to tell the difference anyways. I see it as a wash.
Where indeed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/5m18v0/sam_maloney...
I mean, when your dad knows the right guy at a prestigious bank, and your mom is a VP in a prestigious biotech firm, and they bought you your spot at Stanford, you kind of deserve it, right?
Uber started wrong from the beginning. They were dumping their service. And not charging full cost. That is price that goes to driver and the R&D and marketing after say 1 year.
> On a global basis, the average salary to hit the top 1% is quite a bit lower: an annual salary of about $65,000 does the trick.
> It’s introducing a proprietary networked high latency chaos agent into the critical path.

Well (and amusingly) said. The same (or at least a very similar) problem exists at the other end of the pipeline, i.e., whenever a user has to use a natural-language interface to get software to do something they want. Are we really going to tell our AI assistants to take complex actions on our behalf in the real world, and then just sit back? Are we really going to do this when money is involved?
Most bugs are trivial to identify and trivial to fix. At least that’s been my experience from 15 years as a SWE in start ups and FANG alike.

Yes, I’ve worked on bugs that have taken weeks to fully resolve. But those are rare.
The dodo bird is extinct. This scientist says she can bring it back
First I think this is a promising product and I would consider this except for 2 issues:

1. Fueling Stations.

2. A more complex concern.

From what I understand its "exhaust" is water, which is great. But where I live, winters could be a big issue. These vehicles could coat the roads with thin black ice.

So, if true, would that mean this product would only be useful in warm climates ?
The New Deal, which Bernie was resurrecting, was meant to break monopolies up, to promote completion and make price fixing impossible. the democrats voted against that as they are controlled by the big companies too. this is easy MAGA exists, and won.
The app crime angle for uber/airbnb is a now familiar topic that gets heated and still draws a variety of different kinds of opinions. Landlord price cabals enabled by apps have started to get press.. this surprises almost no one and makes everyone angry.

Price fixing, consolidation, and greedflation in food sources though does not seem to get much press. I think the revelation would be extremely surprising, scary, and absolutely infuriating to most people.

What is really striking here is how the tired old “vote with your wallet!” advice won’t even work for potatoes anymore. And yet the staunch defenders of business-as-usual capitalism still insist nothing has changed, that we only need to “use our agency!” to effectively fight against whatever kinds of abusive corporate bullshit is getting normalized this week. That’s not just a tired rhetorical trick to win points in an argument or to blame the victim, it’s becoming very transparently absurd.
YouTube lived in obscurity until it became the top search result for “Lazy Sunday”.