skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Due to a bunch of reasons combined, I'm stuck on a plan where I have 5GB of mobile data per month, and honestly, I never really use it up. I stopped browsing so much social media because it's slop. I don't watch YouTube on mobile because I prefer to do it at home on my TV. I don't stream music because I keep my collection on the SD card. Sometimes I listen to the online radio but it doesn't use much data anyway. Otherwise I browse the news, use navigation, and that's pretty much it.

Once every few months I'm in a situation where I want to watch YouTube on mobile or connect my laptop to mobile hotspot, but then I think "I don't need to be terminally online", or in worst-case scenario, I just pay a little bit extra for the data I use, but again, it happens extremely rarely. BTW quite often my phone randomly loses connection, but then I think "eh, god is telling me to interact with the physical world for five minutes".

At home though, it's a different situation, I need to have good internet connection. Currently I have 4Gbps both ways, and I'm thinking of changing to a cheaper plan, because I can't see myself benefitting from anything more than 1Gbps.

In any case though, my internet connection situation is definitely "good enough", and I do not need any upgrades.
> Never heard of having to wire taxes as a condition of receiving stock owed to you

Extremely common with ISOs and RSUs. There are consequences for issuers if their options are improperly exercised or RSUs improperly vested.
Yeah, we definitely don't want to position ourselves as an IDE or pure code-gen product long term. What you mentioned with the React Native vertical really speaks to us, we've been indie app developers for a while and think there's lots of opportunities to bring AI to that field that go beyond the code.
I commented with a correction. March 15, 2025 is 140 days from the IPO day. This is before the lockup periods ends and they require us to estimate our tax, based on the fair market value of that date, with the following formula, and pay cash, otherwise the vested RSU will be canceled:

Number of vested RSUs * the estimated fair market value of the stock at the settlement date * the appliable highest marginal federal, state, local income tax rate and employment tax rate.

Even if no one pump up the stock price, the amount of cash needed in such a short notice, is unbearable, which will make most ex-employees to give up their shares.
> This reads like someone who doesn't have a solid understanding of the underpinnings at generative AI.

They're talking about the future, though. You are correct that they, nor you or I, have a solid understanding of technology in the future.
>Also, Tesla is currently the only US company that figured out how to make EVs profitably.

That's not really true these days and hence part of the grift. Early Tesla was only profitable because they were first to market and had huge subsidies to take advantadge of. It's no coincidence that Musk started moving right as Trump took his first office and was clearly antagonizing EV tax credits (as he does now).

Meanwhile, in the 2020's TSLA isn't profitable from cars. It's from BTC and some weird loophole I don't fully understand letting them amortize that value for multiple years.
What is crazy about socal is that it's also price insensitive to that sort of behavioral shifting one might expect from more expensive parking. These days, good luck parking around weho without just throwing your hands in the air and paying a valet $40 thanks to the byzantine web of local permit zones that has emerged in recent years, mostly in mid city and the west side for now. It hasn't lessened the amount of people going down santa monica blvd or anything, and people certainly aren't taking a bus to a $40 plate dinner. Just hurts the subset of people who have to get out there for whatever reason and can't easily stomach a valet hit in stride.
Aha, I see. Thanks!
Borrow against the RSUs. If you have more than $500k, this should be trivial to privately arrange. (If less, idk. Also, not legal advice!)
Several Western European countries have deployed XGS-PON at scale, offering up to 10 Gbps, peaking at ~8 Gbps in practice. Hell I even have access to 25 Gbps P2P fiber here in Switzerland.

Also you can deliver well over 1 Gbps over coax or DSL with modern DOCSIS and G.fast respectively. But most countries have started dismantling copper wirelines.
I use it and it's mostly great, but the experience on Linux desktop isn't the best as it feels like primarily a mobile app.
I’m curious why the author choose to publish his message on the internet vs. walking door to door to spread it.

It’s almost as if his desire to use technology was to collapse the process between idea and transmission.

I appreciate a nostalgia for process to some extent. I enjoyed my 200km walk across the mountains Corsica far more than the plane ride from New Mexico to France…

However it’s possible that you can actually become more aware of and participate in the larger process.

Are I here to spend a month hand drawing my logo and refining it, or am I here to build an AI disaster response system to save a million lives?

While I can see the appeal of these sort of arguments, and agree with much of it, I’m not sold on the value of process in itself in the larger arc of the process of creating actual value for the world.
Not a budget line. This is a procurement forecast. The department is listing all the things they might be interested in so that a small business/vendor has an opportunity to try to sell the government something. AKA this is the government's way of doing window shopping.

If you look up the attributed code DS/C/DEAV, DS stands for "Bureau of Diplomatic Security" and DEAV stands for "Defensive Equipment and Armored Vehicles Division". So these are armored cars for diplomats security details.

The same person put in the following orders:

- Armored Tesla (Production Units)

- ARMORED SEDAN

- ARMORED BMW X5/X7

- ARMORED EV (NOT SEDAN)

- R&D

The NAICS codes are wrong, but the numbers were clearly pulled out of thin air. Luckily, the Acquisition stage is only "PLANNING".

All this information is publicly available
https://www.state.gov/procurement-forecast
It's not orthogonal. The agreement usually covers shares owned by employees and former employees.
despite saying it's open source, there's no link to read source code e.g github.
Rudy Rucker has Capow, which is pretty great continuous CAs: https://www.rudyrucker.com/capow/
Let each states run its own program, then we can compare to see which methods are best. Generally, smaller organizations are much more responsive to the needs of their users as well.

The department of education forgot that its goal is to educate our youth and not just to be a jobs program for adults.
No, it is not. I can't hear that "prompt engineering" is engineering.

The process is clearly shortened. I don't have to "go through the pain" of producing the code: it just pops up for free, and then I just have to tune it. It's the difference between writing a speech and proof-reading it. Or listening to a lot of music versus actually learning how to play an instrument. Because you can be critical about music does not mean at all that you can play an instrument.
I'm not sure we read the same piece. The title is hyperbolic, they all are these days, but the content is much more measured. And I suspect you might even agree with the second to last paragraph:

> In my own practice, I’m learning to use AI not as a tool of compression, but one of expansion. Prompts become not endpoints but starting points. They create new voids to explore, new territories for my mind to inhabit.
You can do better than working at the object file level. With --gc-sections and --ffunction-sections, the linker can include only the relevant functions into your binary (whether your libc tries to minimise internal dependencies is another question)
oh, right. so every time you want to post something you have to run the generator? i think that's why i ended up rolling my own templating thing, asking the sorts of people i set it up for to invoke some other software was a bridge too far. i don't remember how i automated moving the text from their machine to the server but it was "once it's saved it's in there" sort of thing. this was early 2000s, i stopped setting up personal sites for people around 2006.
> It's not orthogonal. The agreement usually covers shares owned by employees and former employees

It covers them as equity holders, or people with the right to equity. I’ve negotiated lock-up agreements. Nobody is thinking about RSU holders. Hence how OP winds up in this mess.

OP’s problem stems from a draconian form of RSU. It doesn’t automatically vest on a liquidity event. It has the company collecting taxes. And it has a forfeiture clause.
I had forgotten the stem of this, thank you!
Indeed interesting, they say the "overview" section is primarily intended for human readers, and the rest is for the model. I wonder how the model will read this spec, maybe there's a more machine readable format.
It's "research" that's highly politicised and much of it is junk (see the "black plastic" scare not long ago).

Synthetic fibers are around a century old by now, other plastics applications more than that, and everyone has already been exposed to microplastics. If they were as harmful as the scaremongers want us to believe, we would've noticed long ago.

Just like non-ionising radiation from radio, this whole plastics scare is another nothingburger.
You can ask the mods to give you a way to flag posts as dupes, eg
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42399483
Some of us are old enough to remember when we said the same thing about C compilers. "No thanks, I'll stick to assembly. I have no idea what that thing is actually doing with my code, but I know it sucks."
As technology evolves, humans lose their capacities as their tools get better.

What's the average human's mental calculation capacities compared to our ancestors when the electronic calculator didn't exist ? Who can calculate integrals by hand nowadays ?

AI is the ultimate tool. Who needs to get a phd when your computer can do the work / solve the task better than you would do and in a fraction of the time you'd require.

Sure there's still gonna be a need for specialists but on average most humans are losing their capacities because their tools get better.
C# can also do that - there's a general problem there with combinatorial explosion when you combine function overloading with generics and lambdas.
Seems silly that we would boycott a technology so we can make busy work for ourselves.
Because your analysis indicates that many other people think it will go up even more later.
That is weird. Is the conventional explanation a flash from one of the last fusion stages right before core collapse?
I wish I could up this far more than once. Instead of “sustainable” waste, how about just do without ads? Everyone hates them, their effectiveness is murky at the absolute best, and even non-emissive ones are intrusive and obnoxious. We don’t need these things anymore, if I want a new gadget, or lunch, or whatever, I don’t look out at fucking billboards, I pull out my phone and google for nearby businesses or for the gadget I’m after. Public space ads were a shit solution for product discoverability when they were invented, and today they’re completely fucking irrelevant. Most ad tech is to be honest, it’s just an entire industry built of people and companies pretending it’s 1955.
What makes them wrong?
They'll take your estimation ? Does it have to follow that formula?
> Distributed algorithms require more coordination.

Sometimes! There's a whole body of research about when distributed algorithms require coordination. One example is the CALM theorem (https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01930), and another is the ways that scalable database systems avoid read coordination (https://brooker.co.za/blog/2025/02/04/versioning.html).

> Distribution also means you have fewer natural correctness guarantees, so you need more administrative overhead to avoid race conditions.

I don't believe this is true.

> If we know the exact sequence of computations, we can aim to minimize cache misses.

Sure, but it's not clear why this is possible in a local context and not a distributed one (and, in fact, in may be easier in the distributed context). One example of how it's easier in the distributed context is snapshotting in MemoryDB (https://brooker.co.za/blog/2024/04/25/memorydb.html).

> But then you lose the assumption "recently inserted rows are close together in the index", which I've read can lead to significant slowdowns.

Or significant speed ups because you avoid false sharing!

> Maybe there's also a cultural element to this conflict. What if the engineers interested in "efficiency" are different from the engineers interested in "horizontal scaling"?

This is, of course, a false dichotomy. Distributed systems don't only (or even primarily, in most cases) exist for scaling, but availability, resilience, durability, business continuity, and other concerns.

To make this purely about scalability is naive.

> I'm not sure where this fits in but scaling a volume of tasks conflicts less than scaling individual tasks

Indeed. Coordination avoidance is the fundamental mechanism of scaling. This is visible in CALM, in Amdahl's law, and in many of the other frameworks for thinking through this space.

> If you have 1,000 machines and need to crunch one big graph, you probably want the most scalable algorithm. If you instead have 50,000 small graphs, you probably want the most efficient algorithm, which you then run on all 1,000 machines

False dichotomy again. Algorithms can be both efficient and scalable, and the true shape of the trade-off between them is both super interesting and an ongoing research area.

I normally enjoy Hillel's writing and thoughtfulness, but this post seems like a big miss.
This very much sounds like you would consider asking a Subway employee for a sandwich to be 'cooking'...
I guess I’ll just keep working in construction. The arrogance of people who think the value of most human work is done hunched over a computer is staggering.
> a shell script that builds and runs a C program from source has no build step

I would say so. Ultimately build step or not isn't a meaningful thing to care about. What matters is the cold start/runtime impact. In the case of deno/bun, the impact seem minuscule/not meaningful.
Sadly that display controller MISO thing is notorious. I first ran into it a few years ago. The recommendation was to use a tristate buffer on the chip select line or, as you did, separate the buses.

I also run into the power domain issue a lot. I didn't see a graphic about it in the article but essentially in the majority of devices the IO is like this:

Vdd

|

Esd diode

|

I/O pin

|

Esd diode

|

Ground

Where the diodes are pointing towards. That way if the line goes too negative the lower one will conduct and clamp it to a diode drop + ground, same as if it goes too high to a diode drop + Vdd. The problem is if Vdd has a low impedance path to ground. This is common with power supply ICs either with output discharge resistors or transistors allowing current through to ground. When that happens, your io pin now has a diode in parallel to ground. If you're not careful and don't have current limiting resistors in the way I2C does (because it needs the pull ups), suddenly you're putting the max current your driver can deliver through that diode. Doesn't take much for the smoke to escape.

Some IO pins are designed to be fine without VDD. You can usually check the absolute max ratings for someone like "VDD + 0.3" vs "3.6"
The concern is that if you don't know how many times you should be tapping the YubiKey when you clone a git repo, then an attacker could slip in its own signing requests and you would dutifully tap the YubiKey to authorize them. If you do know how many times to tap, do you still need the notification?

(It's true that if an attacker slipped in a request right before I was expecting to tap my YubiKey, I would tap it a second time to get my operation to succeed under the assumption that it didn't detect my touch the first time. But I would become suspicious if that kept happening.)
> If you're no longer employed by the company I don't know _how_ they'd figure it out

You ask. Plenty of companies let ex employees cashlessly exercise options or sell RSUs for cover.
China still has a good chunk of population in rural area that will keep supporting urban population growth for a while. That being said, I'm not sure how any of those graphs translate to quality of life of an average person living in those countries.

When shit hits the fan, there will be drastic changes, just like how Japan is accepting more and more immigrants every year. That tap will be cut of in a decade or two, because every country will be fighting for them unless we have some magical economical overhaul. I have zero clues what predictions can be made for 2050 in terms of demographics.
The examples you cite — PCs, robots, locomotives, printing presses — each caused various clear harms. LLMs will do the same. Waving off these harms as lack of understanding on someone else’s part doesn’t make them go away.

Some of the things you haven’t listed — air conditioning, internal combustion engines, car-centric cities — are busy causing so much harm that our biosphere is showing the strain.

Other things you haven’t listed — government-subsidized sugar production, sedentary lifestyles due to constant PC use — are busy causing so much harm to out bodies that humans are dying of simultaneous over-indulgence and despair.

People warning about these harms were _right_, and in each case they were greeted by similar dismissiveness. No technology guarantees a rosy future. All of it has a cost, some of those costs are very heavy, and some are permanent.
Were they incorrect? Most preventative measures were, at some stage, speculation or moral panics.

For example our consumer laws emerged out of anxiety about poisonous food. Our libel laws emerged out of moral panics about misuse of the press. Etc. But were still good measures.

There's also the asymmetric risk element. The social risks of the technology are larger than the material risks of putting it off. Being wary of that isn't Luddism, it's just math
>The way West frames/manipulates History (based on so little evidence) is deeply violent

Violence is the use of physical force to coerce or to cause harm. The "way [someone] frames [something]" can't be anywhere close to "violent".
Thank you again Dang! I pressed submit, accidentally made a typo, then edited, then realised I messed it up again. I’m glad you’re here
A few thoughts there:

1. I generally agree with you on that goal, but there are a TON of ways to convey information in a digestible way without being misleading. Even if you follow good practices.

2. "Convey" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. What are you conveying? One number? Many numbers? A specific story? As much data as possible to let the viewer find a trend themselves? Are the numbers important or the general direction of the data? Picking an answer and making the visual serve that goal is an art IMO.
Hyperscaler computer racks are reinvented supercomputers, and Cloud Software is quite frequently recreating features available on them in the 90's. Change My Mind.
Good riddance. Some companies deserve to die from idiotic, short term thinking.
Then we need new capacities, attentive to our emergent means, and institutional frameworks capable of germinating them.
Might be true, but I have a form of dyscalculia that made almost any sort of math impossible for me, so for this it doesn't affect me as I am not capable either way.

But AI has taken away my ability to think to solve a problem via code. Now all I do is just ask it.
I don't think generations of my ancestors made any predictions about AI /s.

I mean, an argument that "technology" hasn't eliminated work previously so we can assume it won't do so now is ridiculously broad.

I don't even think current LLMs will eliminate all jobs - I think it's limited to a particular kind of mediocre output, an output the demand for which is very elastic. But an arguments about what "AI" can do should based on it's potential, not on some "technology has always created jobs" incantation.
No it isn’t. For so many reasons, it isn’t. What a wildly incorrect take.

Here’s the most obvious reason why that isn’t the case:

There is a direct cause effect relationship with the code you write and the resulting program.

That is not so with prompting, obviously.

Prompting is, therefore, not the same as programming.
Whoa up there. I am not attacking the people you work with. I also don't have to "stop" because you wish to put words in my mouth and broadcast assumptions unchallenged.

I never said "construction not done diy = bad quality".
I tried to say: "tradesperson work has incentive to meet code and move on, as opposed to diy which has incentive to build something that person wants to live with". My attempt to say that clearly didn't work well. Good thing my trade is not wordsmithing.

If you want to bring up "bad quality" ... like all humans there are dodgy elements in any group. I'm sure a whole forum of war stories of dumb shit tradespeople have done can come to light - there's probably a subreddit. Maybe all the people you work with are legends in their craft. However my point is not the skill level - it is the structure of motivations.

A person building their own house thinks differently about the house than tradespeople coming and going.

Asides:
1. where do you think DIY builders come from? Everyone I know doing/did it either is or was a tradesperson. They decided to stop going job to job for someone else and put more time into generalising so they can make something for themselves.

2. how old do you think I am? I would hope the "tradesman before I was born" could be retired before they got to their 70's. I guess some people like to keep moving and work is as good as anything.
It all comes down to local demographics. In many car centric areas, car drivers make up maybe 85% or higher of the workforce. And of that 15% of the workforce that doesn't get around via a car, they might be making something close to the federal poverty line. In other words, for some of these downtown businesses if you make it unattractive for drivers, you really do dry them out and force them out of business. The guy making $15k a year riding the bus isn't interested in your $15 sandwich for lunch. You are gone and whats going to appear in your wake is probably a place where someone making $15k a year could afford for a couple dollar lunch, probably something like a 7/11 or a mcdonalds.

In other places, people who use transit or bike around on average might be much higher income and could support different sort of businesses.
A boycott is voluntary. Presumably not everyone will follow, and those who still use it will be more productive which you say is bad. Do you mean we should ban it? That itself seems impossible to do considering its a program running on a PC.
Cars are expensive. And they're even more expensive when you have to pay for parking.

The total cost of ownership of a car includes the cost to operate it, including parking if that costs anything. If the parking cost component is "artificially" reduced or eliminated, the rest of the argument states.
Cannot comment on Typescript, but Go and Rust are miles better on Jetbrains IDE's. It is not even a competition - vscode is left in the dust.
You're right. But sadly, The US only has two parties and we more or less draw a line on Progressive (Democrat) and Conservative (Republican). Meanwhile, in reality both of US parties would probably fall Center-Right compared to EU parties.

But lately people have been more blatantly making a MAGA distinction from Republicans and MAGA is pretty much your AfD party in a nutshell. Except they are running the show in America for at least 2 more years.