skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> But reliable car mechanics don't get paid a lot.

I honestly don't know: do they not? The reliable mechanics in my city seem to do tons of business and charge significantly higher prices than the competition.

I can think of a lot of software that I have stopped paying for because they did not fix bugs or performance issues. I can think of far less software that I stopped paying for because although it was reliable, they did not add more features to it - but I am an individual, not a business, and likely am not representative of the average software-buying individual.

In software and systems that I have built for myself, the impact of fixing a bothersome bug is usually far higher than adding a new capability, but I may just be more bothered by bugs than most. Reliability and smooth, predictable operation are very important to me.
Yes, that's more or less how the flamewar detector works. But I turned it off in this case.

(I can't remember if I did that because it had kicked in, or if I was being proactive.)

For more info on moderation of this thread and why, see my long comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212835.
If you think a short aerial bombing of Russia would have swiftly ended this war, I have a bridge to sell you.
I find this kind of sealioning really unproductive, given the publicity around Tesla's owner right now. I highly doubt someone with your resumé and levels of capital ownership would need any of this context explained, let alone the average HN reader.
when wealthy people have kids their wealth is diluted. Truly, one of the best parts of Elon Musk having so many fucking kids is that at least his fortune will be greatly divided and spread the second he dies

Generational wealth rarely lasts more than a generation or two. Families like the Rothschilds seem to be more the exception than the rule.

Though I am not wealthy so perhaps I truly don't know what it's like in the big club I'm not in
> It's a particularly poor timing to make the argument, because even if we elide every increase until Sunday, we're still left with Germany reacting to this by adding $100B over the next 4 years

And what stopped Germany from doing so in 2022, or 2019, or 2014?

And this is why there is resentment in the US - we've been telling Germany (and other European) states to do this for decades.

I'll reiterate this again - China is the primary threat against the US. Russia is bad as well, but China is the bigger bad.

American soldiers are directly in the line of fire in Taiwan, South Korea, and Okinawa. Yet South Korea and Japan have both worked on maintaining military capacity and spending after brushes in 2011 and 2016.

And it's been Germany that has constantly undermined French and British attempts at a Pan-European force because German leadership does not want expeditionary capabilities that France and the UK needs [0], and France is the only EU state left that has a true world class MIC.

> It's somewhat gut-wrenching to hear an out of date argument, in so many separate ways, as justification for rugging them completely

Because the "spend more" argument from the US has been coming for 15 years now. And it takes 3-4 years just to on-ramp manufacturing capacity.

Devoting funding alone is not enough to ramp up manufacturing overnight. We have been warning about this for decades, and now Germany (and even some of our other allies like France and UK) now have to contend with this on their own.

I worked as a Dem staffer in the early 2010s and even I am in agreement with Trump about this - because this is a policy that even Obama was driving.

We've been warning your leadership that something like this would happen for 15 years now. Yet your leadership did not listen. When even a Dem like me who worked in NatSec Policy is frustrated, you know much of Europe has burnt any goodwill that remains.

[0] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/12/the-joint-exp...
Historical: Putin longs to rebuild Russian empire

Strategic: oil, minerals, Black Sea port access. Russia's great strategic weakness is that it doesn't have any warm water ports, which drastically limits its naval reach and ability to shape trade.
>"the US shouldn't be spending so much money helping Ukraine in the war".

Large part if not the majority of US money is used to replenish/renew/modernize the stocks of the outdated/expired stuff they send to Ukraine
I also work with genAI daily. to say there's no improvement between gpt3 and gpt4 and gpt4o is massively incorrect. the improvement in the latter two was measurable and obvious. Just the speed of answer alone is improved by an order of magnitude.
I wonder about the economics of places with declining population like Japan and South Korea. I always read that declining population is bad for the economy but feels like those countries will have more opportunities for the young in the future.
https://archive.is/RKUl4
We are building a new aristocracy where people are better than others just by virtue of being born into the right family. And if we don't limit the ability to inherit this process will just accelerate.
The codebase is huge, sure, but the particular feature is relatively small and (as I assume and as verified by another poster) quite easy to implement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43204603
IBM Granite 3.2 adds Enhanced Reasoning to its AI mix
> Russia is near bankrupt.

First, I've been hearing it all my life. More often after 2014, and very often since 2022. In 2022, it was "russia has days left of reserves".

Second, nationalism was always (since 1300s?) strong in there. It always united russians against the enemy even if they hated the goverment. That's why every incrusion attempt always failed.
Sure, but it implies writing "quality content" won't work as a replacement.
First house was in the North of England, took 4 years to save up enough.
>Titanium ore has supposedly been discovered in [...]

Titanium is very common (ninth most common crustal element IIRC). Generally there are always deposits. It's more important to have the infrastructure already in place because it's obtained in such large quantities.
What are you referring to by "the question of wine?" Searching online didn't help, unless you meant Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury?
post-war reconstruction fervor can inspire wealth creation. This is largely because there are no NIMBYs and eco-warriros sat around saying that the returning troops cant have a place to live and we cant have new infrastructure. If we can get that reconstruction fervor without a war it would solve a lot of our problems.
No one wants to play that game. The Russians boast about the nuclear bombs, then suddenly goes quiet.

They were going to use them if Ukraine entered Russian soil!

Then they declared that parts of Ukraine was Russia. Ukraine took back some cities on supposedly "holy Russian soil" and nothing happened.

Then Ukraine took a chunk out of (actually) Russian Kursk. Suddenly no talk of nukes for a while.

What would they do with the nukes? Suicide?
Trump tried to grope him, and he wasn't having it. I don't understand how anyone thinks this is acceptable.
"in the UK"

In the US, my anecdotes seem to show that things have stayed neutral or declined slightly. It seems harder to get a decent job than our parents. It seems that fewer of us have bought homes, or delayed buying due to financial reasons. Seems like more of us are working multiple jobs too. I think the aggregate measures showed real income only trending up slightly over the past couple generations.
The US had about 60% of the world's wealth after ww2. With that, their industrial base and with their "democratic" missions in South America for resources I'm amazed how fast they managed to squander it to make the rich richer.
Yes, you and I are outliers and so are many people here.

Those of us who work in tech, and many of the people we find ourselves bonding with and staying close to in our adulthood, are lucky to have taken up in a sector that happened to see disproportionate growth during our careers and admitted many people from modest backgrounds.

But people who didn't stumble onto that path, or perhaps hoped to follow their parents into professions that were more flat or failing (medicine, education, academia, farming, manufacturing, "the trades"). In aggregate, some of those people are still doing okay, some are doing well, and some are flailing in desperation for having made the wrong bet.

Of the people I grew up with in a modest blue collar community, I don't know anyone besides the few most ambitious and capable that were able to find the security that their parents had. And as one of those more ambitious and capable people who later circled with people of fancier backgrounds, I similarly don't know anyone who pursued things like academia or medicine and found what they expected there either.

Appreciate what you have! Many don't share it.
Thanks for the kind words - and I didn't mean to FAQ-shame you :)
I suspect a lot of people who might otherwise go to F# are using ReScript for React.
I'm in the same position as you, but I see myself as rather lucky. I worked very hard but I also was taught hard work translates into success, many people don't see that relationship. And I happened to be interested in a lucrative career path.
if we start holding all Americans liable for what American government did to other countries, it would be really bad for you
Correction: an anti-LLMs-will-lead-to-AGI post. Big difference.
I wish software engineers focus less on being cool and more on getting done with work and living a life away from a screen
Ad hominem: “Attacking a person's character or motivations rather than a position or argument.”

I said aligning yourself with a famous war monger is a good hint that you may not be a good guy and that it is a good reason for reflection. I did not attack OP’s character or motivations.

>very easy thing to say when it isn't your blood in the streets.

Likewise it is even more easy to be cavalier about continuing to fund a war and depopulating entire nations when you’re not the one being conscripted to fight and die.

It’s easy to be a war monger when you’re not the one doing the dying.
>The truth is economic growth hasn’t been occurring in real terms for most people for a long time and the rich have been transferring money from the poor to themselves at a dramatic rate.

The US is setting up to make this worse by cutting services for the average person (like the CFPB and OSHA) and continuing to give tax breaks to the wealthy...again.

This is after the same group of people set off sky-rocketing inflation by injection almost a trillion dollars of new money into the economy by way of the PPP program, of course hurting the average person more than their wealthy financial backers.
Yep they do, in part because of the depression-obesity axis but also likely via an independent mechanism. They do a couple of interesting things. For one, they seem to have a systemic anti-inflammatory effect. They lower the levels of TNF-alpha and interleukins like IL-6. High levels of TNF-alpha and IL-6 are implicated in depression.

> Various meta-analyses have consistently reported increased IL-6 and TNF-α concentrations in depressed patients compared to healthy controls. IL-6 and TNF-α are associated with specific symptoms and behaviors that co-occur with depression. [1]

They also increase the levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) and BDNF-TrkB signalling is also implicated in depression, especially major depression. [2]

Second, GLP-1 RAs yield similar changes in BDNF, TNF-alpha and interleukin levels you see in atypical antidepressants and anxiolytics like the old Soviet-era Semax [3] and Selank [4]. The former is a peptide analog of ACTH and the latter a peptide analog of tuftsin. Consequently it makes perfect sense to me that GLP-1 RAs would also have atypical antidepressant activity via the same pathway.

There's a lot more to GLP-1 RAs and depression than just making you feel better about yourself as a result of your weight loss, and I suspect we're going to hear a lot more about this in the coming years.

They also get you to the point where you feel good enough to exercise, which increases the levels of serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline, and is also as effective as antidepressants. Unfortunately, depressed people can't bring themselves to exercise. Breaking that cycle so you can and do can only help more.

I've done a lot of digging on all this stuff over the last few years, it's really fascinating.

tl;dr: There's definitely something to your lived experience. Congratulations on getting started on your journey.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-85514-0

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8783167/

[3] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cns-spectrums/articl...

[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5322660/
You’re probably right. The historical norm is that there are owners and there are workers. We seem to be regressing to that.

The difference is that medieval peasants knew their manorial lords had bigger houses and ate more meat, but the visible local differences were small and religion could operate (for worse or better) as a stabilizing force. People tolerated a caste system because they were information poor.

There’s no reason today, though, for people to put up with the kind of inequality that is not only extreme and senseless but constantly being shoved in their faces via social media. The only way the rich stay out of the guillotines is by creating new, weird cultural spectacles like litter boxes in schools (not even a real thing) for “furry kids.”
The debt will only grow under Republican leadership. Framing this as an economic issue is disingenuous, and we all know it.

That debt goes straight into enriching the already rich.
It's basically the same situation as the .COM bubble. Some companies used the internet to an advantage and thrived. Others slapped ".COM" on everything but didn't really understand what they are doing.
> rich have been transferring money from the poor to themselves at a dramatic rate

Anyone not familiar with it needs to look up Georgism.

This transfer happens primarily via housing costs and rent payments.

The stratification of the rich happens via investment opportunities, but the core underlying mechanism for the majority of the population is via housing costs and Ricardo's law of rent.
Forget rights, they mean nothing without the power to enforce them. Think about the actual situation. Ukraine has good reasons to join NATO. Russia has good reasons to want Ukraine not in NATO. Those are conflicting goals, you can not have both. One party has to give up their goal, either Ukraine decides not to join, or NATO does not allow them, or Russia has to live with Ukraine in NATO. Or maybe there could be some compromise, NATO membership but no foreign troops or weapons, similar to Norway. But none of that happened, so Russia decided to settle the issue with force. Which is the only option if other means did not resolve the conflict.

You probably want to argue that Ukraine is a sovereign state and they can join whichever alliance they want. But this is where I disagree. A NATO membership is not just a signature on a document, it has physical consequences. Not that I think NATO is planning to invade Russia, but as a country you have to think in longer terms and be careful. Yesterday the democracy leading the world - at least in the own view - today pondering to take over some friendly countries and kicking an entire population out of the remains of their land to turn it into a holiday resort. With such uncertainty in mind, Ukraine becoming a NATO member is a security threat to Russia.

So countries do not live in a vacuum, they can not do whatever they please even though they are sovereign countries. An the USA has exactly the same view, they did not think that Cuba can have Soviet nuclear weapons, even though that was a reaction to an attempt coup d'état by the USA. Or only weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the USA made clear that Solomon Islands can not decide to host a Chinese military base. And yes, there are obviously different issues, I am not saying that every demand by a neighbor is reasonable and worth considering.
thank you very much. i adore the industry, though I have spent only a limited time in it.
Likewise. It is fascinating to me that people seem to assume this.

I suspect it is an intentional result of deceptive marketing. I can easily imagine an alternative universe where different terminology was used instead of "AI" without sci-fi comparisons and barely anyone would care about the tech or bother to fund it.
Tie it with the second and third points though.

Essentially the claim is that it gets exponentially cheaper at the same rate the logarithmic resource requirements go up. Which leads to point 3 - linear growth in intelligence is expected over the next few years and AGI is a certainty.

I feel that's not happening at all. This costs 15x more to run compared to 4o and is marginally better. Perhaps the failing of this prediction is on the cost side but regardless it's a failing of the prediction for linear growth in intelligence. Would another 15x resources lead to another marginal gain? Repeat? At that rate of gain we could turn all the resources in the world to this and not hit anywhere near AGI.
I'm pointing at it as a problem because that's what causes the e.g. sexual side effects. It's why you don't get them from, e.g. bupropion (an NDRI and nicotinic receptor antagonist) that act on the noradrenergic, dopaminergic and nicotinic systems - and not on seratonergic.

Regarding helping people with depression, the numbers don't really support a strong effect especially against an active placebo that makes you feel different like atropine.

[edit] Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that there's not a role for pharmaceuticals. Just that the data for SSRIs specifically is not nearly as compelling as the quantity of prescriptions for it would have you believe, and they probably shouldn't be front-line treatment.
A stopped watch tells the right time twice a day too.
Equally unimpressed by 4.5 and frankly I find Sam Altman to be the least inspiring visionary to ever have the label.

But. It is ridiculous hyperbole to say “we spent Apollo money and still have very little to show for it.” And it’s absurd to say there’s still no viable business model.

It’s the early days and some seem quite spoiled by the pace of innovation.
What about gifts? Does it follow that gifts are a form of corruption, that exchanges need to be equivalent? Or how would you, for both practical law application as well as moral purposes, distinguish an inheritance, from a gift before death, from a gift in life, from providing shelter in youth and from giving a the gift of life through a part of oneself?
This statement makes no sense because there is just no good measurement of intelligence for him to make a quantitative statement like that. What's he measuring intelligence with? MMLU? IQ? His gut feeling?
Russia didn't lose to Afghanistan, rather Russia, Ukraine and Belarus dismantled the Soviet era occupation force. In fact the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan lasted 3 more years on its own - unlike the US installed government which collapsed before US troops left.
There’s no harm for China to offer $2T for Trump’s permission to coercively take Taiwan by threat of blockade.

I can imagine Trump accepting that kind of deal, and it’s probably still cheaper than war for China.
On your aside: I'll admit, I said that completely sincerely, they've had pretty informative and well-informed things to say in other discussions around here. Coming back with "Yes I am" has caused me to update my beliefs a bit.
And if there happened to be people on the land they “wanted” well then there’s guns and smallpox blankets to take care of those pesky details.

“The people there didn’t have the concept of ownership” but some pioneers sure as hell made sure to enlighten them by laying claim to that same land and then threatening anyone for encroaching on it.
We do have a couple disabled by default in the config, but it's still a lot of warnings:

-Wall,-Wextra,-Werror,-Wno-type-limits,-Wno-attributes,-Wno-deprecated-declarations

And of course some are suppressed with a pragma for a short section of specific segments of the code where you can make the argument that it's appropriate during code review, but those pragmas stick out like a sore thumb.
Trump just stated to the media before departing JBA that Putin has communicated a desire for peace to him. Granted: its possible we did not know that before literally just twenty minutes ago, and we obviously don't know the framework that peace will happen under, and that absolutely does matter.
> Sure, p2p is cool for us engineers. But why the end user ever cares about it?

Skype really was the killer communication app with the killer feature: voice and video over IP, for free. It offered paid calling (for a fairly reasonable if not particularly low price), even international.

End users (other than gamers or enterprise) cared about privacy and decentralization. Not many end users, but perhaps many who made recommendations to their peers about what VoIP software to use.

At the time, the main competition was MSN (terrible UX, later merged into Skype), TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble/RogerWilco (focused on gamers and generally terrible UX), or enterprise-focused SIP software.

Later came FaceTime (Apple-only), Facebook Messenger (privacy invasive), WhatsApp (after Facebook, and basically the same as Facebook Messenger these days), Telegram (Russian spyware), and Signal (not popular).
Money is power, and power needs to be in checks.

"Billionare" is not a word which should exist.
This reddit thread covers it: https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/1izubn4/gpt45_vs...

Seems on par with what expected, but there's lots of unknowns
Why would anyone be motivated to work 60 hours a week on Sergei's say-so when Google has amply demonstrated that they will lay people off at random regardless of their work ethic or contributions? I would think the layoffs demoralize people a lot more than the work habits of their colleagues.

The time for this sort of exhortation was before 2023, Sergei.
It is interesting how the US's influence in the rest of the world is declining every day, and that it appears the main entity trying to tear it down as fast as possible is the US.

I don't get it.
Oh, no. Don't do that. Europe footing its own bill for its own defense and increasing their industrial output is the last thing Donald Trump wants. Really.
Indeed, now's a great time to sing kumbaya while Putin does whatever the fuck he wants -- not including invading multiple soverign nations -- and the Kremlin laughs their asses at our stupidity and crumbling institutions.
If anyone use any nuke, the world as we know it is done, Ukraine might not be able to retaliate but others have already promised to. France did for instance.

No one want it, Putin and especially China. Current atomic weapon are no more the little Nagasaki Firecrackers.
I'll go through the guidelines again, obviously I hadn't yet since my edits. Your house, your rules and I'll try to make sure to depersonalize my displeasure in the future.

Thanks for the example, I appreciate it!
That is the current path (at least until today's meeting).

Maybe we get lucky and Putin dies or is deposed (and the successor is less hard-line). That's a lot of rolls that have to come down the right way.

More likely, Ukraine continues to bleed men until they can't defend Kyiv, then Russia takes all of Ukraine anyway except you've lost a lot of soldiers and weapons.

No matter what EU leaders say, I think they are beginning to realize that Ukraine will not win this war and time is not on their side. The EU may or may not continue to support Ukraine with weapons, but it will be half-hearted at best.

The EU will pressure Ukraine to freeze the conflict, but without any hard guarantees. In a few years, Russia will then begin the attack again and probably take Kyiv then.

I hope I'm wrong.