skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reply brings to mind the well-known Heinlein quote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Thanks for reading! I’m using GPT because I don’t speak English well,
and I assume most nerds in SF don’t speak Korean either :)
GPT is kind of like our emotional translator.
It’s part of the experiment too!
> I don’t see any meaningful difference at all between the system of a human, a computer and a corpus of images producing new images, and the system of a human, a paintbrush, an easel, a canvas and a corpus of images producing new images.

The word "meaningful" here is a cheap hedging maneuver, and if you don't see a meaningful difference (whatever that means), that's on you.
I think you're looking at it from a weird angle...

"Every single one" in your team agreeing on a single specific technological choice is one of the rarest things I can image! Developers argue about libraries, frameworks, programming languages, services, etc., and I think it speaks for itself if Postgres is the thing that comes closest in bridging the gap at least on one layer in the tech stack. Postgres is a "conservative" choice with a very active community and extensible ecosystem.

Also, nobody is ever making use of their technological choice to its full extent, you'd rarely know what you'll need beforehand, and it's just nice not having to add other storage engines when that one feature request steps into your life.
The example of the cat and detective hat shows that even with the latest update, it isn't "editing" the image. The generated cat is younger, with bigger, brighter eyes, more "perfect" ears.

I found that when editing images of myself, the result looked weird, like a funky version of me. For the cat, it looks "more attractive" I guess, but for humans (and I'd imagine for a cat looking at the edited cat with a keen eye for cat faces), the features often don't work together when changed slightly.
Reminds me of one of my favorite stories on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2xjrdy/whe...

tl;dr - Company CTO hires off-shore dev consultant to write an app, the code is horrendously bad, doesn't even fulfill requirements, and has to be thrown out because it's such a bug-ridden mess. Company scrambles to produce the app internally and succeeds. Later, they need to launch a new product, CTO decides to rehire the same off-shore consultant.
My friend, I like you, and I like this place too. Most people on HN are very friendly. I understand your sadness. But please don't feel sad for me. I once read a book called On Liberty when I was a freshman in high school. I also read 1984 and The Road to Serfdom (stereotyped, some people may think that such books are banned from sale in China). At that time, I began to realize that our country restricted the freedom of citizens in some aspects. Later, I asked our university teacher, and she said that freedom is always relative, but I still don't quite understand this sentence. But there is one thing I can understand, that there is always a gap between real freedom and ideal freedom. For example, are your people really free? The words can be said very beautifully, but practice is often another matter. If you look at the development process of capitalist countries, have they also sacrificed the freedom of some people? I remember that your people flocked to RedNote a while ago, saying that the lower-class Americans worked several jobs to maintain the high rent. I was actually a little surprised, because in the past, such things would only be associated with our country. Are they free? Maybe I am making a choice between economy and freedom, but freedom is indeed not an independent concept. It is complex and related to many factors. So I simply don’t think about it. It is enough for me to work hard, improve myself, improve my life and create value.
I think this is the typical modern American bias of idolizing 'tech' companies - it makes a lot of money so it must be because it's very technologically sophisticated.

In reality I'd guess building an Uber scale tech company is not particularly difficult - after a quick ChatGPT query, it seems a city like New York, has about 90kish drivers at any moment - if we assume they make a query to the API every 5 seconds (and add once as many for users) - the scale doesn't look particularly daunting, something manageable with optimized tech on a small server cluster.

Sharding is trivial since New Yorkers are not really interested in taxies from Brussels etc.

And the proof of the pudding is there are tons of competitors, and most of them work just as well as Uber does (on the technology level, driver availability or market penetration might be a different issue).

Uber is a brand like McDonalds - you could say people go to McDonalds because they have the best burgers enabled by their superior logistics and equipment - and that's certainly probably a factor, you can't really ignore that they are where they are due to brand strength, availability, and early mover advantage - while also recognizing they are far from the only players in the business.

American tech companies have immensely benefited from being the 'default' providers of services - Google, Gmail, AWS, etc. People didn't give much thought on what they chose - and assumed everyone chooses them because they are the best, not because people lacked sufficient incentive to give proper consideration to what service they use.

Thanks to Trump, that has certainly changed in Europe at least, literally overnight.
> It’s not exaggerated. Uber was losing hundreds of millions of dollars per year operating. That’s billions.

Well, yes. However, the impact of that on the ride cost is exaggerated.

> Does engineers salaries factor into that? What about data centers? Advertising?

Yes.

> If you factor all of it in, then they’re losing billions.

And when you divide it by the number of rides, you get into sub-$1 figures.
I thought those smart people were the ones saying our military supply chain is dependent on China.
Ignoring the US political situation for a moment I want to point out how ridiculous modern phones and apps storage access given to their users is. You used to be able to mount a phone as a full hard drive and have access to all your files, do a real full backup without some encrypted databases that only facebook, google or apple hold the key for. The first tragedy is that we accepted that the US gives no rights to non citizens the second tragedy that no one talks about is that we accepted giving away our own data sovereignty and using devices that make us more vulnerable and effectively digital slaves.
You can offload the simpler things, but struggling with the simpler things is how you build the skills to handle the more complex ones that you can't hand off.

If the simpler thing in question is a task you've already mastered, then you're not losing much by asking an LLM to help you with it. If it's not trivial to you though, then you're missing an opportunity to learn.
Pretty much so. Next to impossible to actually apply to a job.

I'm very experienced, live in the US and a friendly chap who interviews well, but because of everyone is using AI (applicants, recruiters, employers), it's next to impossible to get a reply to any posting or get trough to a 'human'.
>Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me

This may eventually apply to all human labor.

I was thinking, even if they pass laws to mandate companies employ a certain fraction of human workers... it'll be like it already is now: they just let AI do most of the work anyway!
Surprised there isn't mention that a big part of the tariff strategy is to throw the equity markets into chaos in an effort to drive down the price of the 10-year bond. There was a panic last night because the 10 year bond price started going up as stocks were trading down, which is not supposed to happen. It would be truly disruptive if the whole game gets blown up by a lack of buyers for US debt.
then we should change society

that is my point
Why on Earth would taxpayers give their hard earned money to other people to work on their "projects of interest"?

Scarcity is very real, I'm not sure why you would feel otherwise. Fortunately, we have largely eliminated scarcity of the necessities of life due to economic policies that are as far from your suggestions as possible, but that doesn't mean that they are produced at no cost or that scarcity in general does not exist.

And you don't need to go back 100 years for precedent. We basically paid people to sit at home during covid, and I didn't see some sort of renaissance as a result. Why would this be any different?
> Some get very very nervous when they begin to struggle. So nervous that they just stop functioning.

I sympathize, but it's impossible to remove all struggle from life. It's better in the long run to work through this than try to avoid it.
Do you know Portuguese and your two favorite colors are pink and black? Otherwise, no.
Nice. Is that a 5110? That takes me back...
Is the top score is 2008 or 4008?
But you might not sell the COGS for $2M, you might do just fine with $1.5M.
> If there's a structural ratchet mechanism, where outsourcing a particular kind of manufacturing work means the US can never do it effectively again, doesn't every tick of the ratchet pose significant risks?

Yes, and in an earlier post Ben made that argument and said that the broader conversation on tariffs has been straw manning and wasn't trying to understand where they were coming from. He did more or less agree that the post-ww2 and post-nixon economic setup created this and articulated why it's problematic.

His thesis is just that this approach is wrong, and that it's hard to unpack the reasons because you don't know what to trust: is what the admin says a PR problem, a bad argument, directional or literal, etc.

Here's the older post (the one I shared in this thread was a continuation): https://stratechery.com/2025/trade-tariffs-and-tech/
> gallery with high-resolution images of genitals covered in excrement remains one of the more effective passive defense strategies.

I would not call that passive defense, that's a full on attack on the stomach.
Uber was a 9 year old company in 2018
it does happen and companies don't like to talk about it and most have existing actors still collecting paychecks. however, we have caught the whole gambit. A lot of applicants are good the problem is there is a subset that will go to extreme lengths to trick you. Competitors will do it, and even other governments will be depending on your industry.

We talked to some recruiters recently and they essentially said atleast 1 step of the hiring process must be in person unless a valid reason can be made. i.e. single mother taking care of child going through a divorce backed up by a court record.

One fun thing to do is stress test their GPU / CPU out during part of a coding exam. (Only do this for 99% confirmed cases) This can slow the deepfake software down so much that it starts looking messed up and obvious. Securing employee onboarding with KYE IAM is also critical. Most of these people don't put much effort on the 360 review of an applicant and verifications beyond video calls spot them early on. There are countless solutions to the problem so you need to be creative. These applicants think they are next level fakes, but a lot can be spotted a mile away.
Listen to the Music, Not the Story
> Why don’t schools teach toothbrushing? And/or have the school nurse check children’s teeth?

Some schools used to have a fluoride rinse students would be forced to do. It looks like it still happens in some rural places.
It's not though. The US has been getting compensated for its military investment all around the world.

The explicit architecture of the petrodollar system is that the US will protect international shipping, and in return all petroleum contracts will be priced and executed in dollars. This makes the USD the international reserve currency, and every country participating in international trade needs to hold USD.

How can they put those USD to work? By buying up safe US government debt and other financial instruments.

The US has been rewarded with near unlimited borrowing ability assuming it remained the most stable, powerful, and trusted partner. We could use that to fund practically any investment we want.
> We should also acknowledge that most modern developers aren’t as skilled or knowledgeable as they believe.

I think this is probably true. I suspect that most people think they are above average, but of course it is impossible for most people to be above average

AI tools will definitely allow below average programmers to get themselves into situations where their reach has exceeded their grasp, and the everyone else will pay for that
No it isn't. MCP is a security nightmare, just as bad as crypto "smart contracts".

The protocol already has been riddled with embarrassing vulnerabilities which is already a badly designed standard and would already be a disaster if it was applied all over the web.

Security consultants are having a feast on breaking these LLM apps just like they did with the crappy "smart contracts" in crypto. Adding MCP to the mix would just make it all worse.

Neither of them is "Web 3.0".
Even the gold & silver thing is a different argument: that's essentially saying a country should have a net trade surplus with the rest of the world in aggregate. You can have that while still running deficits with some/many individual nations.

The personal-finance analogy would be that it's fine for me to have a "trade deficit" with my grocery store, just as long as I'm not spending more dollars than I have coming in, overall.
There was a very good exploration of this in the context of boardgames here: https://stonemaiergames.com/the-math-of-tariffs/
All our infra
From an investment perspective, $50 -> $100 is exactly the same as $75 -> $150. The difference in the number of transactions that actually occurred is trivial. I see the point you’re making but I don’t agree that it matters until the transaction value shrinks to the point where you’re selling things in huge batches (e.g a 5 cent part you sell for 10 cents, but you sell them by the 1000s)
> Before traveling, back up your devices so you don’t lose anything permanently. Then delete anything you’re worried about being misinterpreted or saved by the government. That can include conversations that compromise the privacy of the people on the other end. You might delete messages about politics, contact information for political dissidents, apps that save offline copies of sensitive documents like Google Docs, even your phone’s built-in Notes app.

Mind you, this is for entering the country that considers itself the freest in the world...
I think their point is that you have plausible deniability because they wouldn't know you have a backup.
I would say a big difference of the Internet around 2000 and the internet now is that most people shared information in good faith back then, which is not the case anymore. Maybe back then people were just as uncritical of information, but now we really see the impact of people being not critical.
And if you're that one person out of 100,000 who is not using LLMs to do their homework, you are at a significant disadvantage on the grading curve.
It's surreal for me to see such a headline and article on a major US newspaper.
Is it only a matter of time, though? "More evolved" means "more adapted". I think that organisms with fast reproduction cycles generally adapt faster. But it is probably difficult to define a scale for adaptation as well.
I agree and if people want an example of this that isn't about a "what if ..." future, they need only look at Detroit. While we still manufacture cars in the US, the auto industry will continue to automate any jobs that they can.
Mars Attacks: How Elon Musk's Plans to Colonize Mars Threaten Earth
I feel like a lot of the "needs visionaries?, stuff has a pretty high chance of having not much real value.

That's not a judgment on SpacetimeDB, but it is kinda how it plays out with these kinds of things.
The writing is irrelevant. Who cares if students don't learn how to do it? Or if the magazines are all mostly generated a decade from now? All of that labor spent on writing wasn't really making economic sense.

The problem with that take is this: it was never about the act of writing. What we lose, if we cut humans out of the equation, is writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking.

You'll soon notice the downsides of not-thinking (at scale!) if you have a generation of students who weren't taught to exercise their thinking by writing.

I hope that more people come around to this way of seeing things. It seems like a problem that will be much easier to mitigate than to fix after the fact.

A little self-promo: I'm building a tool to help students and writers create proof that they have written something the good ol fashioned way. Check it out at https://itypedmypaper.com and let me know what you think!
exactly, the market doesn't deliver human flourishing
A duress password that booted into an innocuous "safe mode" without access to your full browser and chat history would be a whole lot less likely to get you into more trouble than one which wipes the phone...
> The past couple years have been spent trying to figure out what text AI models are good for, and new use cases are being developed continuously.

In other words, people who care about money and only money are pushing for these tools because they're convinced they'll reduce labor costs and somehow also improve the resulting product, while engineers and creative professionals who have these tools foisted upon them by unimaginative business people continue to insist that the tools are a solution in search of a problem, that they're stochastic parrots and plagiarism automata that bypass all of the important parts of engineering and creativity and make the absolutely, breathtakingly idiotic mistake of supposing it's possible to leap to a finished product without all the work and problem solving involved in getting there.

> The line between human and AI creation will continue to blur

This is utter nonsense, and hype-man prognosticators in the tech world like the author of the article turn out pretty much 100% of the time to be either grifters or saps who have fallen for the grifters' nonsense.
Probably because taxing goods is easy compared to services.
GDP per capita is also a lot larger because the USA has convinced the rest of us into thinking hedonic and imputed GDP is real.
If you read the introduction, it points out that this is not really a substitute for Dan's underlying talk (which is linked/embedded), but merely an addendum of notes for it. The talk is quite digestible imho.

> I’ve given up on the idea of converting this talk into a post form, nor do I think it’s possible. But I wanted to jot down a few notes that are complementary to the talk. I’m going to assume that you have watched the talk itself. This is just the stuff that wasn’t coherent enough to make the cut—the loose threads I couldn’t tie together.
Debian's debootstrap would also like to participate in this discussion
Racket is related to LISP and already has a mature GUI implementation that uses native widgets on Windows and MacOS, and on Linux goes to GTK3 or falls back to GTK2.
https://docs.racket-lang.org/gui/index.html

It is used to create their full featured teaching IDE.

It is worth looking at before re-inventing the stack.
This is unironically true. There's nothing wrong with wanting to use different tools which are better suited for the task. There's nothing wrong with trying to convince people "this tool isn't right for the job, let's switch". But after all that, if the decision is to stick with COBOL (whatever the reason may be) - a good professional does the best they can with it. If you can't suck it up and write stuff in COBOL, you aren't a very good developer.
Why do I have to pick the factors first? Do I have to use all of them? Why shouldn't I use all of them? If I do, why aren't they already picked?

Why are all of these sliders? Why don't they start at zero? Why do all of them at the default setting result in me winning?

Speaking of, am I winning? Failure and success give me the same feedback. I can play this game over and over until I win? That's not really in the Wordle style.

imo you should be picking from a palette of maybe-relevant factors and increasing/decreasing their order of magnitude and order/operation, then when you submit you're locked into a win/loss state like wordle. This would be much more of a game than what you've got here.
I'm an undergrad at a T10 college. Walking through our library, I often notice about 30% of students have ChatGPT or Claude open on their screens.

In my circle, I can't name a single person who doesn't heavily use these tools for assignments.

What's fascinating, though, is that the most cracked CS students I know deliberately avoid using these tools for programming work. They understand the value in the struggle of solving technical problems themselves. Another interesting effect: many of these same students admit they now have more time for programming and learning they “care about” because they've automated their humanities, social sciences, and other major requirements using LLMs. They don't care enough about those non-major courses to worry about the learning they're sacrificing.
This is why Linux and Unix are so awesome. It’s really all just files.
Obviously an entirely subjective opinion but wow those are ugly.
My local produce store was complaing about this. The prices increased about 20 fold. What was once a small loss due to spoilage now became significant.
I used to do this every morning, for the first hour of the day.

I started doing it to cope with severe unmedicated ADHD. I found the only way I could get any work done was to turn off my phone and unplug the router.

(I downloaded offline docs, and if I got really stuck, made a note of what to Google later and just switched tasks.)

I then found that I enjoyed getting stuff done so much, that I'd usually keep it off until after lunch.
Seems too biased and harsh. The best lag masking and clientside prediction systems I've experienced as a player are those that are closely integrated with the idiosyncratic gameplay mechanics. I would never expect SpacetimeDB to have a one-size-fits-all solution to this, nor for it to be the central focus of their product.
Hey, I appreciate the thoughts.

Yeah these are things I considered. As a person I have a nasty habit of over-optimizing super hard and never shipping because I am paralyzed by all the considerations. So I forced myself to ship it and face the music. If I end up working on it more, making it a more pure estimation experience is the first thing that I'll do. I also maybe mis-titled calling it "order of magnitude" here. Its more just general estimation.

Thanks again.
Thanks for checking it out — and good questions.

You're right: the site is SXG-enabled, and the point of the demo is to show that Google can prefetch and serve it even when you're offline — but only if you search for a specific phrase on Google. Random searches won’t trigger the right preload.

The 4-digit code is intentionally hardcoded — it's not a security check, but a way to make sure the user follows the instructions and gives Google a bit more time to prefetch the content before going offline.

The progress bar also helps with timing — making sure the preload has a chance to complete.

After reading your comment, I added a link to a blog post in the final step of the instructions, in case the demo doesn't work as expected. (If the page is cached from an earlier visit, a refresh helps — it's got a long browser cache.)

Thanks again for digging into it!