skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I’m 0 for 3 on startup equity being worth anything and have since left the industry.

One of the startups I did some time at was as close to a sure thing as one can hope for (unicorn valuation at one point) but it still went to zero in a very public flame out. It’s still impossible not to get imaginative about what could have been as I was a very early employee… such is life.

The most lucrative stretch of my career was working for a big company that paid good base salaries.
I'd hazard to guess most people treat these things as just regular English words or phrases which have diverged in meaning, not even realizing it is/was Latin with a specific meaning. Particularly e.g./i.e., I remember them by the English translations and couldn't even tell you what the Latin they stand for is without looking it up.
Thanks! That means a lot — native all the way!
The alternative to comparative advantage is that there exist countries where it's economically optimal for them to produce every single possible good with finite resources taking into account the opportunity cost of producing one good over another. Or to put it another way, in a world where comparative advantage doesn't exist, the country in question must have the same economic outcome for any good they produce, and that seems ludicrously implausible to me.
The problem is not with the people. It is a system which disincentivises family formation for everyone, especially the poor.
If you jail everyone you catch all criminals but that doesn’t work for a long time and will backfire
Startups have this weird psychological purity testing I have never seen outside of religious groups.

Effective organizations understand you actually don’t need to look inside the box. If someone is continuing to do good work for you it’s working. You don’t need to second guess their reasons why, or give them a reason to question their commitment.
> I suspect that post was plagiarized rather than AI-written or written by the spammer.

Given that the accounts other posts were clearly reposts, I think this is the most likely explanation.

It’s much easier to find old posts that did well, change a few words or add a link, and repost it. It’s harder to prompt the AI to get a post that will do well compared to starting with proven material from the past.

It is interesting to see everyone’s AI suspicion turned up to 11, though. We’ve gone from “everything I don’t like on Reddit is a paid shill” to “everything I don’t like on Reddit is LLM generated”.
> LLMs are truly memetic machines, the best we’ve created so far.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s more likely this post is just recycled from some past post that did well, rather than written from-scratch by an LLM.

The rest of the account’s posts are just recycled old posts that did well. Simplest explanation is that this one is too.
There's also just the case that a buyer is happy buying say 88% of the company and having 12% (usually non-voting) shares lie with employees/former employees. Stock options are only really, truly worth anything if they IPO.
Any suggestions on the topic relevant for other countries than the US?
> Ones I always find it difficult to find good icons for are [...] "save file".

As someone who knows very little about iconography and design, this is very surprising to me. I thought that the "floppy disk for save" (or "downward arrow to a horizontal line for download") conventions were pretty universal, and probably have tons of implementations to choose from. What aspects have you found challenging?
> No one in their right minds would want such a product.

No one "wanted" computer gaming to be driven by how to maximize revenue extraction--mostly from addicted whales.

Yet, here we are.

If there is a way to extract money, someone is willing to stoop that low. This is why we are supposed to have laws.
Have you never attended a Hair Metal concert in the 1980s, or at least seen “Spïnal Täp”?

IIRC, Ken Dolls had tan lines or “permanent” briefs, but could remove pants from many action figures and dolls (and put on skirts and dresses on the males, interchangeably)
Average income is $48k in the US. Increase income tax rate enough that somebody with average income nets at 0. So having them pay $18k more in taxes while receiving $18k in UBI seems feasible-ish, if barely. Having them pay $36k more in taxes puts the rate over 100%...
I was a bot before it was cool.
Ignorance is a big problem too. One time I had someone offended when I asked if their insurance plan qualified as a high deductible - they didn’t know it was a legal classification and thought I was accusing it of being expensive.

I’m not anti-startup but the VC backed startup culture of the last 10 years or so has been pretty souring.
These slides from Ralf Hinze were instrumental to my understanding of how to use late-binding to define objects in a functional language: https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/ralf.hinze/talks/Open.pdf
I think the point that the parent commenter is making is that if the drivers are always arriving after the actual emergency workers, they're not providing any value. It sounds like they've yet to save a customer with this experiment, so the value you're talking about is still hypothetical.
> It feels like it's written under the influence of heavy drugs.

That is broadly true with respect to PKD. Wait until you see VALIS...
That mindset can definitely simplify negotiations, but I’ve noticed that removing equity from the perceived value stack can change how people show up. Some folks who might've gone the extra mile with even a slim shot at ownership now treat the role more like a job than a mission. I’m curious—have you seen any shifts in long-term engagement or retention since downplaying equity?
>but then a layer of supervisors that are specialized on evaluating quality

Why would supervisor agents be any better than the original LLMs? Aren't they still prone to hallucinations and subject to the same limitations imposed by training data and model architecture?

It feels like it just adds another layer of complexity and says, "TODO: make this new supervisor layer magically solve the issue." But how, exactly? If we already know the secret sauce, why not bake it into the first layer from the start?
This hit deep. I grew up in a home where my older brother battled drug addiction for years. But I’ve seen the same addictive patterns in myself with phones and social media, the same escapism, the same dopamine loops. What helped him wasn’t punishment, but connection, routine, and purpose. Dr. Pennie’s work shows that addiction is more human than we realize and technology can control our minds if we aren’t careful.
A social network where everyone is a bot
You need connection to card scheme, which means you need ton of paperwork, which means you need ton of money. That's biggest issue :-)

For technical side - there are companies selling complete SDKs.
Some link shortening services allow you to either bring your own domain or register a domain through them to use, so in the latter case it would be "via" the link shortener.

It's sometimes available on other types of SaaS services where your URL would otherwise be customer-facing as well.
Spray-on concrete innovation could transform bridge repairs
Hi! This is part of Jewish religious purity law and not usually taken as part of the rules that govern most Christian denominations. For example, women who are menstruating are usually not banned from participating in Christian services, and any other people would be unsuited to partake in Temple service according to Jewish religious law are usually allowed to participate in worship in Christianity.
North Korea's Nuclear-Cognitive Warfare Strategy
Blogroll.org
Have you ever used a Pascal compiler that's strict about this? It's surprisingly annoying even today. Now imagine it's 1981 and you're editing your programs with a line editor. In C code, you can freely swap lines around. If you try the same in Pascal code, you'll spend a lot of time fixing up semicolons.
Note that this isn't a problem for blue noise based dithering; nevertheless, it's better if dithering is the last operation, and the result displayed 1:1 with pixel output.
Sometimes it's the small details. Remember all the microtransactions in Ubik? "insert coin to open this door" (to his own apartment!) etc.
Thus heightening Jesus’ mysterious irony, and probing the dichotomy between acceptance before humans and the abundant grace of spiritual redemption

The physical human body is said to parallel and prefigure the glorified heavenly body. Archbishop Fulton Sheen was quoted as saying that the only “man-made things” in Heaven are the Five Wounds of Christ.

>> Korean Statue Depicts A Jesus So Jacked It Looks Like His Last Supper Was Pure Protein (2018)

https://brobible.com/life/article/korean-jesus-statue-jacked...
The things they voted for
More like a willingness to invent data about a thing as opposed to referencing data that is either immediately available or easily found. This often done out of convenience. That is probably fine in casual conversation, but many developers will just guess at performance, requirements, estimations, costs, dependency overhead, and so much more.
Ironically our president has a 1.5 hour commute he does daily. He is extremely value oriented when it comes to money though, and will not get rid of his car until it dies. Which might be a while as he is insane about care and maintenance.

Everyone else lives within 20 minutes.
It's even simpler than that. Ecuador doesn't even need to be better than the US at growing bananas, they just need to be better at growing bananas than the US is at developing software relative to their banana growing abilities.

My favorite example is from an economics class quite a few years ago now. Michael Jordon is super efficient at making money playing basketball (told you it was a while ago). But he's also pretty good at mowing his lawn, since he's tall and athletic. But since he's way better at playing basketball, it makes sense for him to focus on basketball and paying some kid to mow his lawn, even though the kid is way less efficient at mowing lawns.

The US is way more advanced than Ecuador, and could presumably develop some hyper efficient banana greenhouse using genetic engineering and AI or whatever. But Ecuador is still pretty good at growing bananas and the US is much better at developing software, so buying bananas from Ecuador and putting the AI greenhouse resources into developing software instead makes way more sense.
TIL: Celine Dion's fans are all gambling addicts?
Wikipedia has citations so you can verify its information. An LLM with citations can also be verified, and if the citations are consistently accurate people will start to trust it.

Wikipedia has a very dedicated fact-checking team who try to enforce accuracy, and (at least for non-political articles) most agree they do very well. Perhaps someone will develop a reliable automated fact-checker, then it can be applied to LLM output to “bless” it or point out the mistakes.
It was previously known as a possibility, but it wasn't believed to have observable consequences. This paper relates it to degeneracy pressure in noninteracting systems.
This reads like it could result in "the blind, leading the blind". Unless the Supervisor AI agents are deterministic, it can still be a crapshoot. Given the resources that SourceGraph has, I'm still surprised they missed the most obvious thing, which is "context is king" and we need tooling that can make adding context to LLMs dead simple. Basically, we should be optimizing for the humans in the loop.

Agents have their place for trivial and non-critical fixes/features, but the reality is, unless the agents can act in a deterministic manner across LLMs, you really are coding with a loaded gun. The worst is, agents can really dull your senses over time.

I do believe in a future where we can trust agents 99% of the time, but the reality is, we are not training on the thought process, for this to become a reality. That is, we are not focused on the conversation to code training data. I would say 98% of my code is AI generated, and it is certainly not vibe coding. I don't have a term for it, but I am literally dictating to the LLM what I want done and have it fill in the pieces. Sometimes it misses the mark, sometimes it aligns and sometimes it introduces whole new ideas that I have never thought of, which will lead to a better solution. The instructions that I provide is based on my domain knowledge and I think people are missing the mark when they talk about vibe coding, in a professional context.

Full Disclosure: I'm working on improving the "conversation to code" process, so my opinions are obviously biased, but I strongly believe we need to first focus on better capturing our thought process.
Isn't that the point of equity compensation? I don't care about owning a percentage of the company - that just sounds complicated. I care about converting it into cash later. To compensate for the small chance that will be able to happen, you better make it seem like a lot more cash than the alternative cash compensation you're offering. The upside to you is that you don't have to pay that bundle of cash for a while, and you only have to pay it if you have it. And not you personally, but all investors indirectly.
Why would I encourage you?
It is a job, no matter how you pitch it. Equity is not real ownership and doesn't come with any real decision making power. It is a slim chance at a big bonus. I've had equity in most of my jobs and the job sucks then I'll leave before my stock vests which I've done twice.
Yes, noted non-scientist Edison who stole pretty much everything he claimed to have invented.
If I want AI slop I’ll go ask a chatbot, thanks.
while researching this i discovered another fast fp64 card is the R9 280x by amd/ati. although the memory is weak, only 3GB! But i suppose if you need the numerical accuracy, there's always that, and those cards are like $40 (in the us, on ebay, sold listings), compared to $400 for the titan. if you need 4x the ram though i guess you're stuck paying 10x the price!
A lot of people don't get further than Malthus, and don't realize that he was just the first pioneer. They think "Malthus was wrong", and don't realize the rabbit hole that opens up once you start treating population dynamics mathematically.
And it's rated for much less than similarly priced, similarly marketed utes.
Reminds me of a thought experiment: if all the users are bots, is it still a "social" network—or just a simulation of one? Curious to see if this leads to better content, or just faster chaos.
Young people will take less financial risks, because if your bet does not pay off and you lose all your money, you starve. Which means less purchase, fewer companies founded, less demand for existing companies, and worse economy.

Even worse, some young people will still take financial risks, their bets do not pay off, and they become the penniless old, who only have their own kids to look after them. These young people are now stacked with debt, having to pay off money they've never even seen. Again, worse economy, and more misery.

In the long term, society is shaped by its people. If enough people decide "I'll take care of myself, and others should do the same," then that's the society you get - one mistake or accident and your life is ruined. There's your personal responsibility, choose wisely.
Hmm,
My comment wasn't a prediction, it's just an observation on my personal experience.

I find the opportunity for improvement exciting, and I'm optimistic for the future.

Like, statistically most software I've seen written, didn't need to be done. There were better ways, or it was already solved, and it was a knowledge or experience gap, or often a not invented here syndrome.

The main thing that frustrates me these days, is trying to do things better doesn't generally align with the quarterly mentality.
More meant in a "talk is cheap" way, that given the chance, most people would say that they would act a lot better than they do in reality, so don't believe them until they have proven themselves
That would be the naive mathematical interpretation and how the system would work if engineers designed it. Lawyers designed it, though, and they probably know some tricks to make that not happen.
There are plenty of valid scenarios where the company sells for a lot, but less than it raised. And 1x preferences are no longer standard post-ZIRP, afaik.

People are often not aware that the value of common is nonlinear, so the value of 0.5% in this case is zero. (For the ML fans out there, the common price per share has one or more ReLU activation layers. :) )
don't worry we can still evolve it into an even worse form of capitalism
One web needs ground based gateways, which isn't really an option in warzones. These gateways will be immediately targeted. The only option is to used space based lasers for relay. Of which, spaceX is the only entity on the planet with this technology.

Love or hate Elon, he's been able to turn himself into a very powerful figure on the world stage through technology alone. If you think him having complete control over Starlink is a national security risk, he's just getting started.

Unfortunately with European employement laws, I don't see them being able to compete. If you tried, you’d face fines, lawsuits, and maybe even criminal penalties for making your employees work the 80+ hour weeks that Elon requires from all of his companies.

Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.
I can confirm that it was the same for the USSR. There was a "blessed" corpus of Western authors, and this actually did include a lot of sci-fi as well.

Asimov is one prominent case because the translators had to figure out how to deal with his obviously Jewish name at the time when that became a red flag. This is why it's traditionally transcribed phonetically as Айзек rather than the more straightforward Исаак.
What's the point of the ugly genAI interstitial images? The blogging equivalent of wearing a dunce-cap.
Not a typical orange. “Sumo Citrus” / dekopon / shiranui is a hybrid tangor/tangerine cross. Very fragile, specialty fruit, only recently available at scale in the eastern US. This is on the high end per-fruit but I’ve seen higher. I usually buy in cases at ~$1.25 per fruit.
> I’d rather have the language …

check out Lean 4 then. Its syntax system is based on Racket but —instead of parens— implements stuff like [JSX syntax](https://github.com/leanprover-community/ProofWidgets4/blob/d...) and a [maze](https://github.com/dwrensha/lean4-maze)
China is the largest manufacturing hub on the planet and exports globally. At 14% or so the US is certainly their largest direct customer.

China has essentially stated it believes it can belt tighten and go forward with the rest of the world as customers longer than the US can go forward without direct imports from China, should the US eventually get its manufacturing back on track, so be it.
We already have. Chrysler laid off 3600 people in Canada due to tariffs, and 900 people in the US that worked at plants supplying the Canadian factory.
Speaking of treating population dynamics mathematically… compartmental models are still some of my favorites https://pypi.org/project/epidemik
Why "Remember"? php-fpm is probably powering millions of sites right now.
I wrote this 2 years ago and it feels like it’s already coming true. https://art.cx/blog/12-08-22-city-of-bots
Btw, in your about page the link to Vates seems to be relative instead of absolute and directs to the wrong place (a subfolder in your domain instead of the Vates domain)
Its a symbiotic relationship, we don't survive without them and they don't survive without animals that spread their seeds and provide the CO2. Life is interlinked in this way in a huge number of things we can't separate ourselves from nature both the impact we have had in changing the biodiversity and in the necessity of that biodiversity providing this diverse range of plants and animals. Its why its so heartbreaking we are wiping out species at a rate never seen before and causing a mass extinction event which might include us if we keep up at this increasing rate of damage.
Also not OSS. That's not a win for me.
This appears to be LLM generated and full of hallucinations.

1. Aaron Swartz’s last blog post is a review of the movie The Dark Knight. No entry on his blog has the title "Goodbye, Dr. Spencer".

2. The quote is not present at all in the linked note.

3. The link is wrong, should be: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

4. and 5. are simply extremely generic quotes without any valid source. "Programmers crying in despair" GitHub repo does not exist.
Light hearted? Suitable for small children? Are you kidding me.

I'm in my mid-30's and still remember nightmares those stupid series gave me when I was in kindergarten. It was X-Files-tier scary ("The X Files" being other show aired by polish TV around same time), masquarading behind cute animations. How can anyone in their right mind call the episode where the Moomintroll swaps bodies with Stinky lighthearted and positive? What about the collection of monsters like Groke or Hattifnats? On some occasion I remember my parents would call me to get out from my room to watch the "wieczorynka" and I would pretend I can't hear and come out only as I hear the outro song starting, just to avoid whatever insane plot the Moomins would bring on me that time. I hate Moomins so much and wish could erase it from existence. Calling it "cute and happy" is like saying candybar with razorblade inside is delicious; technically true but not exactly an accurate description.
They're still around.

https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/nonstop-servers.html
I created a minimalist task manager to help me stay focused. It started as a personal project to track simple to-dos but turned into something I use every day.
This was my immediate thought when I saw the ring light. Very very likely a CRI of 90 or below, which doesn’t even weight much in red shades. Not uncommon to see 92 CRI with a R9 (red) score below 50% of sunlight or tungsten illumination.
When we trace Python code, devs have to explicitly opt-in dependency modules to tracing. Specifically, the `@compile` decorator has a `trace_modules` parameter which is a `list[types.ModuleType]`.

With this in place, when we trace through a dev's function, a given function call is considered a leaf node unless the function's containing module is in `trace_modules`. This covers the Python stdlib.

We then take all leaf nodes, lookup their equivalent implementation in native code (written and validated by us), and use that native implementation for codegen.

We don't interact with the GIL. And we keep track of what is unsupported so far: https://docs.fxn.ai/predictors/requirements#language-coverag...
my comment was tounge-in-cheek, pointing out that its essentially eugenics which is a controversial topic. although apparently less so when its applied to "Y chromosome holders" as you can see in a sibling reply where this particular group of people are deemed problematic and something that should be got rid of.
The "happiest barrack" in the Soviet Bloc was traditionally considered to be Hungary, though:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goulash_Communism

Although that was after the Hungarian Revolution.
Bash is bash, zsh is zsh; how are they different? coreutils differs, sure, and I dislike BSD’s implementation of them, but that’s why gnu-coreutils exists.
The first thing that comes to mind is macros.