gkoberger

Hey! I wrote this as the first part in a series, so it doesn't get too much into the code... that's up next. But if you have any specific things you want to hear about (the code, the hosting, the support tools, performance, etc), let me know!

Trump has an 87% approval rating amongst Republicans as of the last poll I can find.

While Trump is a megalomanic and does whatever he wants, he has the mandate of the Republican party, whose elected officials could choose at any moment to end this by withdrawing support.

Don't let them off the hook.

Wow, Om was one of my first bosses. It’s hard to separate my memory of him from the era; he defined it. I have such nostalgia for both. He loved tech and startups… not buzzy tabloid stuff, but true journalism. A lot of people may not know GigaOM, but he helped shape a generation of tech.

Thanks for everything, Om. I was a fan before I worked for you, loved my time on Pier 1 in SF, and have always appreciated your steadfast love for technology.

Well, the 100 Wordles is just "Solve one Wordle" in a for-loop. If you're an even somewhat decent engineer, it takes under 10 minutes to get it working (inefficiently).

Then we encourage people to do whatever they want next: improve their average score, build a frontend UI for it, solve on Hard Mode, etc.

In the past, we never did technical interview questions like this. We always asked people to bring their own project, and work the way they want to. However, with the addition of AI, we hit a wall: we want people to feel they can use AI in a way that mimics how they'd actually work day-to-day, BUT we also need a simple check to make sure they understood engineering basics.

This isn't groundbreaking science, sure, but it is a great way to get people interested in a topic. After all, it wouldn't be on Hacker News if the word Wordle wasn't in it. I'm a huge fan of using things like this to teach science, math and engineering.

We started using "Solve 100 Wordles programmatically" as our technical interview, and people _love_ it. They get really into it and have fun. It's pretty easy to do inefficiently, and it's great to watch people build on it and try to improve their scores.

It has two benefits: 1/ everyone clearly understands the problem 2/ people see it as fun rather than a drag.

Homelessness won't be ended with just money, it'll be solved with (or caused by) politics and policies.

But the reason it's a "fallacy" is AOC could donate 100% of her current salary for 63,000 years and that would equal 1% of Elon's current net worth.

Even if you did get 1% of Elon's money, it wouldn't be enough. Real change comes from structural change, not pure cash.

And as the original person pointed out, you're clearly smart enough to know that.

No, her argument is not that people have too much money, it's that the system allows for it. She's dedicating her biggest resource, her time, to fixing this.

There's a greater wealth inequality in the US now than there was at any other point in time.

AOC once summed up her political position as "I believe that in a modern, moral and wealthy society, no person in America should be too poor to live," and I would consider that directionally right.

I think there's a bit of nuance here. AOC is directionally correct, but of course there's exceptions.

I do think Taylor Swift and JK Rowling "earned" a billion dollars.

I don't think Elon Musk or Donald Trump "earned" their wealth.

Elon, for example, did earn a lot of it. People gave him money for Teslas.

But he disproportionally makes profit off regulatory credits, selling his own companies to each other, and burdening his companies with debt. He's forced people to work through pandemics, undermined the SEC, stolen data from the government, bought elections, and (if you want to believe recent stories) may have even helped cheat in the most recent presidential election. He directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths due to DOGE budget cuts, all while getting billions of dollars worth of contracts via SpaceX and xAI.

Or Bezos. Amazon uses our roads and infrastructure. A majority of Amazon warehouse workers rely on public assistance. I believe Bezos is a phenomenal founder, but his returns have subsidized by us.

There's a reason Taylor Swift doesn't get brought up when people talk about the rich. You _can_ earn a billion dollars, but more often than not you have to screw over a lot of people to get there.

I don’t have an opinion on this specific proposal, but I am glad to hear a politician talking about the effects of AI.

I feel like I’m going crazy sometimes. Over the next few years we will see the biggest change to employment our country has ever seen. Our entire financial structure is about to be upended, and not a single politician is talking about it. It’s so weird that all I think about is AI, yet not a single politician seems to notice. (Or maybe they do and that’s why they’re pillaging the country.)

I don't use it that way, but it is correct. "The property owner or police barred you from the property."

I had never heard it until recently, and now this is the third time I've heard it used that way.

It is hard to understand if you only read the blog posted here. They left out a lot of this specificity.

I'm really confused by this blog. There seems to be a large portion of the story missing. I can't figure out the correlation between the owner losing their franchise and the rest of the story. Why did they want to steal the sets? If they're really a $400M company (whatever that means), why would they do this over (at most) $200k?

I couldn't figure out what is being claimed here. I'm not saying it's not true, I just can't follow the story at all.

EDIT: After reading other sources, it seems that the franchise owed $200k to BAM (unrelated) and also made a deal with the Mansell's directly. And it seems like the parent company is saying the unsold sets have been returned but the money is theirs because the store owed them money, while the Mansells are (correctly) saying consignment means they own the sets, not the franchise. BAM crossed into definitively illegal territory when they continued to sell sets after the Mandells asserted they wanted their property back (as confirmed by a "sting" operation).

The Reckless Ben stuff is actually pretty interesting: https://youtu.be/14ktgvoH4Mc?si=yhSzpEDo5ut6s8eS&t=880

I imagine there's a similar same number of those style projects out there.

However, the amount of devs have grown exponentially, and the number of non-niche problems without a solution have dramatically decreased.

I highly doubt this is true. The sources are all scammy-feeling websites.

I think you'd be surprised. People interpret art how they want.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musicians_who_oppose_Donald_Tr...

They're adding backlinks to other sites. They're either making revenue from those sites, or (more likely) selling backlinks to unsavory products.

Great, show me something they consistently misrepresent.

I agree that everyone has, by definition, some bias, but NPR/PBS tend to avoid editorialization significantly more than their counterparts.

I mean, in theory I like this. But look what happened to NPR and PBS; it was ultimately at the behest of the president. They lost their revenue for not saying the "right" things.

American here.

I'm equally confused, but I think it's playing into the types of people who were previously into crypto or sports betting or prediction markets.

Every sports bar I go to, there's some middle-aged finance bro name referring to "Sam" like they're old friends or talking about how their NVIDIA stock is up. They're confidently predicting markets due to trends.

The stock market has been kinda monolithic the past decade or so. Things went up and down, but mostly in sync. AI represents a disruption; billion dollar companies can go to zero overnight and the right bet can be the next NVIDIA. So, this show matches that vibe.

tl;dr = it's for gamblers

I bet OpenAI genuinely believes they're using their money to help free media exist. And TBPN genuinely believes this is the right choice for economic freedom so they can continue to operate. I bet they even had a convo such as "we'll never tell you what to say," and both sides genuinely believed it.

But this never ends well. Even if there's never a conversation about it, directly, the implication is there.

I don't care about TBPN, specifically. I just really, really wish we had a better way for media to fund itself independently. (And I say this as someone who pays for some media, but not nearly enough. I don't have $10/mo for every outlet that deserves it.)

EDIT: sama basically said what I said he would: https://x.com/sama/status/2039773740586918137

Agreed. But building something new takes capital, and it’s really hard to find it for an open source tool.

FWIW, it worked for Bun (at least for the VCs and employees), so there is a model there that works.

He may have the same title, but he’s way closer to an engineer than Elon/Bezos/etc.

My analogy was taking VC money and using it to build an open source tool.

Yeah, I was being nice, but this writer upset me. He sees Ryan Dahl as Nero, but he’s a lot closer to Robin Hood.

I didn’t like the tone of this. Building a company is hard. Building an VC-backed open source product is really, really hard.

I know on HN we don’t always love CEOs, and that’s okay… the ethos of startups has changed over the past 10 years, and tech has shifted away from tinkerers and more toward Wall Street. But Ryan Dahl isn’t doing that; he’s a tinkerer and a builder.

I dunno, I just don’t like this vibe of “what have you done for me recently” in this post, especially given he skipped over the company and is calling out Ryan directly for some reason. Ryan is responsible for many of our careers; Node is the first language I really felt at home with.

Comparing him to Nero is gross.

I “get” technology so I understand how you got here.

But this is the wrong take. I expect to go to a restaurant and not die from the food… and I want nothing to do with the inner workings of the kitchen. I just want to know any restaurant I go into will be safe. Society has made restaurants safe, either because of government pressure or it’s good for business.

How is that not a fair ask for technology, too? We all have things we know well, and then there’s reasons we’re alive that we don’t even know exist because someone took care of it.

It’s unreasonable to only allow people to participate in society once they understand every nuance.

Sure, me too. But that was the point of his character – the false equivalence that he was the good guy, and those are the two options.

He justified ignoring the rules, which lead to the death of someone in his command, due to his own moral arrogance.

There's a third option. Someone who understands the weight of the role and holds themselves (or is held) accountable.

For me, it's the blur between who makes decisions. I don't love our government making decisions about who lives or dies, but I much prefer decisions to be made by a/ a human b/ one who isn't beholden to shareholders.

"You're attacking the person who's protecting you – idiot. [..] You may hate this, but there's one person protecting your rights to be a conspiracy theorist that actually has a seat at the table, and that person is me. [..] You may not want to hear that truth, but it's fucking true."

The way Alex Karp views himself is scary; he gives himself (and his company) carte blanche when it comes to morality. He's basically become the Jack Nicholson character from A Few Good Men.

Yes, America needs technology to succeed. But it can't be unchecked.

I had this happen yesterday to me, and Claude itself was able to recover it via the other conversations... I just had to tell it that it did the work and to find it in its other conversations.