HN user
https://ppsreejith.net
Agreed. I don't like that you're downvoted for pointing this out as the language is very weasel-wordy (revealed to have? by who? what is all of Facebook?):
Zuck is also revealed to have given the Chinese state access to all of Facebook
Tbf, the book actually makes the right claim that it's Chinese user data, not all of Facebook so the article is to blame.
Seconded! Great read though maybe a bit reductive in places
Why are room temperature superconductors an 'obviously-impossible' technological claim?
Asking since we've managed to increase superconductor temperature several times in the past, right? (to ~ -130 degrees celsius right now IIRC). Why is our current temperature of, say ~30 degrees celsius special?
In the book "The Quest for Community" (1953), Robert Nisbet argues that social function is primary and natural and leads to true association which for man fulfils a core need. From the book:
In a highly popular statement, we are told that the family has progressed from institution to companionship. But, as Ortega y Gasset has written, “people do not live together merely to be together. They live together to do something together”. To suppose that the present family, or any other group, can perpetually vitalize itself through some indwelling affectional tie, in the absence of concrete, perceived functions, is like supposing that the comradely ties of mutual aid which grow up incidentally in a military unit will along outlast a condition in which war is plainly and irrevocably banished . Applied to the family, the argument suggests that affection and personality cultivation can somehow exist in a social vacuum, unsupported by the determining goals and ideals of economic and political society.
Going on a tangent, my current beliefs are that:
1. Social functions (i.e accomplished through association) has always had, and will always have high marginal utility, independent of and utilising any technology.
2. That there are political and not technological barriers suppressing it in our current age.
3. That humans are evolved to interact with large numbers of humans (probably seasonality), and that our evolved sociality is scalable even to the present day and beyond (i.e a rejection of Dunbar's number as an evolved constraint)
A lot of comments mention John Ousterhout's book Philosophy of software design and it's definition of complexity of a system being cognitive load (I.e the number of disparate things one has to keep in mind when making a change). However IIRC from the book, complexity of a system = Cognitive load * Frequency of change.
The second component, frequency of change is equally important as when faced with tradeoffs, we can push high cognitive load to components edited less frequently (eg: lower down the stack) in exchange for lower cognitive load in the most frequently edited components.
Doesn't chat gpt require a phone number?
The difference here is that humans aren't the ones using the stablecoins or micropayments. Agents are. Humans will interact with agents like they currently do.
Honestly, some form of digital credits work just as well here IMO (barring regulatory hurdles). No crypto necessary.
Ben Thompson's latest article deals with a possible solution to this issue: https://stratechery.com/2025/the-agentic-web-and-original-si...
Tl;dr* He claims ads were the original sin of the web, built for a human internet. For the coming agentic web where most browsing would be done by agents, he proposes a new protocol that has payments integrated into it. Specifically agents paying for accessing content using micropayments with stablecoins.
Also interesting to note that this is one of the most submitted articles of Stratechery to HN but gained no traction. Latest submission: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44073241
* A summary can also be found here: https://stratechery.com/2025/the-upheaval-coming-for-the-int...
People want the death of Google because people hate ads and tracking.
Paid competitors cannot compete because people won't pay.
Seems to me they're different groups of people. Otherwise, if people hate ads, why don't they pay?
I don't agree it's an everyone loses situation. Enough people don't mind or prefer the ads based ecosystem for it to continue.
IMO, more sophisticated ad blockers (I.e real control over one's devices) used by more people, would make the ad tech ecosystem a lot less profitable. After all, ads only work when you can control what the other person sees.
Agree. Apple should be as well. The only con I can think of would be their (Meta's) data center investments but seems this will make them more efficient?
Great book! IIRC, after attending the 2005 USA memory championships as a journalist, he became intrigued and started training and in one year became USA Memory champion in 2006 at age 24
I'd tried applying memory training lessons from this book a few years ago and written about my experience: http://web.archive.org/web/20210301185111/https://ppsreejith...
The increase from 2009 could also be correlated with the rise of smartphones
Nice idea but horrible execution. Playing from this angle gives me a headache.
It's possible that self driving can be 'added on' using something like Comma:
Code & Data: https://github.com/minusxai/plots
1 Minute Creation Video: https://youtu.be/dANHVKezZ4w
Seems there's a lot of links submitted from new accounts which are dead on submission. This doesn't seem normal. Screenshot above^
This is pretty incredible, kudos to the team! I wonder if there's still an option to call native modules asynchronously (since I'd guess the synchronous native calls block JS execution?)
Also, I remember transferring lots of data through the bridge could be a bottleneck for some use cases. Is that effectively solved with this architecture?
To be pedantic, the comic doesn't mention _targeted_ lightning strikes.
If every major APM vendor and dozens of startups release agents in the next year, it will be difficult for customers to tell what’s snake oil or what’s actually useful. One approach, also seen in the financial space, is having open benchmarks for assessing how well agents can answer questions and show domain-specific knowledge.
IME benchmarks, though valuable, don't fully reflect the real world, often only reflecting the easily quantifiable. The best way is to be able to quickly try out an agent to see how it performs on your work environment. Sort of like having a private test set you can try different agents on to see how they perform in the real world quickly.
Disclaimer: I'm building MinusX, a data science agent (github.com/minusxai/minusx)
As a Firefox user myself, yes! We plan to launch for other browsers after open sourcing MinusX (in ~1-2 weeks).
We're currently exploring the tools displayed on our website (Tableau, Grafana, Colab, & Google Sheets). But if you have a specific tool in mind, please do tell us at https://minusx.ai/tool-request
How’s the performance on doing the same analysis on a dataset with 1 billion rows for instance?
This really depends on whether your tool can handle the scale. We only use a sample of the outputs when constructing the context for your instruction so it should be independent of the scale of the data. We mostly use metadata such as table names, fields, schemas etc to construct the context.
Also does this work with self hosted Metabase or Metabase Cloud? Or both?
Yep, it should work on both :) We have users across both
Yep! MinusX uses Metabase APIs to pull relevant tables, schema, & dashboards to construct the context for your instruction.
Anecdotally, my hardest problems w/ nl2sql are finding the right tables and adding the right filters.
Totally! especially in large orgs with thousands of tables. Using your existing dashboards and queries, gives useful context on picking the right tables for the query.
We're building an assistant that works across all your analytics apps. This means MinusX can use context from multiple apps to better fulfil your instructions. You can imagine a future version of MinusX reading data from a spreadsheet, putting it onto a Jupyter notebook / Metabase Table, and running further analysis.
When Metabase (or any other tool) builds an assistant, we aim to use it to further extend MinusX's capabilities!
Currently, we're using GPT-4o. We've tested it with Claude as well and plan to roll out support soon!
We've done a bunch of work to strip down the context and minimise the output tokens (which tends to be 100x as slow as input tokens). GPT-4o is pretty fast too :)
Possibly related to Elon's new lawsuit? https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/5/24213557/elon-musk-openai-...
The new lawsuit filed in federal court in Northern California on Monday says that Altman and Brockman “assiduously manipulated Musk into co-founding their spurious non-profit venture” by promising that OpenAI would be safer and more transparent than profit-driven alternatives. The suit claims that assurances about OpenAI’s nonprofit structure were “the hook for Altman’s long con.”
I think the unit is off. Starting from 2410 GWh & a compound increase of 59% per year gives us: 61,915 GWh (2410 * 1.59^7) which is about 61.915 TWh. So perhaps the author meant 61.915 TWh instead of GWh.
No way is this in anyway close to 8 doublings though. That would take 12 years or by 2035. (1.59^12 = 261x)
Very interesting prompt regarding the boxer Eupolus of Thessaly. Gemini Advanced gets this wrong as well as Llama 3 70b (as run on groq.com).
However, if I start with: "What is the earliest record of cheating in the olympic games?" Then all models get the question right. It's surprising that GPT-4 gets it right on the first go.
From https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL1N2XV1HA/
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, published scientific estimates of the global CO2 emissions for all on land and submarine volcanos “lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year.”
This is a fraction of the CO2 produced by human activity. In 2021, the global CO2 emissions from energy combustion and industrial processes alone reached a record high of 36.3 billion tonnes (or gigatons, GT), data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) showed