Hacker News Reader

StopHammoTimeon OpenAI's H1 2025: $4.3B in income, $13.5B in loss

You've run a false equivalency in your argument. Growth is not representative of the entire economy. The economy is, in aggregate, much more than tech - they have the biggest public companies which skews how people think. No exclusive sector makes up "most" of the economy, in fact the highest sector, which is finance only makes up 21% of the US economy.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/248004/percentage-added-...

StopHammoTimeon The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

It's unfair he didn't include the name of the app in the article (or it's unfair that I can't see properly, if he did). I want to see what this problem was he was trying to solve!

StopHammoTimeon Auto insurance prices have gone nuts

I think this plays a huge part as well. My wife and I were watching an episode of the US cop show “The Rookie” and they casually discussed paying a ticket for driving SEVENTY MILES OVER THE SPEED LIMIT. I went and checked and in LA the cost is about $500. This blew my mind.

In Australia, you are very at risk for jail for going over anything above 40km/h which is about 25mph. It’s considered reckless/dangerous driving. Your license would also be suspended for six months. I think we have excessive fines but the US seems to go in the opposite direction.

StopHammoTimeon Introducing Kagi Search's New Design

You hit the nail on the head - Apple does not allow the addition of custom search engines at this time.

StopHammoTimeon Discord to start showing ads in the coming week

If they show me a single ad I will be cancelling my subscription.

StopHammoTimeon ASML is threatening to leave the Netherlands

Yep, people don’t care about the economy if they’re living on the streets.

StopHammoTimeon French court issues damages award for violation of GPL

Yes, someone still needed to be trained on the original copyright sheet music before they could train someone else. Ultimately the source of that knowledge was a copyright piece of material that was licensed appropriately.

Yes someone may teach another person based on their memory, but even if that person still performs that work they still are legally required to license the work.

Yes, if the only thing they were doing was training, sure. But it’s not. They’re training and then presenting the data and given the way LLMs are trained, there is no guarantee a transformation even takes place.

At the end of the day LLMs should be licensed under the current copyright system. Maybe OpenAI need to donate some money to a few politicians for that to change.

StopHammoTimeon French court issues damages award for violation of GPL

I'm unsure what you're getting at, but when people sing copyright songs or act copyright plays that do, in fact, get a license. So yes, if you train a human on someone's copyright content I do expect you to have a license to it.

I'm sure you've heard of covers? Well every cover that is published affords a royalty to (at least) the original authors of both the lyrics and composition. The artist may get some money, depending on how the work was licensed.

StopHammoTimeon How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent

This is just good advice in general. The number one thing that has led to my career success (albeit at the cost of much stress) is following my Grandfather's adage: "Someone has to do it, and it might as well be me." I struggle day-to-day to convey to engineers that a grind is required, and sometimes work just needs to be done. People would rather take 60 hours writing a script, instead of just doing work that takes 10 hours (and I'm not even being facetious with that estimate).

StopHammoTimeon Did a 1997 merger ruin Boeing?

Type ratings are not prohibitive to achieve once a pilot has achieved an ATPL. It’s about 5-6 weeks per pilot. Yeah, it’s a pain but it’s also not a devastating road block. Ironically if you hear some airlines talk about the whole point of MCAS and no extra type rating requirement didn’t actually factor in as much as Boeing thought. Training and aircraft expense is actual minor compared to fuel efficiency and availability of aircraft. If you’re running 20 year old 737NGs the new engines on the MAX are going to save a tonne of money, even after potential reputations damage. It’s all risk management.

Edit: in regards to maintenance a lot of airlines are outsourcing maintenance to bigger providers so that’s less of a deal than you’d think as well. Fuel really is one of the largest factors in this and an extra 5 years of expensive gas while waiting for a new plane may be too much for budgets to bear.

StopHammoTimeon Two pharmacists figured out that oral phenylephrine doesn't work

I actually have HN to thank for knowing this. About a year ago someone pointed out how useless the non-pseudo alternatives are. Colds are nowhere near as bad anymore.

StopHammoTimeon A Lufthansa A350's frustrating Oakland diversion

Just a clarifier for everyone - a fuel emergency is not what you think it is. They don’t run until the last drop. While it indicates the aircraft should be handled without delay, it’s also not going to fall out of the sky immediately either.

A fuel emergency would never be severe enough that they would be forced to land at SFO in this situation. In fact, if they were truly forced to land the pilots would lose their jobs because they left it way too late. Oakland was always a reasonable option.

Finally, fuel emergencies are not actually a standard call. It is a thing that is adhered to in the industry as courtesy. Unless there is a malfunction with the fuel system (which would be a mayday call) then it is mostly avoidable.

StopHammoTimeon Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?

https://sim-atc.com

Do online ATC on VATSIM and hated being unprofessional. Gives you airport names, abbreviations, and helps with some calculations.

Surprisingly annoying to get airport data.

StopHammoTimeon If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing

This exact same thing happened to me last week. I purchased a fantastic audiobook about Julius Caesar written by Adrian Goldsmith about 8 years ago on audible. I loved the content and the narrator was great, I listened to it four times.

I go to re-listen to it last week and lo-and-behold, it’s not in my library. Even worse, I can’t even PURCHASE it again. It looks like they’ve just black-holed through production in Australia. If I lived in the US I could at least “buy” it again.

I just want to enjoy art and the worst part is it’s not even the artist doing these things. It’s money grubbing distributors. Middle men are actually the worst kind of people in existence.

StopHammoTimeon Gemini AI

I wish Google would let me pay for Bard. It’s annoying me that they haven’t addressed the monetisation model yet. I want to start using it as a search engine replacement but I’m not willing to change my life that much if I’m going to get in conversation ads.

StopHammoTimeon 23andMe confirms hackers stole ancestry data on 6.9M users

I personally don’t. I used to lose my mind over the thought of my confidential documents being leaked. Then after seeing how poorly personal information is handled, I realised it’s almost a guarantee. A few things from Australia (which has good privacy laws) that made me recognise the futility of it all:

1) the large hack of Optus in which about half of the population had their credit card details stolen. 2) the large hack of Medibank in which the details of a large portion of private health insurance customer details were stolen. 3) I applied for a mortgage and found out every 2-bit mortgage broker is emailed 100s if not 1000s of sensitive ID documents every year and they definitely do not go through their email and delete them after the closure of deals. 4) Most companies in Australia only require a name, address, and, birth date to verify identity which is easily found with five minutes of searching most of the time. 5) I set up a pin with Telstra that should have blocked administrative changes on my account for years. One day I called in, got my password ready, and they didn’t ask for it. They just did it anyway. It was entirely futile.

IMO the only way that privacy will ever become respected is if we move the onus for fraud onto the actual victims of fraud: the companies. This is the whole ancient joke about someone’s identity being “stolen”. It wasn’t stolen, your verification procedures ultimately failed as a business and you are trying to divert responsibility to avoid having to suffer a loss. This is one of the reasons I use my credit card exclusively these days - if it used fraudulently I know that I can charge back, and that’s about the only mechanism I can use to truly prevent unauthorised access to my money.

StopHammoTimeon GCP Incidents

I have a lot of interaction with Google Cloud Support, mostly around their managed services. I am genuinely not over-impressed with their service, considering with similar employers of size on AWS the support experience was always wonderful.

However, I will say if you are on Google Cloud and you have a positive interaction, make a big deal about someone helping you. Given the rarity it occurs, it’s not a big deal to really go out of your way to reward someone with some emphatic positive feedback. I’ve had four genuinely fantastic experiences and there’s always a message to a TAM that flows soon after. I hope more people like those I interacted with get rewarded and promoted.

StopHammoTimeon Shein Files for U.S. IPO

It has been alleged that Shein uses forced labor to make its products (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/01/shein-china-congress-forced-...).

Anecdotally, I have heard that there is three towns where a predominant amount of Shein clothes are made and while people are free to leave, they’re paid in “company bucks” akin to company towns in the late 1800s/early 1900s US.

StopHammoTimeon Apple asked Amazon to block rival ads

The law is the problem.

The law requires explicit knowledge, so Amazon can get away with it.

I don’t agree with it, but lawmakers should be making these changes.

StopHammoTimeon A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends

Hard disagree with your sentiment here. The AGPL is what every company doing BSL stuff should have done. They will never deviate internally from their upstream repo, they have to keep it maintained to make it worthwhile.

Yes, they can relicense contributions to paid customers but that’s the case anywhere. People need to make money and that’s okay. The problem is when the publicly facing code is relicensed and a person who has contributed effectively loses the rights to run their own code. This solves that problem as long as that person continues to be a good open source citizen.

The AGPL rocks.

StopHammoTimeon Forty years of programming

Same on the wrist. I have one of those mice with a trackball on top that you use by running your hand over it. Absolute game changer and not at all difficult to work (probably even more sensitive tbh).

StopHammoTimeon How Mastercard sells its ‘gold mine’ of transaction data

I think people tend to forget that while there is a lot of money in tech, there’s a lot more money in money (finance) xD.

StopHammoTimeon Developers fight back against Unity’s new pricing model

The problem is not that they wanted a cut. The problem is that they want to retroactively apply to all games that have ever been published and even those that aren’t using the most recent engine.

Also, there are cases where a developer might squeeze $100k out of sales and then get a game pass deal where they get another $100k that would result in them getting 5 million downloads. That would result in the fee being $1 million because they’re on the lower tier subscription.

They are doing this for two reasons from what I can tell: a) they want a cut of game pass volume b) they want to worse high volume micro transaction games onto their own ad network (if you sign up to their ad network you don’t pay the fee)

The biggest problem is them attempting to bill people who have already released games and might still get the odd download. It’s crazy cause these developers never agreed to the new license AND it’s highly doubtful this would be legal anyway because contracts need consideration. “We just want more money” probably won’t cut the mustard.

StopHammoTimeon “I want to use this tactically vs. GOOG/AAPL” (2022)

I like that this was sent using the Mail app and not Outlook.

StopHammoTimeon I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it

I find it remarkable that they used laptops for this. Surely, a Dell server for $100k with good specs could have crushed a lot of these models. Could have just given them all Remote Desktop sessions too.

StopHammoTimeon Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

But even then they’re not going to proactively stop it, it’s up to devs to monitor their bill and go “wait we’re getting bombed”. Their whole approach is terribly sloppy and unprofessional.

StopHammoTimeon Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

“Get out of my house.”

StopHammoTimeon Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

The problem is they now want to license the engine as a separate product which they didn’t do in the past. Previously, you paid your license fee for editor and any game you build off that is deployed and you could stop paying them.

I guess they didn’t like the thought of not being able to perpetually milk their customers and wanted to increase their cut outside of the editor fee.

From what I understand though, Unreal is just licensed based on revenue and all the editing tools are free. Unity had the opposite approach previously. They’ve decided they want a cut of both pies.

StopHammoTimeon Unity has seemingly silently removed its GitHub repo that tracks ToS changes

They have actually released something like this in the last day that says if you use their ad market there is no per device fee.

It was on HN this morning.

StopHammoTimeon ‘We need to see pain’: Multimillionaire says unemployment must rise

Ironically of course, the standard of living for the average Australian hasn’t changed over the last 20 years. Growth means nothing to most Australians, because ultimately, the money doesn’t wind up in our pockets.

Politicians and rich people treat ever increasing GDP as some kind of admirable pursuit when in reality it’s making Australia far worse. We are not investing in infrastructure and any investments we do make are quickly skimmed and shipped overseas.

I want to try a stagnant economy, as I’d rather everyone works 20 hours and have great lives than what we have now.