jonas21

Well, I guess it's good that corporations have free speech protections under the First Amendment. I often see it argued here that they shouldn't.

Luckily for us, OpenAI's prompt wasn't "make as many paper clips as possible."

You can also just turn off your watch history completely and use the subscriptions page as your starting point. I did that for a while, but turned it back on when I realized that the algorithm was actually quite good at surfacing content that I learned a lot from -- most of it was stuff that I would never search for on my own (or even know to search for).

You must never read the contracts you enter into. Nearly every contract limits the liability of the service provider to the amount you paid them. Short of proving fraud or negligence, you're not going to get more than that.

You could just as easily ask yourself how can a middle man for people finding web pages be worth so much, but here we are, and Google is worth something like $4 trillion, mostly on the back of search.

As it turns out, it's very valuable to be the intermediary between a large number of people who want something and a commoditized market of providers. It's the middleman who captures most of the margin.

Now, AI models are not a commodity yet. But things seem like they might be heading that direction. And in a world where they are, Stripe probably wants to be that guy sitting in the middle.

They reported a $47B run rate in May. This article claims $4.7B revenue in Q1 and $11.5 B in Q2. It all aligns with a very high growth rate. Here's one set of numbers that fits (though I would guess the actual growth was spikier than this):

    Jan    $1.0 B
    Feb    $1.5 B
    Mar    $2.2 B
    Apr    $3.0 B
    May    $3.9 B
    Jun    $4.6 B

It's not just checking user thumbs up/down. As your quote says, they also did a controlled study with people rating the results. What else would you want them to do? The whole point is that it needs to introduce a detectable statistical difference, but humans should not be able to perceive it as a quality difference.

I know people who believe the end state is a Star Trek-style post-scarcity world.

This is not the same thing as communism. You can still have private ownership, differing levels of wealth, entrepreneurship, and competition. It's just that having money is not necessary for survival or to lead a reasonably comfortable life.

And they don't believe it will magically happen -- it will take intentional action by governments to get there. This is, perhaps, the reason the AI labs are talking so much about AI replacing people's jobs. It's not arrogance, it's to make sure our leaders are thinking about this now instead of when it's too late to guide the outcome.

Or alfalfa, which uses ~6 trillion liters per year in California alone. Essentially none of it is eaten by humans, and a large fraction gets exported to China and Japan to feed livestock there.

I love that the comments on some of the posts (like this one) are written by hand too!

https://handwritten.danieljanus.pl/2022-10-01-hyperlinks-in-...

No, it cost 1M tokens, or about $10

EDIT: The parent comment originally claimed they spent $1M on the demo -- they seem to have edited it after I replied.

I don't think he's claiming it's been exhausted. It's just that things have progressed to a point where people are arguing over the finer points of which pelican looks better -- which is often a matter of taste, and an indication that we've hit the knee in benchmark where models are no longer failing in obviously awful ways.

They tried to develop Gmail into a social network in 2010 with Google Buzz [1]. It received a lot of backlash from people who did not want their email to be a social network.

The social network they were not developing well was YouTube. Eventually, they figured it out, and it's estimated YouTube would be worth $550B as a standalone business today [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz

[2] https://variety.com/2025/digital/news/youtube-valuation-wort...

Why is a Roomba or automated rubbish disposal system more "ethically right" than a humanoid robot?

1. Accountability - even very talented people can lose motivation or get distracted. Having investors to report to helps with this.

2. Recruiting - many people would be wary of working on a rich guy's pet project. Taking investment makes it more of a real company that has to deliver something and is not subject solely to the whims of one person.

Many of the groups that spend the most on lobbying are composed of "normal" people who have banded together for some common interest. For example:

- The AARP ($21M annual spend) has 38M members

- The National Association of Realtors ($54M annual spend) has 1.5M members

- The American Medical Association ($24M annual spend) has 300K members

Of course that doesn't mean that their interests necessarily align with your interests.

Is the 5-minute expiration correct? I thought it was more like ~1 hour.

How about "OpenAI's accidental cyberattack on Hugging Face is science fiction that happened"? It fits HN's 80-character limit exactly.

We have general expectations on the velocity an engineer should be able to work at. If it took someone 5 weeks to deliver the exact same feature another engineer could deliver in 1 week, that would be considered "falling behind" at most places. Would you disagree?

The notion of falling behind because you refuse to adopt an advance in the field seems both uncontroversial and not aggressive at all to me.

Have a look at slide 53 of the summary pdf. It's specifically about Virginia, and it says the same thing I wrote above (minus my personal opinion about 100% renewables being a good thing). Just to be clear, it doesn't say that VCEA is the only contributing factor to price increases: they attribute ~70% to VCEA, with higher natural gas prices accounting for the rest. There's a chart in the upper-right of the slide showing how these two factors have contributed over time.

I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that solar has a much larger up-front cost than, say, a natural gas plant -- but because there are no ongoing fuel costs, it is expected to be cheaper per kWh over the lifetime of the plant. So this is a great investment in the long term, but there are significant costs that must be absorbed in the short term -- and that's what is impacting prices right now.

This is in Virgina, which passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act in 2020. This mandated that Dominion (the power company) transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Personally, I think this is a good thing in the long run, but in the short run, it means that Dominion has had to invest a lot in building out renewable projects that haven't come online yet.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab recently did an analysis on electricity prices in the US [1] and found that most of the rate increase in Virginia was attributable to the VCEA, and that load growth had a mitigating effect on price increases.

If you look at the overall report (not just Virginia), the places where electricty costs are rising the fastest are generally not the same places where lots of new datacenters are being built. It's easy to blame datacenters, but there are many factors at play here.

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/factors-influencing-recent-...

> Nice you could choose if you would like your gasoline with or without service :-) (4:00).

Yeah. Too bad you weren't able to choose if you would like your gasoline with or without lead yet.

$325M for 9.65% implies a valuation of around $3.4 billion, so it's more like 18x.

Regardless, Boston Dynamics has been burning cash for 35 years and all they have to show for it are some fancy demos and trial deployments. Eventually you have to wonder what their future prospects are.

Yeah, it's been a hot mess since everyone started using it all the time. Which is not all that surprising. It's really hard to scale fast, and even more so when the resources you depend on (GPUs) are extremely hard to acquire.

What did your AI-assisted workflow look like 1 year ago? I can only speak for myself, but I would carefully specify a class or module in great detail and then hand it off to the model to implement, then carefully review the result.

How about 2 years ago? Back then, I wouldn't even trust it to write a 5-line function without making some sort of silly mistake.

Today, I can leave an agent running by itself for 20 or 30 minutes and most of the time, it comes back with a result that's either flawless or can be refined to be good with a few back and forth messages. Maybe I still have to make some high-level decisions ahead of time, but all of the details, including exploring the codebase and figuring out what to do based on that, can be left to the agent. The amount of improvement just in the last 2 years has been staggering.

Now extrapolate how things will look if the trend continues for another 2 or 3 years.

Is this guaranteed to happen? No. But people have been predicting that we're going to hit a wall for a long time now, and we haven't yet. Maybe there's a wall just ahead of us. But maybe there's not -- and the "not" case seems likely enough that we should at least be planning for it.

Why would you want to own your own giant datacenter? What would you do with it? Of course it's expensive to operate a datacenter that serves millions of people.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. :)

Well, it looks this post has already been flagged down onto page 7.

And IIRC, the same thing happened to the "oh shit" moment thread you linked to. Did the mods have to intervene to get it back on the front page?

HN might not be anti-AI, but I feel like the way flags are weighted by the ranking allows some users that are extremely anti-AI to create the impression that it is.

EDIT: And now it's back.

Glad to see that the "high thinking" level adds a helmet. Always a smart choice.

How is it strange? The "exceeds $5B" quote was from December 2025. Anthropic has seen tremendous growth since then, ever since Claude Code with Opus 4.5 got really good at coding.

If you've ever been at a startup, this is exactly what it looks like when you go from not having product-market fit to having it (though with a few extra zeros on the end compared to most).