Hacker News Reader

jonnaton AWS Acquires DuckLabs

Fair point, but no one is clearly articulating what AWS gets out of this. They don't get the DuckDB IP, that's owned by the foundation. All the work that the team at DuckLabs is putting in growing DuckDB and DuckLake are already in principle converting into compute/storage demand in AWS. So what does AWS actually want and how will it change DuckDB to accomplish it?

jonnaton I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit

No, value is determined by what participants in a market are willing to pay for something. The only reason you are able to say that the value of gold is determined by its weight is that gold is a commodity and no matter what you paid for it you'll find others willing to pay market price.

Simon is saying that companies are (today) willing to pay API prices for tokens which is as good as any determination of value.

jonnaton Meta acquires Moltbook

People said the same thing when he paid $1B for Instagram, for it to look like a crazy bargain a couple of months later.

jonnaton AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

Read the linked issue. The bot did not find anything interesting. The issue has the solution spelled out and is intended only as a first issue for new contributors.

jonnaton xAI joins SpaceX

Pretty terrible for SpaceX. Of course they paid a crazy inflated price for xAI in an attempt to cash in on the IPO. This just devalues SpaceX and exposes the investors to all the AI bubble risk.

jonnaton Apple says it may stop shipping to the EU

What an empty threat. Apple has 1/3 of the mobile market share in Europe and people here are not locked into the ecosystem, with 3P messaging apps like WhatsApp dominating communication. And they are trying to pull this BS at a time that they are facing ever stronger competition from foldable phones and their inability to do anything useful in AI.

jonnaton Just let me select text

The hardest part is to remember not to do it when sharing screens...

jonnaton Zorin OS

Doesn't sound misleading to me. I read "$5,000 of professional software" as paid-for software that would have cost $5,000.

jonnaton OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

He most definitely did not pay $6.6B. The beauty of these OpenAI acquisitions is that they are all-stock transactions so only worth the face value in the make-believe world OpenAI investors seem to live in.

jonnaton All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding

I admit I've not been following the Chrome saga, but what does the DoJ mean by Google divesting from Chrome? Will they have to sell the Chrome brand? Will they have to get rid of all Chrome developers? If not, what would prevent Google from keeping all the devs and just rebranding the browser to something else based on Chromium?

I truly don't understand how you could force someone to divest from an open source project. Why would they not simply prevent Google (or any company) from paying broswers to limit our choice of search engine?

jonnaton American Disruption

Worse than projecting one's values onto a rationalization of the new tariffs is to simply take the administration's rhetoric at face value. That other countries are "taking advantage of us" is just a talking point. We have to look at how the tariffs fit historical conservative programs. Republicans have long wished to replace our progressive income taxation with a flat tax system, but that's simply not achievable, even for Trump. Further decreasing tax rates from high earners and replacing revenue with tariffs to avoid the ballooning of the government debt, for which Trump was heavily criticized during the first term, may be the closest he can get to approximating flat taxation.

jonnaton Databricks to Buy Data-Management Startup Tabular

So, will Databricks deprioritize Delta Lake in favor or Iceberg, or will they try to derail Iceberg development now they they got the team that originally built it at Netflix?

Edit: from the Tabular CEO announcement

  Databricks reached out to me and proposed a collaboration that could bring Iceberg and Delta closer together [...] I’m excited to have the opportunity to work with Databricks and the broader Delta community to build better table formats together.

So it seems they are going for the latter.

jonnaton Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking as Microsoft Brings Games to PS5

That would not make any sense to Microsoft. Xbox consoles are sold at or close to manufacturing cost but it's worth it to MS because it locks consumers into their ecosystem that generates a lot of after-purchase revenue. Allowing windows on the Xbox would be equivalent to subsidizing a PC to consumers.

jonnaton Tesla to lay off more than 10% of its staff

> Elon is Tesla's marketing driver so we can't kick him out

I confess that when he started the downward spiral, I thought it might be part of some marketing strategy: they had to bring the other half of the population who think global warming is a hoax/unimportant to EVs in order to be truly successful. It became clear very quickly that he's just losing his sanity.

jonnaton Is .NET just miles ahead or am I delusional?

Whenever this comes up, my thought (admittedly from an outsider perspective) is that people can say that .NET is far ahead in the same way some may say that Oracle is far ahead: Both are enterprise focused technologies that were built using a sales-driven design, trying to check as many feature boxes as possible to help sales teams in their pitches. The problem is when you've been to too many sales pitches and start to equate box-checking with product quality.

jonnaton Full AMD Linux Laptop (Radeon 7600M XT GPU, Ryzen CPU): Tuxedo Sirius 16 Review

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

It would cost substantially more for a small-scale company to produce a laptop with the quality of MacBooks than it costs Apple. That cost difference would have to be passed to the consumer.

jonnaton Daft: Distributed DataFrame for Python

It has an Apache 2.0 license. I assume it allows it to be repackaged removing telemetry.

jonnaton Over 100k Infected Repos Found on GitHub

They probably mean that the actual number of malicious repos is probably very hard to get.

The article reaches the 100K number by searching for repos with patches with a particular string contained in this specific attack, so it's likely missing many malicious repos that use different methods of infection.

jonnaton Cratering motor fuel sales in Norway show the death spiral that can end oil

While it't true that oil is used for plastics and chemicals today, it's absolutely not the case that it will be drilled into the future when demand for gasoline disappears.

Oil is not strictly a necessary precursor to much of the chemical industry, it is rather a convenient raw material because the high value of gasoline makes lights virtually free. In the early days of oil exploration, lights were constantly burned as they had no economic use at the scale they were produced.

If oil exploration would continue just for the sake of chemicals, the cost structure of these precursors would fundamentally change and it would become more attractive to replace them with renewable sources.

jonnaton Meta to release open-source commercial AI model

Quite the opposite, this is great for Meta's competitors. Meta is not trying to get market share with this strategy, it's trying to commoditize their complements (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/)

Content is a complement to a social network: the cheaper it is to create content, the more content is available, the easier it is to optimize a feed, the larger the time people spend in the platform, the higher the revenue. GenAI is just a method to drive the cost of content creation to zero.

jonnaton GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

I was with you until your last sentence. Taking you point at face value, people who despise codes of conduct nonetheless working under a code of conduct would just be another example of people disagreeing with each other (in this case disagreeing with people who favor the implementation of codes of conduct) and yet still being able to work together.

One could argue that the difference here is that codes of conduct are being enforced in a top-down fashion, that is, the people you disagree with are actually in the leadership of the project. But I can see how this argument could just as well be used to justify the value of codes of conduct.

FWIW, I've tried but I simply cannot decide if I'm ultimately in favor or against codes of conduct.

jonnaton Google reverses 5M file limit in Google Drive

I guess I finally understand what they mean when they say “I don’t know how to count that low”

jonnaton Wronger Than Wrong

> The Many World Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics was rejected out of hand by scientists that were also religious

Do you have a reference for that? The Many Worlds interpretation was initially rejected by John Wheeler, Everett's Ph.D. advisor, under the influence of Neils Bohr, but I've never read anywhere that the motivation of the two was in any way religious.

The book What is Real? by Adam Becker has a good account of this history.

jonnaton Little Snitch Mini

They have a comparison page: https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch-mini/compare.html

jonnaton Companies are paying huge sums to show their ads to bots

Even if it would be easy only pay per conversion, you would create a different type of perverse incentive in which ad platforms would exclusively want to target consumers their models attach a high preexisting (before exposure to ads) probability of conversion. That is OK for lower funnel tactics but it would severely reduce your ability to put your brand in front of a new audience.

jonnaton Facebook is receiving sensitive medical information from hospital websites

Because they are for-profit businesses and as such have a strong incentive to spend in ads and for these ads to be as effective as possible. FB and Google are just giving them the means to do so; we should be asking why it is that hospitals are allowed to have these strong economic incentives to begin with.

jonnaton Where do space, time and gravity come from?

An episode from Sean's podcast in which he builds the argument in more detail: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/09/09/63-s...

jonnaton Umeshisms

Or: "If you've never quoted an Umeshism after you screw up, you're taking too much responsibility for your failures"

jonnaton Human toxicity from Covid-19 rapid home test kits

Important recommendations from the article: don't eat, drink, or put in the eye most parts of a Covid test. The article doesn't mention the paper package, you might be safe eating that.

jonnaton Microsoft buys Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising business

We are one year away from Chrome effectively killing third party cookies. That’s a strange acquisition given how reliant on cookies AppNexus still is.