HN Best Comments

Re: How to earn a billion dollars Why do you think no one is contradicting him? The exponential growth model that pg presents is an obvious lie - you could use his exact explanation to claim that good founders will soon become trillionaires, all it takes is 9 months of 93% growth after your first few billions; quadrillionaires will soon follow. The obvious reality is that exponential growth is just a small phase in any company's history, and it is anyway limited by the size of the market(s) it is operating in. A company can quickly capture a market, but not quickly grow forever. Then, he completely hand waves away the externalities, lawlessness, self dealing and similar issues that are the supporting power of all such growth events. He claims this is all powered by "making your users happy", which makes them tell others about your business, as if every restaurant that people fawn over becomes a billion dollar business in 1-5 years. Even the examples he can think of of companies that did this are infamously bad companies that have become rightly hated and accused of spreading various forms of social ills - e.g. social media addiction induced by Meta, spy ads by Google, excessive tourism and house price increases by Airbnb, or the erosion of worker protections by Uber. There isn't a single billion dollar company that doesn't at least get accused of similar problems, which represent t the meat of the argument, and pg ignores this completely in favor of the "build something useful" model. tsimionescu, 4 hours ago

Re: Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026 The headline buried the lede -- this is a way to get some summer vacation (niiice) AND encourage enterprise support contracts, which will still have availability. I don't think I've heard of this particular open source / support / summer vacation business model before but I like it! vessenes, 2 hours ago

Re: Your ePub Is fine Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbugs where changes in one area would affect unrelated functionality in other modules, etc. — and while it cost something like $800, it was completely unsupported: I filed a number of trivially reproducible bugs with reduced test cases but never heard anything back until the next release came out and they sent automated suggestions that the bug might be fixed so I should buy a full-price license and find out. acdha, 8 hours ago

Re: Firewood Splitting Simulator People here seem a little confused. This is a simulator in the same way Goat Simulator is a simulator. It’s from a collection called “screen toys” and it’s meant to be mindless fun. bicx, 17 hours ago

Re: Did Anthropic ask for this? Maybe this will be simpler for Anthropic to understand if they take their own high-minded philosophical nonsense and ego out of it and consider it the way a neutral party would. Suppose a company calls themselves The Doomsday Device Company. They make and sell excellent-quality doomsday devices. They regularly go online to proclaim that their doomsday devices are the best and most powerful, and also that doomsday devices are dangerous and should be regulated. The Doomsday Device Company then says they have the world's best doomsday device. (They don't, but they claim they do.) The US Government hates the Doosmday Device Company for various political reasons, but also has a vested interest in there not being a massive proliferation of doomsday devices. The Doosmday Device company spends a great deal of time and money telling everyone: "Our doomsday device is the most doomy of all time!" (though it probably isn't) and "Everyone can use it!" (for a lot of money) It is completely logical, then, for the US Government to say: No, everyone cannot use your doomsday device, because doomsday is bad. (While also meaning: Only we should be able to use it, and you shouldn't be able to tell us how.) If you do not want to be in the business of having your doomsday devices shut down by the government, well, it would help if you didn't so loudly and aggressively proclaim how doomy they are. It doesn't matter how trustworthy you claim to be, given that your business is making evil doosmday devices. You still won't be trusted! ivraatiems, 9 hours ago

Re: Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026 > > The bad guys won’t rest > Probably not. But we will. A pleasant dose of humanity in decidedly inhuman times. zarzavat, 1 hour ago

Re: The only scalable delete in Postgres is DROP TABLE Only by a weird definition of "scalable". The first sentence says: > Counterintuitively, large DELETEs add work to the database. There is nothing counterintuitive about this. It takes just as much work to delete a row as it takes to insert a row. Why wouldn't it? Obviously you have to do almost all the same operations: write a log, write the deletion, update indices, replicate it, etc. And yes, it's a well-known trick for all major relational databases (not just Postgres) that if you want to delete 90% of rows from a large table, it's much faster to just copy the rows you want to keep to a new table, run DROP TABLE on the old table, and rename the new table to the old table. Since DROP TABLE is ~instantaneous, mainly involving table-level metadata. DELETE scales just fine, in the sense that if you are constantly inserting and deleting individual rows, DELETE scales the same as INSERT. Basic database functionality is designed around the assumption of lots of small transactions. Whenever you have to do something involving millions of rows at once, you generally need to investigate solutions that work well in "bulk". E.g. loading rows directly from a file rather than with SQL, adding indices only after the data has been loaded rather than before, disabling foreign key checks on large operations (if you know by design that the keys are valid)... and yes, taking advantage of DROP TABLE instead of DELETE. This doesn't mean small transactions aren't scalable, it just means bulk operations are qualitatively different and benefit from their own solutions. And DELETE is no different from INSERT in this regard. crazygringo, 15 hours ago

Re: Electric motors with no rare earths Unfortunately, their Web page does not say a single word about the important problems of their motors. The electrically excited synchronous motors have been known forever, but they had not been used in EVs because of 2 disadvantages. The first is that traditional EESMs require brushes, i.e. sliding electrical contacts, which are worn out by friction, so such motors require frequent maintenance for changing the brushes. It is possible to make brushless EESMs, but they require a rotating transformer and a semiconductor rectifier inside the rotor. The second disadvantage is a lower efficiency than with permanent magnets, which cannot be improved so much as to match PM motors, because the electrical currents that circulate through the rotor windings must generate heat. The lower efficiency also makes cooling more difficult. Renault says that their EESMs have an efficiency of 92%. This is a good efficiency, even if not as good as attainable with permanent magnets. Losing a few percents in efficiency is an acceptable compromise for avoiding the use of expensive and supply-constrained chemical elements. What I wonder is whether Renault reaches this 92% efficiency with EESMs having brushes, or with brushless EESMs, and this is what I would have liked to read on the parent Web page. Brushless EESMs usually had a lower efficiency, so 92% would be impressive for them, while it would look normal for EESMs with brushes. If Renault has succeeded to make a brushless EESM (i.e. maintenance-free) with an efficiency of 92%, that is something worth to brag about. Otherwise, making a traditional EESM would not be great news, because everybody has avoided those because of the maintenance problem. adrian_b, 2 days ago

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse. The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI. Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level analysis is disregarded in favor of dunking on Anthropic. AI is a threat to your job, status, beliefs, and way of life. For HN, believing this truth is harder than coming up with rationalisations for why it MUST be untrue. I appreciate the grounded few on HN who continue to engage with object level analysis, and accept that the world is about to change in a pretty bizarre way. temporaryacc2, 2 days ago

Re: Not everyone is using AI for everything > It's tough to answer because you want to hedge for both an AI enthused employer and an AI hesitant employer with limited information about who they are and how they personally use these products. Have you considered just answering truthfully? Would you even want to work somewhere where you need to play a role and where they flip out when you say the wrong word you should've correctly guessed through mind reading? That sounds not like a job but a toxic relationship. hypfer, 13 hours ago

Re: AI coding at home without going broke That's because you're treating the problem as an engineer instead of an "influencer" or "10xer" or whatever. You're treating it as a problem to be solved with engineering and AI is merely a tool to do so. It is, in my experience, vanishingly rare for an engineer to have a problem that needs to be solved with multiple hours of unattended AI code generation. I've only found one single application where it makes even the slightest amount of sense to have an AI grind away for hours on end. I'm reverse engineering a widget which contains five separate firmware images. I've dumped the binary from the widget and I set the AI to decompile and reverse engineer these interrelated firmware projects. It's a compelx task, but very well bounded. It's not complicated work, but it's a lot of work, and the end result is a C-shaped pile of text that is only informative, it never would be compilable on its own even if I did it by hand. The quality of the output is tightly bounded by the input assembly and the overall output artifact is documentation in the shape of code. I don't have any qualms about letting an AI go ham on it unattended because the stakes are zero. But if the AI can beat the assembly into a recognizable C project, it's much easier for me to read and reason about. Easy win, I think. vitally3643, 1 day ago

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing > I actually have another draft post in the barrel about how I think we should see a resurgence of the ‘flash game’ renaissance because it has become so much easier to make fun little games with AI tooling. I have been lurking on the aigamedev subreddit to see exactly what sort of games people are coming up with and I can say I have been incredibly disappointing. I've been faithfully trying the games people post and have come to the conclusion that game design is a very difficult art to learn, and something LLMs really can't help with that much. My guess is that these games are "fun" just like toddler paintings are "beautiful." And there are so many quality indie games you could get for the 25+ dollars you'd spend generating the code. Anyways, I guess that's another discussion for another blog post. uludag, 2 days ago

Re: There is a shadow hanging over this Fable thing OP point out that OpenAI used the "too dangerous to release" marketing ploy with GPT-2... Positioning this as "both sides" have played this card. But at this time Dario was at OpenAI and was a co-author on the GPT-2 research paper announcing the model. The "too dangerous to release" approach has been him the whole time, at both companies. andrewparker, 2 days ago

Re: Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models To give you further perspective, Amazon has a $50B stake in OpenAI and a $5B stake in Anthropic. If things were flipped, I highly doubt Amazon would be running straight to the feds. fny, 1 day ago

Re: Amazon CEO's talks with U.S. officials triggered crackdown on Anthropic models It’s a great way to regulate if you’re corrupt. When the rules are opaque and arbitrary, there’s a lot more room for corruption. aqme28, 1 day ago

Re: GLM 5.2 Is Out In the last few days, Chinese labs have given us MiniMaxM3, KimiK2.7 and now GLM5.2. Meanwhile US is censoring models. Reads like fiction. segmondy, 1 day ago

Re: GLM 5.2 Is Out Seems like there's no official blog post with benchmark results yet. But I'm once again thankful for the Chinese AI labs for being open with their work and contributing it to the world under permissive licenses like this. The Fable 5 fiasco is just another reminder of how valuable these things are to have. Reubend, 1 day ago

Re: The Birth and Death of JavaScript (2014) I love(?) that he absolutely predicted a global disaster between 2020-2025, he just got the wrong type. Which is very JavaScript. DavidPiper, 9 hours ago

Re: Israeli firm BlackCore suspected of meddling in New York and Scotland votes As a New Yorker this doesn’t shock me too much. The level of “Mamdani is an anti-Semite” sentiment I saw online (Reddit particularly) felt truly hysterical. And wasn’t matched by any equivalent in the offline world. afavour, 21 hours ago

Re: No, everyone is not using AI for everything I assume it's because he is seeking to pay rent, food bills, and other expenses through employment. emodendroket, 2 hours ago