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Why is Zig so cool?

https://nilostolte.github.io/tech/articles/ZigCool.html
287•vitalnodo•8h ago•152 comments

Snapchat open-sources Valdi a cross-platform UI framework

https://github.com/Snapchat/Valdi
208•yehiaabdelm•7h ago•53 comments

Becoming a Compiler Engineer

https://rona.substack.com/p/becoming-a-compiler-engineer
191•lalitkale•9h ago•85 comments

Myna: Monospace typeface designed for symbol-heavy programming languages

https://github.com/sayyadirfanali/Myna
246•birdculture•13h ago•114 comments

How did I get here?

https://how-did-i-get-here.net/
195•zachlatta•11h ago•36 comments

Immutable Software Deploys Using ZFS Jails on FreeBSD

https://conradresearch.com/articles/immutable-software-deploy-zfs-jails
55•vermaden•7h ago•21 comments

Why I love OCaml (2023)

https://mccd.space/posts/ocaml-the-worlds-best/
315•art-w•17h ago•221 comments

Ruby Solved My Problem

https://newsletter.masilotti.com/p/ruby-already-solved-my-problem
214•joemasilotti•12h ago•86 comments

How to find your ideal customer, right away

https://www.reifyworks.com/writing/2023-01-30-iicp
18•mrbbk•4d ago•3 comments

YouTube Removes Windows 11 Bypass Tutorials, Claims 'Risk of Physical Harm'

https://news.itsfoss.com/youtube-removes-windows-11-bypass-tutorials/
563•WaitWaitWha•10h ago•195 comments

Local First Htmx

https://elijahm.com/posts/local_first_htmx/
19•srid•5h ago•11 comments

FSF40 Hackathon

https://www.fsf.org/events/fsf40-hackathon
74•salutis•5d ago•2 comments

Running a 68060 CPU in Quadra 650

https://github.com/ZigZagJoe/Macintosh-Q650-68060
30•zdw•6h ago•4 comments

Venn Diagram for 7 Sets

https://moebio.com/research/sevensets/
118•bramadityaw•3d ago•25 comments

How a devboard works (and how to make your own)

https://kaipereira.com/journal/build-a-devboard
65•kaipereira•9h ago•9 comments

Cerebras Code now supports GLM 4.6 at 1000 tokens/sec

https://www.cerebras.ai/code
70•nathabonfim59•7h ago•44 comments

Show HN: Find matching acrylic paints for any HEX color

https://acrylicmatch.com/
14•dotspencer•4d ago•7 comments

Can you save on LLM tokens using images instead of text?

https://pagewatch.ai/blog/post/llm-text-as-image-tokens/
13•lpellis•6d ago•4 comments

Transducer: Composition, abstraction, performance (2018)

https://funktionale-programmierung.de/en/2018/03/22/transducer.html
92•defmarco•3d ago•3 comments

Angel Investors, a Field Guide

https://www.jeanyang.com/posts/angel-investors-a-field-guide/
128•azhenley•14h ago•27 comments

Mullvad: Shutting down our search proxy Leta

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/shutting-down-our-search-proxy-leta
108•holysoles•7h ago•61 comments

Ribir: Non-intrusive GUI framework for Rust/WASM

https://github.com/RibirX/Ribir
58•adamnemecek•11h ago•7 comments

Using the Web Monetization API for fun and profit

https://blog.tomayac.com/2025/11/07/using-the-web-monetization-api-for-fun-and-profit/
51•tomayac•9h ago•14 comments

Why I love my Boox Palma e-reader

https://minimal.bearblog.dev/why-i-love-my-boox-palma-e-reader/
61•pastel5•5d ago•30 comments

Analysis of Hedy Lamarr's Contribution to Spread-Spectrum Communication

https://researchers.one/articles/24.01.00001v4
53•drmpeg•8h ago•38 comments

VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf Receives the European SFS Award 2025

https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20251107-01.en.html
300•kirschner•11h ago•54 comments

James Watson has died

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/07/science/james-watson-dead.html
290•granzymes•12h ago•158 comments

Shell Grotto: England's mysterious underground seashell chamber

https://boingboing.net/2025/09/05/shell-grotto-englands-mysterious-underground-seashell-chamber.html
19•the-mitr•3d ago•6 comments

Blood, Brick and Legend: The Chemistry of Dracula's Castle

https://news.research.gatech.edu/2025/10/31/blood-brick-and-legend-chemistry-draculas-castle
5•dhfbshfbu4u3•4d ago•0 comments

WinObjC – The Windows Bridge for iOS

https://github.com/microsoft/WinObjC
39•zerr•5d ago•8 comments
Open in hackernews

Sam Altman's pants are on fire

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/sam-altmans-pants-are-totally-on
163•toomuchtodo•6h ago

Comments

rhetocj23•5h ago
I personally called it within my circle that when Friar was hired she was going to commit a tremendous blunder. It may have been innocent, but the trend is now reversing in regards to its mantlehold of mindshare of consumers.

Someone I know who has been an absolute staunch advocate of chatgpt,and has been for the best part of the past 1.5 years suddenly changed their tune earlier this week. That is my signal that things are turning south.

There will be a reprieve for some time, with increasing revenue. But eventually that will jam to a halt and all the doubts will intensify.

an0malous•5h ago
The VCs and bloggers have also shifted tone and are hedging to save themselves from embarrassment. It used to be “AGI is just around the corner” and now it’s “Just because we haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean we never will” (Andreesen) or “Actually bubbles are good” (Stratechery).

Gary called it a long time ago but I think the Dwarkesh and Karpathy podcast is when the shift started.

rhetocj23•5h ago
Something to note about this craze and Crypto is that the world is full of bozos who do not think deeply whatsoever.
pinnochio•4h ago
So many goons on here who keep flagging submissions like these, or trying to discredit them with superficial criticism ("he keeps saying the same thing!"). It's sad this behavior doesn't get modded.

Edit: lol at the downvotes. You're just proving my point, goons.

rhetocj23•4h ago
I pity them. They are not as far ahead in life and understanding as they want to be or are supremely deluded.

I just wished the bozos actually replied to the post instead of hiding behind a button.

an0malous•4h ago
I’d also add these lessons I’ve personally learned:

- Greed is blinding even to intelligent people, especially greedy people in groups

- Society is incredibly vulnerable to lying, we mostly rely on the disincentive that people usually feel bad about it, but the ones who don’t can get away with anything.

- There’s really only a subtle difference between many successful startups and Ponzi schemes. Sam Altman’s grift is only one level more sophisticated than SBF or Elizabeth Holmes

goatlover•4h ago
- Thinking the present is somehow special and unlike similar past events or trends.
Spooky23•4h ago
The Ben Thompson take attempting to find a lemonade in the lemons is the most terrifying: the bubble will pop and leave us with… excess electric generation capacity? (And bankrupt power producers?)

We truly live in the dumbest timeline.

Neywiny•5h ago
There was also some woman (maybe a high up exec, I don't know their full roster) in one of those live audience interviews saying they were looking towards a government backstop on the loans. They know they have no way of ponying up 1.4T. That's an insane amount of money. Honestly if more investing and startups were "we have x front-runners, if he dies he dies" I think we'd be in s better spot. Maybe don't invest in capturing-helium-in-a-colander.ai just because it ends in "AI"
mitthrowaway2•5h ago
I think you must mean Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI.
Neywiny•5h ago
Most likely. Who better to know their financial status is fried than the CFO
bpodgursky•4h ago
You can criticize OpenAI for many things but this was blatantly misquoted.

They were talking about backstops for chips, to get fabs constructed in the US. If anyone else said this, it would have been considered a great idea, both republicans and democrats talked about the same thing to get TSMC production into the US, but everyone pretended that OpenAI was talking about data centers in this context. They weren't/

neuvarius•5h ago
For sake of HN can we get a rundown that isn’t Gary Marcus flinging shit on people? I’d like something a bit more objective.
samrus•5h ago
You could just read the primary sources. The things hes showing people to have said.

The gist is altman was trying to be slick about requiesting a government bailout, got called out on his bullshit, and then decided to lie and say he never wanted a bailout

The implication being the bubble is getting closer and closer to popping, since even altman is thinking about how to survive the pop

ungreased0675•5h ago
Somehow people like him seem to survive just fine. Adam Neumann still has infinite money and Billy McFarland is still getting investors for various schemes.
NBJack•4h ago
Yep; it will just screw the employees, the investors (or at least those that didn't suddenly get clairvoyant and find an exit right before it hits the fan), and many, many apps relying on their APIs.
this_user•4h ago
Altman definitely has enough wealth of his own to survive no matter what. But if you look at how he operates, it is pretty clear that what he really wants is power, and he is usually extremely good at getting it. But OpenAI is rapidly losing their leadership in the space, and it turns out that their product has no moat. Meanwhile, new Chinese open source SOTA models just keep coming on an almost daily basis.
neuvarius•3h ago
Unfortunately the shit flinging is recursive. I’m not looking to read more conjecture. And people are pulling an Elon v2 with Altman and the “any day now he’ll make a fatal mistake!” nonsense.

I’m not holding my breath for hot takes, but I got what I came for: sama said some stuff, the thread.

nostrebored•5h ago
No particular love for Sam Altman, but the article reads as “I was right about X, so my interpretation of Y is correct.”

I don’t see any particular contradiction. Moving fabs onshore is absolutely in the interest of both parties.

samrus•5h ago
The crux of the article was altman trying to get a bailout, and when people called him on his bullshit, lying thay he never wanted a bailout. You cant trust the man
ineedasername•4h ago
It looks like the actual crux was Altman's plea that the backtops be granted... Not to OpenAI? The document linkedfrom the article that had the actual ask, rather than cleanup over deliberate misatributions by others, was to... "Extend eligibility", for the AMIC money already carved out, to companies that are producers of things such as "grid components such as transformers and specialized steel".

So: Altman did not ask for OpenAI loans to be guaranteed, nor did the CFO. It was on behalf of others drawn into the needs of the industry the AMIC grant was supposed to support. Self interested by OpenAI? Sure! And also not about to make the top 10k leaderboard for "sleezy things companies do".

Jedd•5h ago
That wasn't my take - it was more broadly a 'given past statements and accompanying behaviour, we can't trust future statements to align with future behaviour'.

Can you more explicitly describe what the X and Y points you allude to are?

nostrebored•4h ago
Every “6 months ago I said this!” added little to the article. In a real investigative report it would lay out the facts and fairly objectively state “6 months ago, Sam Altman was accused of …”

The article as a whole just seems libelous? Almost personal?

chrisco255•4h ago
It's not a report, it's a blog post. Of course it's personal.
nostrebored•3h ago
You regularly make personal attacks against individuals on the internet?

Maybe I’m just old, but I don’t see the appeal?

If you’re trying to convince people, then you should probably have a convincing argument. Otherwise it feels like kiwifarms-posting with a megaphone.

milowata•3h ago
Maybe you’re missing the context of who Gary Marcus is
chrisco255•5m ago
A blog is an opinion piece. The subject of interest, Sam Altman, is a public figure and CEO of one of the fastest growing tech companies. He's testified in front of Congress on AI regulation and has a lot of pull and influence on regulators. Some of the things and actions he's taken in the past are controversial, thus, thinkpieces get written. The AI industry is quickly en route to trillion dollar plus territory (already there if you count Nvidia as an AI company). There's a lot of money and emotions at stake for the AI gold rush. When someone is at the forefront of these types of things, like other public business figures with controversial tactics (Musk, Gates, Jobs, Kalanick, etc) it draws attention.
hiddencost•5h ago
Gary Marcus has been writing a piece like this roughly every 2 months for 20 years, and he gets a lot of attention because he seems respectable (he is not), and many papers are looking for a respectable source that has this opinion.
nextworddev•4h ago
He’s playing the Nouriel Roubini game (another NYU adj prof).

Last time I checked Nouriel was partying up in the Hamptons so being a permabear is lucrative.

an0malous•4h ago
Why is he not respectable?
pols45•4h ago
Cause he hasn't built anything or found a job since he sold his last company ages ago.
Supermancho•4h ago
Respect can be earned through many means, not just through goalposts set by financiers.
pols45•3h ago
Gary Marcus is not changing the story financiers are telling each other about AI. He has been telling the same story without making a dent in their stories. And that is because he is not in the arena. What he says, does and thinks doesn't matter.
anothernewdude•4h ago
So upon finding success, he has escaped the struggle that people are forced into against their will. How unreasonable of him.
ants_everywhere•4h ago
Gary Marcus has a very particular view of human psychology that was popular for a while, especially in the early 2000s. Major proponents include Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor. This view was heavily influenced by symbolic computers when symbolic computers were new and so held some mental share leading into the dotcom boom. For several reasons, one of which is the replication crisis, this view is no longer nearly as popular.

One of the major beliefs of this view is that LLMs are essentially impossible because there's not enough information in language to learn it unless you have a special purpose language-learning module built into the brain by evolution. This is Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus" argument.

Marcus still defends this view and because of this bias is committed to trying to prove to everyone that LLMs are not possible or at least that they're some kind of illusion. There's a sense in which they threaten his fundamental concept of how the brain works.

In proposing and defending these views he appears to me and others to be having a sort of internal crisis that's playing out publicly where his need to be right about this is coloring his judgment and objectivity.

pinnochio•3h ago
> LLMs are essentially impossible

> trying to prove to everyone that LLMs are not possible or at least that they're some kind of illusion

This is such poor phrasing I can't help but wonder if it was intentional. The argument is over whether LLMs are capable of AGI, not whether "LLMs are possible".

You also 100% do not have to buy into Chomsky's theory of the brain to believe LLMs won't achieve AGI.

ants_everywhere•3h ago
We weren't talking about AGI. It sounds like that's a topic you are interested in. It's a fine topic just not the one we're discussing.

And my phrasing was wonderful and perfect.

option•5h ago
This isn't a comment about Sam Altman, but given Gary's track record, why would anyone listen to him?
spiderice•5h ago
Care to enlighten those of us that know nothing about Gary's track record?
hiddencost•5h ago
He posts some variant of this kind of anti AI piece roughly every two months for over 20 years. He's been wrong so far. Eventually he'll get lucky, but his track record is abysmal.
rhetocj23•5h ago
So what? Who are you exactly? Pretty sure Gary's word means more than yours.
ta9000•4h ago
I don’t think they kind of comment belongs here.
ineedasername•3h ago
On this board, there's an exceptionally good chance a response will come from someone who wrote code or published research fundamental to your daily life, perhaps your favorite sci novel, etc. Not that such questions are ever a reasoned entrance into discussions you aren't burning down-- they're not. But there are still some few places on the internet where a bit if discussion can happen, and this is usually one where the noise doesn't fully drown that out.
goatlover•4h ago
Has he been wrong about everything? I doubt that. It's also a logical fallacy to dismiss his current argument because he's made wrong arguments before. What he's saying about Altman lying is true or false independent of anything else he's said prior.
prodigycorp•4h ago
point here is that his signal/noise is very poor, and the reason why people upvote him is because they agree with the headlines
superconduct123•5h ago
I don't understand, what prompted OpenAI recently to need this 1.4T investment?
pinnochio•5h ago
Believe it or not, that's actually a walkback from the $5 to $7 trillion he was pushing for almost two years ago.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/repor...

tootie•4h ago
I remember and it lends some credence to the notion that Altman is just making up big numbers.
jgalt212•4h ago
He was just anchoring.

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/w...

pinnochio•4h ago
Absolutely. It's anchoring in the service of a massive con.
Gigachad•5h ago
They are going all in, promising so many deals to so many companies that if OpenAI fails, the entire US economy will explode. Expecting the government will bail them out to prevent such a disaster.
goatlover•4h ago
Billionaires and corporations too big too fail are bad for democracy. They have an oversized impact on society and the government.
therein•4h ago
That would do nothing to prevent such a disaster. It would guarantee it.
JumpCrisscross•4h ago
> what prompted OpenAI recently to need this 1.4T investment?

Capital denial to competitors.

hoppp•4h ago
I think every company would like to have that. OpenAI is in a hyped up position that it can get it, so they go for it.

I don't buy that they can create AGI by investing trillions in training models and infrastructure.

If you ask me, this is just more money spent on pollution.

The need to replace humans to be profitable, just sounds like the end goal is to destroy the planet with datacenters and hurt people generally.

Sounds like a net negative for the planet.

an0malous•4h ago
All of Sam’s shenanigans go back to that one popular post on here many months ago about how AI has no moat. LLMs are a commodity, Chinese companies are just releasing them for free. Sam has gone all in on OpenAI and needs to secure his company, he knows it could be another decade until they discover an innovation on par with tranformers and there’s absolutely no way they can go from burning tens of billions of dollars a year to profitable by selling a rapidly commoditized technology.
sumedh•4h ago
LLMs are a commodity but ChatGpt is a brand, for most people AI means ChatGpt. They are not going to use Chinese models.

ChatGpt is also building other products/brands like Sora to capture more mindshare.

Linux is free and yet people use Windows.

woooooo•3h ago
An operating system is a lot stickier than a website URL.

Google has stayed on top for 25 years because they're better and free. LLM providers will have to compete on price doing expensive inference.

sumedh•2h ago
Google stayed on the top because of business deals with Apple and Firefox and then they got the biggest marketing tool called Chrome.

Chatgpt can become an Ad company just like Google probably bigger than Google.

an0malous•2h ago
All this transformer tech is a commodity, no one will care about the brand if an alternative is free so it’s a race to the bottom.

Yes people use Windows. Go look up the history of how that came to be, it had nothing to do with their brand. Sam is looking for his IBM.

tarsinge•10m ago
I don’t buy this argument about brand, in tech history has showed customers will switch overnight if a better option appears and there is no network effects or ecosystem lockin. BlackBerry had a brand too.
Spooky23•4h ago
The need to say “fuck you” to Elon and one-up him.
ineedasername•3h ago
Absolutely nothing. They don't, they didn't, it's a poorly stitched together attack job.

The 1.4 T amounts to a broad nearly decade long capex plan, not liabilities.

The loans and backstops etc were a request, not for OpenAI, but on behalf of manufacturers of grid equipment, manufacturers that OpenAI wouldike the government to consider as eligible for money already carved out by the AMIC national investment in chips and AI, and also probably more money as well-- it's a separate group of tangential industries that weren't initially considered, so why not ask? Sure it would help keep the wheels moving in OpenAI and the broad AI and US semiconductor industry, but it's far away from and ask by Altman for a bailout of his company.

techblueberry•2h ago
Narrator: it was in fact a bailout they were asking for.
chaosprint•5h ago
OpenAI's Bailout Blunder: How a CFO's Words Ignited a Firestorm

https://entropytown.com/articles/2025-11-06-openai-cfo/

"If you want to sell your shares, I'll find you a buyer." OpenAI and Microsoft Detail Landmark Partnership, Navigate Future of AI and Compute

https://founderboat.com/interviews/2025-11-01-openai-sam-sat...

Crazy sequences in a week...

lumost•4h ago
The "I don't need to answer your simple questions on profit and loss statements" sentiment was odd. Likely odd enough to spur institutional investors to dig deeper or attract short interest.
JumpCrisscross•4h ago
“Altman, sensing that he had massively blundered…”

Altman is in bed with Trump. He isn’t all in. But Tuesday evidencing an electoral shift makes Friar’s comments exceptionally ill timed.

siliconc0w•4h ago
That agro response to a perfectly reasonable question, "if you don't want your shares, we'll find you a buyer" instantly reminded me of that Bernie Madoff movie.
Animats•4h ago
Loan guarantees? Where did that come from?

The AI bubble must really be about to pop.

octoberfranklin•4h ago
Yeah that and the rush to IPO OpenAI....
sidcool•4h ago
I'm no Sam fan. But Gary Marcus is quite publicly a Sam critic. So I'd not dismiss it, but would also take it with a pinch of salt.
meander_water•4h ago
Here's the juicy stuff mentioned in the article: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...
octoberfranklin•4h ago
s/pants/hair/

Somebody please tell me how to short this. I'm going all in.

rsync•3h ago
You buy puts on TQQQ.
BluSyn•4h ago
I'm confused about language, as "loans" to me do not equal "bailout". The equating of the two seems odd, as many government incentives use loans that pay back with high interest, so governments MAKE money on those kinds of deals.

Also clear that the 1.4T figure includes some accounting for spend that does not come directly from OpenAI (grid/power/data infra for example). Obviously some government involvement is needed, but more at EPA/State/Local level to fast track construction permits, more-so than financial help from Treasury.

I'm confused why this generates such sensational headlines.

octoberfranklin•4h ago
This is the same kind of bullshit rationalization they used to say that the bank bailouts of 2009 weren't really bank bailouts.

They were bank bailouts.

Unsecured government loans are either bailouts, entitlements in disguise, or (usually misguided) attempts at broad economic stimulus. This definitely isn't either of the latter two.

BluSyn•2h ago
Unsecured government loan to a successful company to fund acceleration and growth is a "handout".

A "bailout" is what happened in 2009, in the sense the banks would literally have collapsed without it (and they probably should have).

OpenAI is not going to collapse without these loans. Huge difference.

Also for the record, not rationalizing, because I'm not in favor of either handouts or bailouts.