I'd really like to see a regular poll on HN that keeps track of which AI coding agents are the most popular among this community, like the TIOBE Index for programming languages.
Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.
It is difficult to say this is what consumers want, when right now consumers are getting the best of both worlds: The ease of AI agents without the long-term negative consequences of destroying the publishers who created all the high quality training data in the first place.
I think in the long term the highest quality content creators are going to find ways to keep their information out of AI training data, and put it behind walled gardens.
While yes, I am attempting to collect ad revenue from users, and yes, I don't want somebody competing with me and cutting me out the loop, a large part of it is controlling my content. I'm not arguing whether the AI chatbot has the legal right to access the page, I'm not a legal scholar. What I'm saying is that the leading search engines also have the equal rights to access whatever content they want, and yet they all give webmasters the following tools:
- Ability to prevent their crawlers from accessing URLs via robots.txt
- Ability to prevent a page from being indexed on the internet (noindex tag)
- Ability to remove existing pages that you don't want indexed (webmaster tools)
- Ability to remove an entire domain from the search engine (webmaster tools)
It is really impolite for the AI chatbots to go around and flout all these existing conventions because they know that webmasters would restrict their access because it's much less beneficial than it is for existing search engines.
In the long run, all this is going to lead to is more anti-bot countermeasures, more content behind logins (which can have legally binding anti-AI access restrictions) and less new original content. The victim will be all humans who aren't using a chatbot to slightly benefit the ones who are.
And again, I'm not suggesting that AI chatbots should not be allowed to load webpages, just that webmasters should be able to opt out of it.
The AI isn't "reading the web" though, they are reading the top hits on the search results, and are free-riding on the access that Google/Bing gets in order to provide actual user traffic to their sites. Many webmasters specifically opt their pages out of being in the search results (via robots.txt and/or "noindex" directives) when they believe the cost/benefit of the bot traffic isn't worth the user traffic they may get from being in the search results.
One of my websites that gets a decent amount of traffic has pretty close to a 1-1 ratio of Googlebot accesses compared to real user traffic referred from Google. As a webmaster I'm happy with this and continue to allow Google to access the site.
If ChatGPT is giving my website a ratio of 100 bot accesses (or more) compared to 1 actual user sent to my site, I very much should have to right to decline their access.
A datacenter could consume a lot of water with evaporative cooling. I don't know how prevalent it is, but given how cheap and efficient evaporative cooling is, I'd guess datacenters use it a lot where possible (probably in combination with other cooling methods).
Coincidentally I just had a professionally done garage door spring replacement today, and I asked the repairman this question, and here is what he said:
1. The springs lift the door from the bottom, and from each side, which puts less load on the door itself as compared to if the entire weight were being lifted from the top middle every time.
2. The motors can be smaller, quieter and use less power
3. In case of power failure, the door is much more functional and safer the less apparently weight it has.
Also the springs themselves are very unlikely to be dangerous (as long as you don't try to replace them yourself), because he said they almost always break when the door is at the closed state, because that is when they are under the most tension. Therefore on the whole, the springs in practice offer no practical safety risk, while greatly increasing the safety of the door in it's normal operation while also reducing wear and tear on the door. They also allow people to have heavier types of doors if they want them.
The people who come up with 409a prices have every incentive to make it as low as possible provided it is somewhat defensible to the IRS.
I assure you they can get more creative than saying that the last preferred price was at $X, therefore our hands are tied and the common must be close to that. They can take into consideration the preferred preferences, the current state of the business, the time since the last round, etc. For example, the 409a value can keep going down and down if the value of the business is (defensibly) going down and down, regardless of the last fundraising round.
Self driving electric cars are much better than car shares as they'll have significantly higher usage rates and eliminate much of the need for parking spots in dense downtown areas.
If you believe car shares are part of an efficient transportation future then self-driving cars are part of it!
I'd just like to note the irony of saying how bad Google is while at the same time saying that Google's general purpose search engine is still better than any of the specific search engines of these individual sites.
Perhaps the issue isn't that Google is bad, and the issue is that search is incredibly hard.
Generally speaking the people who live in SF aren't comparing SF to Boise, they are comparing SF to other elite cities like NYC, LA, Boston, Austin, etc. And the COL is not 2-3x higher in SF than those other cities.
Also as a little story about how crime infested SF is, a couple years ago my wife accidentally left her key ring in the lock on our front door (which included car keys to a car right out front), where they stayed for the next ~18 hours, right in obvious public view from the street, until we noticed the next morning. And lo and behold the crime was so bad that the keys were right there the next morning and we had a nice laugh about it.
You always need somewhere to live, so you can only "sell high" if that means you can "buy low" somewhere else. If all bay area houses go up 10%, then you haven't actually gained anything assuming you still want to live in the bay area.
You also lose at least 5-6% of the value of real estate every time you buy or sell. So given that buying/selling real estate is complicated and expensive, and moving is complicated and expensive, for the vast majority of people, the value of the house going up and down _in the short term_ is mostly irrelevant.
I've logged a lot of miles of Comma in a 2023 Hyundai Ioniq and 2022 Toyota Prius Prime, and the built in driving assist of both cars is nowhere near Comma, both in terms of steering and accelerator/brake.
Things that Comma handles seamlessly that the built-in cruise in both cars will not:
- Full stop and go
- Sharp turns on the highway that require slowing down (both built-in adaptive cruise modes will gladly just drive you off a cliff at 65 mph)
- Situations where the lane lines are hard to see or are implied
- Non-highway driving
- Not requiring me to touch the steering wheel every 20 seconds
Maybe those things work in higher end cars (though I'd say the Ioniq is a fairly high-end car), but then again with Comma you get it for ~$2k in a ton of cars instead of having to buy a luxury car.
It is true that if you are on a highway, with clear lane lines, the steering assist in both cars is certainly a lot better than nothing, but it's just not nearly matching the reliability and versatility of Comma in any sort of imperfect situation.
As a very happy user of Comma, I think it is reasonable to say the company is going to fail, but that ignores that the product they created is still awesome. Comma is light years better than any built-in driving assist in any non-Tesla car. And it's comparable to Tesla for far less money.
The reason the company might fail is because their main thesis, being that car manufacturers would just license the self driving tech to somebody else (like Comma), never came about. Car manufacturers are just too conservative. It was a perfectly reasonable bet to make though. Unfortunately they ended up in the business of selling hardware and giving away software for free when they wanted to be in the business of selling software.
There is a very big difference between giving no credit and giving a fair amount of credit, which might be small. If you listened to the podcast they talked about Aaron in a non-disparaging way, and a way that I'm sure is accurate to their beliefs about it.
But my point is that _even if_ Aaron was super, super important to the company 16 years ago (which I can't speak to), Reddit was a tiny little fledgling of what it is now. From what little I know about Reddit's history, I know that Aaron stopped working on Reddit very soon after he started and has had no contribution to the company since then.
I also do think it's interesting that the people that have worked at Reddit for years/decades all seem to have a similar opinion of the situation, and the people who haven't worked at Reddit at all are the ones that feel so strongly that Aaron is being wronged somehow.
Maybe Aaron himself was more proud of all the other things he accomplished! Saying he was an important but small part of Reddit's story is still something!
If I had to guess as to why his contributions are marginalized, it would be that his contributions were ~16 years ago to a version of the website that is vastly different in scope and scale to the one that exists today. Founders are important entities for companies, but just having the title of "founder" doesn't also magically mean whatever contributions and decisions you made have to be memorialized and defended forever after so many things have changed.
Hard to keep up with all the changes and it would be nice to see a high level view of what people are using and how that might be shifting over time.