jonnat

We need to fight back against this type of both-sidesism and other demoralization propaganda on HN.

They don't need to start 100 companies, they just need to start one, call it Jane Street 2.0 if you will, and all their funding troubles would be gone. But they don't, because that would be competing with actual intelligence in a very measurable way. Instead they keep acquihiring companies like Astral, known for carefully crafting software rather than vive coding, while claiming they are just about to solve all humanity's problems.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.