Hacker News: fra

New comment by fra in "Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy"

fra — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 14:01:41 +0000

For all intents and purposes Character.ai was acquired in August 2024, and this is just the mess leftover from their run around antitrust regulation.

The company filing for chapter 11 today is shell that was left after Google "hi-quired" (the opposite of acqui-hired) the founding team. The shareholders got paid ($2.7B from Google), the founding team moved on, and what's left is the corporate structure and whoever Google did not want.

It sucks for the people left over (but then again, it also sucks to be part of the team that's laid off in a merger). It's also a terrible practice that I hope the Justice department and the CFTC will put an end to soon.

New comment by fra in "Jeff – Jev-compatible 0.8B decision models, trained at home, ~30 ms"

fra — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 22:37:40 +0000

BERT need to be fine tuned for your use case, Jev generalizes. It’s a pretty big difference!

New comment by fra in "I built non-autoregressive decision models with RL a year ago"

fra — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 07:09:48 +0000

Most valuable comment here. You can fine tune BERT to perform really well on classification tasks. What's exciting about Jev is that it generalizes. Laya does not!

New comment by fra in "DeepSeek v4.1 Flash Is Now Our Best Hacking Model"

fra — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 17:04:36 +0000

Interesting result, but the writing is very poor.

New comment by fra in "Top Pentagon Official Contracted Personal Lawyer to Handle Minerals Deal"

fra — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:44:51 +0000

I agree that from the perspective of a business owner this would seem very normal. "I need legal services for X, and I happen to know and trust a very good outside counsel for this" is very normal. Additionally, law firms have super robust conflict of interest policies so you can expect this would have been reviewed in details.

However, I think this story brings up two important topics:

1. It is important that high level government officials avoid not just actual conflicts of interest but also the APPEARANCE of a conflict of interest.

2. The Trump administration has taken a much more liberal approach to conflicts of interest than most admins, and this has undermined trust in government. The fact that this story got people so riled up is a great illustration of it. This is not good for the country!

New comment by fra in "Nvidia Insists It Can Keep Printing Money to Fund the AI Boom"

fra — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 16:08:24 +0000

The demand signals never allocated the resources, a small number of people always did. Those people react to the demand signals (and they still do).

IMO a more important question is: what happens when the market power of a segment of society grows much greater than the rest? In a "K-shaped" economy, the top 20% have so much spending power (and even more future spending power) than their demand signals can overwhelm the rest. Then IMO the market won't respond to the demand signals of the bottom 20% and capitalism stops working for all. Add to that the possibility of AI automating more and more work and you have a system that only works for folks at the tops.

This isn't a resource allocation problem! it's a purchasing power distribution problem.

New comment by fra in "GLM-5.3 is now open-weight"

fra — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:50:06 +0000

h/t to DeepInfra for being the first 3rd party provider for it on OpenRouter (https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.3?endpoint=b711bea7-3994-49...).

New comment by fra in "France reaches 94.9% fiber coverage in 2026"

fra — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:56:00 +0000

Less progressive than in the USA, believe it or not…

New comment by fra in "There's no such thing as a small software team anymore"

fra — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 03:27:17 +0000

I would take the other side of that bet. In five years, there won’t be more outages than today.

New comment by fra in "Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit"

fra — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:26:59 +0000

I think most business will decline to do any further business with you after you threaten to sue them. There are even patent licenses that automatically get voided in the event you sue your counterparty for any reason.

New comment by fra in "Ask HN: Do you know of any company that went back to hand-written code?"

fra — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:11:11 +0000

the number of companies using local AI for development is too small to draw any conclusions from.

New comment by fra in "Why Can't You Pack a Bag? (2024)"

fra — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:44:50 +0000

I have a simple list: money, medication, identification, underwear, bathing suit. Everything else you can figure out.

New comment by fra in "Bending Spoons makes first post-IPO acquisition with $1.3B Airtable deal"

fra — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:44:08 +0000

Deals of this type are usually cash free and debt free. The cash went to the shareholders. Hence the implied valuation of $2.5B.

New comment by fra in "At least 105 past YC founders have worked at OpenAI and Anthropic"

fra — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:52:28 +0000

I’ve seen many people climb the SWE ladder or build a YC company (having done both myself), and trust me the founder route is not the most efficient. You only believe this because you didn’t see the 2 failed startups and 10 year journey grinding 80h weeks almost running out of cash a few times.

Jensen Huang himself says nobody in their right mind should start a company https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/11/jensen-huang-i-didnt-kno...

New comment by fra in "New York becomes the first state to impose a data center moratorium"

fra — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 16:52:50 +0000

For two reasons: 1. They create externalities 2. They generate an economic flux that can be taxed

New comment by fra in "Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health"

fra — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:04:54 +0000

My experience could not be more different. I’ve made life long friends at work, especially when I was working for smaller firms. I don’t think those relationships are transactional.

New comment by fra in "MacBook Neo is so popular that Apple doubled production"

fra — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:49:13 +0000

no chance

New comment by fra in "The dead economy theory"

fra — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:57:49 +0000

France, USA, Australia to name 3 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_self...).

New comment by fra in "How to convert between wealth and income tax"

fra — Fri, 22 May 2026 18:57:07 +0000

If you follow his logic and believe that the ultra-wealthy pay too little tax (as e.g. Warren Buffett does), then a balanced approach is to set the tax rate to: "37% of income or 1.85% of wealth, whichever is higher".

This would close the gap between Buffett's tax rate and that of his secretary, but would not be the "highest taxes in the world" that PG decries.

Squaring the Circle on Employee Equity

fra — Sat, 02 May 2026 17:37:38 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.baldassari.me/employee-equity/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988552

Points: 2

# Comments: 0