Hacker News: jonnat

New comment by jonnat in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

jonnat — Wed, 27 May 2026 21:01:34 +0000

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.

New comment by jonnat in "Meta acquires Moltbook"

jonnat — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:31:28 +0000

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

New comment by jonnat in "AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it"

jonnat — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 12:58:36 +0000

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.

New comment by jonnat in "xAI joins SpaceX"

jonnat — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:12:32 +0000

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.

New comment by jonnat in "Apple says it may stop shipping to the EU"

jonnat — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 15:28:31 +0000

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.

New comment by jonnat in "Just let me select text"

jonnat — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 19:52:52 +0000

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

New comment by jonnat in "Zorin OS"

jonnat — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 16:05:19 +0000

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

New comment by jonnat in "OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive"

jonnat — Wed, 21 May 2025 18:04:33 +0000

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.

New comment by jonnat in "All four major web browsers are about to lose 80% of their funding"

jonnat — Thu, 01 May 2025 11:15:10 +0000

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?

New comment by jonnat in "American Disruption"

jonnat — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 15:17:11 +0000

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.

New comment by jonnat in "Databricks to Buy Data-Management Startup Tabular"

jonnat — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 19:22:15 +0000

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.

New comment by jonnat in "Xbox Console Sales Are Tanking as Microsoft Brings Games to PS5"

jonnat — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 16:28:51 +0000

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.

New comment by jonnat in "Tesla to lay off more than 10% of its staff"

jonnat — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 12:01:53 +0000

> Elon is Tesla's marketing driver so we can't kick him out

I confess that when he started the downward spiral, I thought it might be part of some marketing strategy: they had to bring the other half of the population who think global warming is a hoax/unimportant to EVs in order to be truly successful. It became clear very quickly that he's just losing his sanity.

New comment by jonnat in "Is .NET just miles ahead or am I delusional?"

jonnat — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 11:43:31 +0000

Whenever this comes up, my thought (admittedly from an outsider perspective) is that people can say that .NET is far ahead in the same way some may say that Oracle is far ahead: Both are enterprise focused technologies that were built using a sales-driven design, trying to check as many feature boxes as possible to help sales teams in their pitches. The problem is when you've been to too many sales pitches and start to equate box-checking with product quality.

New comment by jonnat in "Full AMD Linux Laptop (Radeon 7600M XT GPU, Ryzen CPU): Tuxedo Sirius 16 Review"

jonnat — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 15:39:52 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_scale

It would cost substantially more for a small-scale company to produce a laptop with the quality of MacBooks than it costs Apple. That cost difference would have to be passed to the consumer.

New comment by jonnat in "Daft: Distributed DataFrame for Python"

jonnat — Fri, 01 Mar 2024 15:05:35 +0000

It has an Apache 2.0 license. I assume it allows it to be repackaged removing telemetry.

New comment by jonnat in "Over 100k Infected Repos Found on GitHub"

jonnat — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 14:52:06 +0000

They probably mean that the actual number of malicious repos is probably very hard to get.

The article reaches the 100K number by searching for repos with patches with a particular string contained in this specific attack, so it's likely missing many malicious repos that use different methods of infection.

New comment by jonnat in "Cratering motor fuel sales in Norway show the death spiral that can end oil"

jonnat — Sat, 21 Oct 2023 15:34:03 +0000

While it't true that oil is used for plastics and chemicals today, it's absolutely not the case that it will be drilled into the future when demand for gasoline disappears.

Oil is not strictly a necessary precursor to much of the chemical industry, it is rather a convenient raw material because the high value of gasoline makes lights virtually free. In the early days of oil exploration, lights were constantly burned as they had no economic use at the scale they were produced.

If oil exploration would continue just for the sake of chemicals, the cost structure of these precursors would fundamentally change and it would become more attractive to replace them with renewable sources.

New comment by jonnat in "Meta to release open-source commercial AI model"

jonnat — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 16:03:31 +0000

Quite the opposite, this is great for Meta's competitors. Meta is not trying to get market share with this strategy, it's trying to commoditize their complements (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/)

Content is a complement to a social network: the cheaper it is to create content, the more content is available, the easier it is to optimize a feed, the larger the time people spend in the platform, the higher the revenue. GenAI is just a method to drive the cost of content creation to zero.

New comment by jonnat in "GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct"

jonnat — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 15:46:32 +0000

I was with you until your last sentence. Taking you point at face value, people who despise codes of conduct nonetheless working under a code of conduct would just be another example of people disagreeing with each other (in this case disagreeing with people who favor the implementation of codes of conduct) and yet still being able to work together.

One could argue that the difference here is that codes of conduct are being enforced in a top-down fashion, that is, the people you disagree with are actually in the leadership of the project. But I can see how this argument could just as well be used to justify the value of codes of conduct.

FWIW, I've tried but I simply cannot decide if I'm ultimately in favor or against codes of conduct.