MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stale2002 | 2025-04-02 19:12:52+00:00
Former Twitch employee of 4 years here. Its a combinations of 2 things.

1: The Malaise of Big Tech caught up to them years ago, and Twitch simply can't build anymore. They are way too slow, bloated, and they have a list of dozens and dozens of failed/shutdown products/feature that failed to create growth.

They laid off over half the company in the last 3 years.

2: More nimble competitors like Kick.com have finally started seeing success. This is compounded by the fact that kick has an unlimited wallet, because it is funded by the massively successful crypto gambling company Stake.

This war-chest has allowed them to buy streamers by simply paying everyone on the platform an hourly rate to stream, based on viewership. And they can do so, profitably, because the streaming platform is simply a loss leader for the gambling platform.

Short story is, Twitch is screwed. They can't wait out the competitors like they did with previous platforms like mixer, because the new competitor isn't losing money. Gambling is massively profitable.

And they are too slow and have laid off too many people, to be able to innovate their way out of its current mess.

The only two paths they have left are a slow, but steady decline, or a hail mary play of firing their entire executive team and replacing it with people who will run Twitch like a wartime startup.
by pvg | 2025-04-02 19:13:02+00:00
Requiring justification for flags would immediately crud up threads with meta-debates.

That is true and I used to say it but the receipts people evade it with non-public receipts (which can maybe later somehow be audited). So I'm switching to dunking on the thing for its martinetism and pointless bureaucracy. It feels more self-indulgently righteous to boot!
by matvp | 2025-04-02 19:13:13+00:00
I contribute to OSS very often, mostly sponsored by the company I work for (we're in video streaming, and we're too small to build everything from scratch). Outside of company hours, I work on my personal streaming project [1], and I've had a couple of people find the "Buy me a coffee" button and GitHub sponsors page. While it is not a sustainable amount of sponsorship, the joy of seeing people support with a few bucks feels incredible. It's a passion project after all.

I used to maintain a private fork of an OSS project as I assumed my company wouldn't want specific features out there (especially since they gave a competitive advantage). I eventually met up with the maintainers of that project with a situation I couldn't figure out and they were so eager to help. After, I went to legal and told them it didn't feel fair to have OSS maintainers help out but keep it private, and to my surprise, they agreed. All I had to do was ask, and not assume.

[1] https://superstreamer.xyz/
by shw1n | 2025-04-02 19:13:14+00:00
This sentence was intended as that answer, but I guess it wasn't clear enough:

"And this is fundamentally why I don't discuss politics with friends.

It's not that I don't want or am scared of opposing views (in fact the opposite is true[8]), but rather because of how common others’ desire to "remain in the bubble" is."

I actually am willing to risk alienation to find people that enjoy this sort of discussion-based discovery as much as I do, but found most people I encounter don't actually want that -- so I try and respect what seems to be the average opinion.
by agentultra | 2025-04-02 19:13:16+00:00
> I think we're talking past each other.

Perhaps. I'm not saying that deadlines don't exist or shouldn't. I am saying that they're often unnecessary and most software teams can deliver value without them.

If you're in the embedded space there's no dodging deadlines. If you need to flash ROMs it could be months before you can do a release if you miss your deadline. You might not have enough money to survive until then.

If you're shipping boring, line-of-business enterprise SaaS you don't need deadlines. Customers want software that solves their problems and are happy with something that works for 80% and a steady rate of improvements over time. They want progress and milestones. There's nothing wrong with taking an extra week or month to reach the next milestone.

Where you get the "deadlines equal dollars," mentality in enterprise software is from the long sales cycle with the big price tags. A business is going to have reservations about dropping a few hundred thousand on a new software product. And so you end up with these negotiations between sales, management, and the software teams where you're lying about the deadlines to different parties in order to keep everything in line. I don't think that's a good way to go about it.

Especially when most of the time it's not even necessary. This was the finer point I was often finding myself in opposition to the sales folks with. Their reality was that deadlines are a negotiating chip they can't ignore. The software developers' reality was that any estimate about a deadline is completely made up of hopes, dreams, and unicorns. The easiest way to get people to work together, in my opinion and experience, is to cut out the lying and just be honest.

Some organizations like that, some don't. I went back into being an IC because I just can't operate at that level and keep my sanity/energy.
by somelamer567 | 2025-04-02 19:13:19+00:00
As somebody who's seen communities come and go over the last couple of decades, I cannot praise Hacker News highly enough. And we can thank the moderators for that. HN is like an oasis for me: polite, sane, and informative, and your values and principles really shine through, especially below the fold.

Thanks for keeping the standards so high here!
by plankalkyl | 2025-04-02 19:13:26+00:00
I am not an OSS contributor, so I have no personal experience whatsoever in this context.

But I saw this talk by Evan Czaplicki (author of Elm) a while ago.[1]

The talk is primarily about the economics of open-source programming languages, but I think that a lot of the issues discussed overlap with other areas of OSS.

From the description of the youtube video:

> In the mythology of open source, programming languages are created by people who seemingly have no direct economic function. They are just really good at compilers (somehow) and have a house to live in (somehow) and have a lifetime to devote to creating a useful programming language (somehow!)

> We will examine specific organizations that create programming languages. Where do the salaries for compiler engineers come from? How does Go end up with 5 engineers and Dart end up with 30? Who signs off on these expenses and why? Does this put any boundaries on language design or development practices? And how do the economics work for people outside of the major tech corporations?

> My goal is to give the talk I needed to hear 10 years ago when I was just starting on Elm. By clearly delineating the many variations of corporate funding and independent funding, I hope users will come away with a better foundation for evaluating and comparing programming languages.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8
by shw1n | 2025-04-02 19:14:11+00:00
I feel this way too, it's in one of the footnotes actually

"[8] Few things give me greater joy than a discovery-ridden conversation with smart friends, and this is only enhanced if I learn something I previously believed to be true is actually wrong. Seriously, come prove some core belief I have as wrong and you will quite literally make my week."

Thanks for reading!
by ziddoap | 2025-04-02 19:14:56+00:00
Probably because a single example at a single time point can't really be extrapolated to the entire platform across all times. The comment being downvoted proves nothing (as evidenced by the fact it's now upvoted to the 2nd top comment!)

And this comment of yours I'm replying to will probably get downvoted because it's a complaint about votes that contributes literally nothing to the conversation (in fact, detracts from it).
by bayarearefugee | 2025-04-02 19:15:07+00:00
I agree with you on all of this... and from a practical perspective one could argue it doesn't matter if he's a Kremlin agent or not if everything he does is indistinguishable from what a Kremlin agent would do.

But also if we are theorycrafting conspiracy theories, I think the explanation that makes most sense is widespread systemic blackmail originating from Russia but now spreading out virally through Trump. Because the suspicious behavior is not just coming from Trump but also the very many people who flipped from being very vocally against him to being pathetically loyal (see: Graham, Rubio, Cruz, Vance, and dozens of others).

It feels to me like there's got to be more going on there than people just hitching their wagons for political expediency, because a lot of them also have to know that this is all a cult of personality and when Trump is gone their wagons are going to be thrown into chaos and yet they've still hitched them...
by javier_e06 | 2025-04-02 19:15:13+00:00
I read in the article that phrase that has been popping here and there in my zeitgeist:

"exit strategy"

Like watching that game at the venue and the score is very much settled and you asked yourself:

"Where did I park?"

The revolution will not be televised.

No flying cars for us but here, takes this gadget and play Sudoku until whatever will happen, happens.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-02 19:15:55+00:00
> Cars are not buy it for life items.

No, but they certainly can be "buy it for the life of the car". I prefer that myself. New cars are nice, but I'm not going to trade up to a new car every few years. I will buy new (or new-ish), and then drive it until it dies 15 years later. Much more cost effective.
by Balmbli | 2025-04-02 19:16:11+00:00
I'm really shocked tbh.

I can't imagine the progression of ai and in particular robots but I assumed that the first robot would cost min 6 figures if not 7 but would still be worth it due to 24*7 and initial invest vs long term.

But the fact how good Gemini robotics is already and how cheap the first models are I do believe what will hinder us more than tech is people learning about it, testing it out and doing it but not technology.

I believe the world will look relevant different in 10 years.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-02 19:16:19+00:00
Ah I see. Yes, but you pick the card for the purpose of course. I also don't like the way they have such limited support on ROCm. But when it works it works well.

I have Nvidia cards too by the way, a 4090 and a 3060 (the latter I use for AI also, but more for Whisper because faster-whisper doesn't do ROCm right now).
by jhedwards | 2025-04-02 19:16:30+00:00
There already is a story like that in The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem. One of the robot characters in the book decides to make a poet robot. They reason that a poet is "programmed" by their culture, and a culture is programmed by the previous culture, so the robot has to simulate the evolution of the world from the beginning of time in order to produce the AI poet. It's a wonderful and hilarious story.
by palata | 2025-04-02 19:16:47+00:00
> I don't know how they're the only independent app that seems to be able to produce such a well built UI/UX for a chat application in 2025.

Precisely because they don't spend so much effort for privacy. If your server can read all your messages, it's suddenly easier to provide great features. For instance, GMail can add your next hotel stay to your calendar automatically because it has access to your emails. That's great UX, but poor privacy.
Ask HN: Game devs, how do you approach optimization? What would make it better?
by aarongeisler | 2025-04-02 19:17:14+00:00
Game devs, how do you ensure your game performs well across your player base? By perform well, I mean achieving consistent frame rates and reasonable load times (and free of other technical issues).

Obviously, there are ways to measure and debug these things in a development environment (profilers, NSight, RenderDoc). But how do you gain confidence things are working well in the wild with diverse hardware setups?

I'm thinking about starting a project to help track and measure these types of issues -- sort of like Sentry.io for game performance.

Some pain points I’ve heard and experienced myself: - Game performance is assessed too late in the development cycle - Getting data from a wide range of devices is time consuming - Difficulty enforcing art budgets and performance standards across the team - Challenges identifying the root cause of slow-downs based on player reports - Limited data

How are you handling performance debugging and optimization? What’s missing and how would your dream tool improve this?
by histriosum | 2025-04-02 19:17:19+00:00
Your personal choice is fine for you. My personal choice is to enjoy a cup or two of coffee per day, because I love the way it tastes, not because I want or need the caffeine. I currently don't have regular employment, as I am attempting a career change, but my coffee consumption doesn't change when I'm on a job.

With respect, I think your worldview needs to widen out a bit. Just because there are lots of worker exploitation issues going on the world doesn't mean that everything fits in that lens. Some of us like coffee, and that doesn't mean it's because we like or accept a "whip at the back".
by djha-skin | 2025-04-02 19:17:30+00:00
It was given as a revelation from God[1]. This is not some doctrine that came about from a philospher. It came from the top.

The same revelation discouraged tobacco use, the problems of which wasn't understood until much later. I assume the same will happen with caffeine, tannins, and other coffee/tea things.

1: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/dc-test...
by xfr | 2025-04-02 19:17:31+00:00
First, I am extremely impressed by the demo. It looks truly groundbreaking.

Could you elaborate on the types of tasks and data sources used to train Ace, and how these contribute to its performance on desktop automation?

Ace is said to outperform other models on your suite of computer use tasks. Can you provide more details on these benchmarks and how Ace compares to existing automation tools?
by echelon | 2025-04-02 19:18:49+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_dosage

Historical-sounding, maybe? It's still used in the literature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32144-z

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48960-4

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10757140/
by Olreich | 2025-04-02 19:19:18+00:00
Sure, but the argument is still that the smartphones aren’t the root cause. It’s the transactional nature of the thing. Can’t fail students because money would go down, so keep passing them as they get better equipped to ignore you and have reduced requirements to get a passing grade.

The thing that’s changed is how much the transactional nature favors the lazy students, not the smartphones specifically.

The reason the argument is so bad that “it’s the smartphones” is because that implies an easy solution that is external to the academic system, when the root cause is internal to the system.
by for1nner | 2025-04-02 19:19:38+00:00
A while back I stumbled upon a youtube channel[1] dedicated to just solo sailing trips. I'm not sure how much is him/his video composition vs. just the subject matter of filming one's seemingly minuscule progress across the vast reaches of ocean, but I became entranced by just the calm plodding-ness of his days. Did a great job of breaking down trips and prep in some of his videos.

Can't speak to his latest stuff, so YMMV, but for a while it worked for me as incredible background. I imagine there's more and more content like this on YT, what with more powerful technology becoming more ubiquitous.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@samholmessailing/videos
by aisenik | 2025-04-02 19:19:52+00:00
From another perspective, because you drive a symbol of the new authoritarian state armed state enforcers essentially offered to target people at your discretion and it reinforced your acceptance of state propaganda.

I'm not sure you realize it but in that moment you were given the opportunity to destroy the lives of any scapegoated person/group you could locate in the vicinity.

The administration has sought the most extreme charges and punishments possible for Tesla-related dissent, even advocating sending American citizens to CECOT. The ability to wield immense state violence in this fashion is worth protesting against!

I find your story a harrowing tale of how our new fascist state seeks to wield violence against the citizenry.
by chews | 2025-04-02 19:20:31+00:00
From your site, "Ace works like we do—performing mouse clicks and keystrokes based on the screen and prompt—trained with <3 by our team of software specialists and domain experts on over a million tasks."

Is there a way to train or augment training on applications you've never seen before? We have a bunch of custom Java applications that we use in finance, curious about some additional automation.
by DoctorDabadedoo | 2025-04-02 19:20:34+00:00
Take any of these videos with a grain of salt.

In demos these robots only need to do well once and it can take hours to record.

In real life, a failure rate of 80% is unnacceptable, but perfectly fine to edit out in the final cut media.

I hope they do well, this area is incredibly hard, but it will take a lot more than what people imagine.
by dang | 2025-04-02 19:20:57+00:00
Many people feel that flagging is worse than it used to be, but they don't agree at all on what should or shouldn't be flagged. That makes this feedback less actionable than one might assume.

HN gets tons and tons of threads that are critical of LLMs, so it's possible that the ones you're seeing get flagged are just below median quality and/or overly repetitive of previous discussions.
What If ChatGPT Projects Allowed Teams and Shared Memory?
by techsoft | 2025-04-02 19:21:11+00:00
Hello I'm a Pro user and I love the new Projects feature in ChatGPT — it's incredibly useful for long-term development.

I have two suggestions that would take this to the next level:

1. Project Groups (Grouped Workspaces): The ability to organize multiple related projects into a group where memory is shared across the group. This would help keep large, multi-part concepts organized (e.g., an app with backend, frontend, business plan, and content projects).

2. Team Collaboration: I’d love to create a team space where I can invite other Pro users to share a project or group. We could collaborate with ChatGPT together, like a virtual team assistant — working on the same canvas, having shared chat memory, and building things together in real time.

These features would be game-changers for small teams, startups, educators, and collaborators. Thank you for the amazing work you're doing!

Best, Mohammed Rasam
by altairprime | 2025-04-02 19:21:38+00:00
HN does not welcome dissenting opinions in certain areas of tech where the individual freedoms of techies come into conflict with status quo social harms to non-techies; so, for example, you won’t see many HN articles about the ethical dilemmas of working at Palantir, how our industry’s libertarian foundations obstruct labor organizing today, what advantages the ‘bros’ receive in return for their misogyny, and so on. HN is a light-touch moderation site — as libertarian as possible, in keeping with our roots — so I certainly don’t hold the mods as responsible for the community’s defensiveness in that regard. In general, whether tech or otherwise, it’s not possible for a community to welcome uncomfortable dissent against its own underpinnings without a heavier hand on the moderation wheel than is cultural acceptable for HN and for our community. That doesn’t mean that HN rejects all dissent — certainly they may be other pillars of obstinance I haven’t personally identified and studied over the past fifteen or twenty years participating here — but, yes, absolutely, HN’s community has zero tolerance for certain dissent.
by mattmanser | 2025-04-02 19:21:41+00:00
I did a lot of chemistry for a year when I worked as a QA for a pharmaceuticals company before going to uni.

So much so that when I did Chemistry at uni I got asked if I was cheating a few times in labs, until I explained.

It's actually really hard to get any experiment perfect the first time.

Even with a year's practice of measuring and mixing and titration and all the other skills you need, I'd still get low yields, or bad results occasionally. Better than everyone else, but still not perfect.

I also noticed that the more you do a particular process, the better results you will get. Just like practicing a solo on an instrument lots, or a particular pool shot, or cooking a particular meal. There's a level of learning and experience needed for each process, not all chemistry in general.
by tomhow | 2025-04-02 19:21:46+00:00
Many thanks for the warm welcome, everyone.

It’s been a privilege to help support this community and to work alongside dang, who has been a great friend and mentor for many years. It’s a great responsibility, to keep HN a healthy and thriving community, and I’m continually amazed to see all the ways dang puts thought and energy into it.

One final note is that it was never part of the negotiations that I was expected to know or learn Arc, yet somehow in the onboarding process the HN Arc repo has found its way onto my machine, so it feels like the bait and switch is on…
by kstrauser | 2025-04-02 19:21:58+00:00
One major problem is when people presume that their simplistic understanding of a subject is factual, and that everyone else is going off emotion. For example, some people will erroneously claim that the 2 genetic human options are "XX = woman, XY = man". Those seem to be the most likely combinations, partly because we don't collect DNA from 100% of the population and compare it to the observed anatomy, but they're clearly and documentedly not the only options.

Even without considering trans people, it's factually untrue that "XX = woman, XY = man, and those are the only possibilities." And yet, people who stopped at high school biology will argue until they're blue in the teeth that anyone with a more nuanced take is anti-science.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-02 19:22:02+00:00
Yeah, I've definitely noticed that people respond well to unusual styles as long as you wear it with confidence. For example, I sometimes wear a pocket watch when I dress up. It's not in vogue or anything, but I think they're cool and I don't really care whether or not anyone else does. The funny thing is, I've had multiple people tell me that they appreciate my pocket watch thing. I think maybe people are attracted to authenticity, when someone has the confidence to do their own thing for their own sake rather than worrying about others' opinions.
by Zigurd | 2025-04-02 19:22:11+00:00
This is the right way to frame it. Trump hasn't got a W-2 from the FSB. But it looks very likely that he, his family, and many people around him or who influence him, have been targeted for influence, bribery, blackmail, etc.

There might be an outright Robert Hanssen in that set of people. Or not. But that's not the important thing.
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-02 19:22:23+00:00
I just watched Real Genius the other day. It's one of my favorite Val Kilmer movies. Another one that seems to be forgotten was Red Planet [1] I would like to see the robot dog developers make something closer to AMEE envisioned in that movie.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTcOOzD-JQs
by faefox | 2025-04-02 19:22:38+00:00
The damage to Tesla's brand is irreversible. Musk has done literally everything in his power to alienate the core EV-buying demographic and the product itself is no longer unique or even particularly competitive. Maybe tariffs can prop up Tesla's auto business for a while longer but otherwise his only hope is for the MAGA set to suddenly pull an ideological 180 on EVs.