MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I missed office life, so I built a multiplayer corporate simulator
by marcsala | 2025-04-09 10:18:47+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm Marc, a 41-year-old indie creator who (strangely) misses corporate life.

After 10 years working remotely, I started longing for the weird things: the passive-aggressive chats, the drama, the promotions that make no sense, the hallway gossip, and the comfort of the office carpet. So… I built a world where all that still exists — virtually.

Corporate Life Simulator is a multiplayer text-based game that replicates the weird, beautiful chaos of office life. There are no graphics — just tasks, politics, and absurd corporate logic. You start as a Junior, choose a department (like HR, Sales, IT...), and try to climb the ladder.

Here’s what’s working today:

You can try the Demo (no signup required) Complete meaningless tasks like “optimizing a spreadsheet that nobody uses” Buy useless items in the company store (we have branded paperclips) Experience real office politics, including random events like backstabbing, gaslighting, and gossip chains Get promoted either by doing your job well… or by talking a lot on Discord. (Just like in real life.) I'm especially proud of the Politics + Prestige system — it tries to replicate how influence, reputation, and perception shape your career inside a company. You can choose your path to the top: you can yap your way up or work and do your job.

Technically, I built this using ChatGPT, Lovable, and Supabase. I don’t know how to code — not really. I prompt obsessively, test everything, and break it a lot. It’s messy and fun.

Coming soon: crafting and a bizarre internal economy of absurd corporate items. (Still deciding whether money should be involved — maybe, maybe not.)

Try the demo: https://corporatelifesimulator.com Join the company: https://discord.gg/ucpGFyqm

Would love your feedback — and if you’ve ever been stuck in a pointless meeting, this might hit a bit too close to home.

Thanks for reading, Marc
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-09 10:19:53+00:00
>> As of 2025, 9 years after the knowledge pump had been primed, there is still no sign that Cyc would ever achieve general intelligence. The long slow failure of Lenat’s project is a strong indictment against the symbolic-logical approach to AI.

Really? CYC, a strong indictment against SAT solving, though unrelated to it? A strong indictment against automated theorem proving, though unrelated to it? A strong indictment against planning and scheduling, though unrelated to it? A strong indictment against program verification and model checking, though unrelated to it? A strong indictment against Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, though unrelated to it?

Or are those "symbolic-logical approaches to AI"? Some of those fields use heuristic search, but then so does Neural Networks research. What's gradient optimisation? It's a search algorithm that follows the gradient of a function based on the strong assumption that the function has its optimum at the location of the searched-for datum. So, a search algorithm; with a heuristic cost function.

How about probabilistic AI? Is that "symbolic-logical AI"? I mean the Bayesian calculus is a form of logic after all, and probabilities are symbolic right up to the time when they turn into statistics when you have to give them values [1].

How about neural networks again? Everyone will tell you they are "sub-symbolic" but in truth their "continuous" weights are finite-precision floating point numbers, so they're basically symbols, with a very large vocabulary. And in any case Neural Nets, like everything else, are running on a computer, a symbol manipulation device based on Boolean algebra and logic gates. Is that symbolic, logical, or neither?

See what happens when you make up new terminology as you go along and then pretend like it's some kind of agreed-upon definition that everyone agrees upon? Yes I know. My first language is not English either, but the author has clearly gone and er delved into old papers about CYC so I don't see that they have any excuse to make all those unsubstantiated, and unsupported, assumptions about what "symbolic-logical AI" is.

And as for CYC and Lenat: it's easy to disparage a man's work when he's dead and can't defend it. It's easier still if you're just repeating the same talking points that has circulated in the grapevine for who knows how long: blah blah CYC failed, blah blah symbolic AI failed blah. The fact of the matter is that CYC is closed source, very few people can use it, and nobody, outside of Cycorp, knows its true capabilities. A bit like "OpenAI"'s latest "reasoning" models, all we can do is speculate and pretend we know what we're talking about, when we clearly don't. I mean they. The author.

_________________

[1] Which is what you have to do if you want to use probabilities in the real world. And if you feed the Mogwai after midnight they turn into Gremlins.
by fidotron | 2025-04-09 10:20:17+00:00
It's the Soros way, which permeates to the things he supports such as this.

He went through a phase of introducing his books by claiming he's a misunderstood sociologist that is doing what he's doing (on the markets) to prove his various theories, which he developed at the LSE under Popper. This particularly applies to the concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory) .

Essentially, the things Soros actually did that people hate him for (such as in the UK the episode with the pound) he claims he did to demonstrate that individuals shouldn't be allowed to do them and that especially markets cannot be trusted to be resistant to problematic individuals. Instead some overarching control mechanism must be inserted of the nature I described.
by AngryData | 2025-04-09 10:20:43+00:00
My counterpoint would be the thousands of dollars computers people bought 20+ years ago that had not even a fraction of the utility of an iphone. My first computer cost me $2000 and it was obsolete in like 2-3 years. My cell phone that cost $100 that I bought 6 years ago still runs brand new programs fine.
by lupusreal | 2025-04-09 10:20:58+00:00
Most restaurant websites don't have photos of the food. Certainly not professional ones. Pan around randomly on google maps then zoom in and find the nearest strip mall, then go down the line checking the websites of restaurants there. Most are generic crap and you'll be lucky if the menu online is even complete. If they have food photos it's probably smartphone pictures taken by the owner's kid.

I do this a lot, far more than I actually go to restaurants, because I like adding small business details to OSM. There are a few that have their shit together but the overwhelming majority do not.
by fxtentacle | 2025-04-09 10:21:13+00:00
I'm not sure the Linux desktop needs much saving anymore.

Even games released by Microsoft (like the new 2024 flight simulator) have excellent performance on Linux. And installing them through Steam and running em in Proton is easy and end-user-friendly. Thousands of gamers use a Steam Deck and never gave it a 2nd thought that all of the Windows games just work. The Linux desktop already works very well for a ton of use cases. And with Microsoft aggressively pushing features that their users hate, people are getting more willing to overlook little Linux hickups by the day. Because at least it's not invasive and obnoxious ads.
by bonoboTP | 2025-04-09 10:22:08+00:00
Sometimes I just open the NumPy or the Python docs and browse it (or other libraries like PyTorch). Even after about 2 decades of Python experience, I often find something new and neat even on the "basic" pages that I didn't know about. Reading release notes can be useful also.

Many people seem to have an irrational aversion to reading documentation and manuals. They'd rather speculate and guess and state false things than to just open the docs to understand how the thing works.

I'd say if you use the tool daily for years, it makes sense to invest into actually reading the docs.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-09 10:23:37+00:00
>Why is the marketing firm/platform not on the hook for noncompliance in your first example?

Because they act in good faith and expect that consent is collected before their script is executed. This is usually written in their ToS, e.g. see Google Analytics. Google expects that you maintain compliance and if, because of your failure to stay compliant, they collect PII without consent, you are liable for the damages. See what happens? Every small business who wants to know something about visitors of their website is now on the hook. They are expected to understand GDPR, to understand legal details of Google ToS etc. Since you cannot avoid having digital presence today, this looks pretty much like a compliance tax.

>I genuinely believe if people are dumb enough to keep PII in spreadsheets

You are speaking about majority of population of this planet now. Everyone prepared at least once in their life a list of contacts to send wedding invitations, list of customers for a freelance job etc etc. People are not dumb. They just keep doing what they were always doing: having a sheet with a list of contacts. And honestly, they should continue, because why not? Why we should put significantly more thought in this simple task? Yes, the tools have changed and we now have implicit privacy and security risks associated with them. We should fix the tools and assign liability properly.
by lheck | 2025-04-09 10:23:44+00:00
almost-one-liner (though it will give you the full model):

import z3; z3.solve([z3.Sum([ord(a) == z3.Int(f"k{i}") for i, a in enumerate(r[0])]) == r[1] for r in [("bbababbabb", 7), ("baaababaaa", 5), ("baaabbbaba", 3), ("bbaaabbaaa", z3.Int("x"))]])
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-09 10:24:32+00:00
> Did you not notice the last decade of the tech industry anointing itself as the one arbiter of truth and gatekeeper of human communications?

No, I've seen individual firms in the various (social and otherwise) online media subindustries, like firms in every earlier media subindustry, each declaring themselves the one arbiter of what will be treated as true and/or worth transmitting on the platforms they operate, but... that's a very different thing than your claim.

> Seems difficult to not noticed with how loudly that role was cheered on by those who thought it would entrench their political ideology into society forever.

Some people may have cheered on individual moderation decisions (but typically the people invested enough to do so had an even longer list they objected too), but no significant group cheered on the fantasy you describe, nor did any significant group embrance the even more fantastic belief you describe as characteristic of the people cheering on that fantasy.
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-09 10:26:01+00:00
I suppose making it to the very, very top of worldwide wealth requires some incredibly unusual personality traits. Single-mindedness, ruthlessness, enormous risk tolerance and so on. These aren't necessarily bad, even if selecting for these criteria tends to end up with narcissists. But equally these maybe aren't the best qualities in a political leader.

Maybe what's changed is that SV wasn't running the country 10-20 years ago?
by reidrac | 2025-04-09 10:27:03+00:00
I use DDG, but mostly with the bangs, so I search in the place I'm likely to get the answer I want. Which can be limiting, because I'm always using the same sites (e.g. imdb for media information) and won't discover new ones, and sometimes I don't know where I can find what I'm looking for.

For more general searches, depending on the topic, DDG is close to useless because link farms, AI slop, and returning results that aren't really what I'm looking for (some of the keywords weight too much). But I suspect this is a common problem in all search engines, so I'm not looking for a replacement. It is frustrating though. I can't believe the information doesn't exist, is just that it is unreachable.

I don't search using AI. Generally I'm not looking for information that can be distilled into an "answer"; and there's also that DDG is not feeding me AI answer (I think? May be I'm not paying attention).
by gizzlon | 2025-04-09 10:27:56+00:00
> .. identified the villain with brass-knuckled clarity: the decline of critical, open debate was due to the corrupting influence of concentrated power. Truer words have never been spoken. And yet… Updating his 1962 analysis in 2023, Habermas, the patrician-academic, chose to fuss over topics like “algorithmic steering”— a quaint concern akin to adjusting picture frames while the house collapses into a sinkhole.

"Adjusting picture frames while the house collapses into a sinkhole" sums up much of the opposition in the US ATM

However, it's not clear to me how "concentrated power" has lead to "the decline of critical, open debate" ?
by munksbeer | 2025-04-09 10:28:21+00:00
Ok, I did watch the video. He does make a lot of points which sound plausible to a casual like myself.

I'm still sceptical. It's pretty clear that there is real distaste for Europe in the MAGA sphere. I really find it hard to believe that this is all an act, a ploy, to boost Europe's own economy. Everything I've witnessed about MAGA suggests this type of long range thinking is just a coping wish. I think it's much simpler than that. I think they have a real distaste for Europe, for a variety of reasons.
by teleforce | 2025-04-09 10:28:24+00:00
>Connecting GPUs across clouds, securing workloads across continents, migrating between cloud providers — it’s messy, it’s hard, and it breaks all the time.

Is the new fund raise to enable Tailscale perform these complex tasks or for scaling it?

I've once read few years back that seamless and secure cloud independent computing or cross-cloud system is the next frontier, and it seems it's a legit problem and a business opportunity for security company like Tailscale and Crowdstrike (investor). The record breaking acquisition of Wiz kind of cemented this problem space and the pain points, and it seems that Tailscale is riding on the opportunity [1].

[1]Google to buy Wiz for $32B (845 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398518
by codingbot3000 | 2025-04-09 10:29:40+00:00
I have been using both platforms recently, but I personally consider current iPhones a bit less useful and a bit more buggy than comparable Android phones. So my guess was that many people don't buy it for the additional value but for status / cult / whatever. But I am sure there are people who get additional value out of it, e.g. because they are heavy iCloud users. Did not mean it as a general insult, sorry.
by sipofwater | 2025-04-09 10:30:01+00:00
"Motorola moto g play 2024 Smartphone, Android 14 Operating System, Termux, And cryptsetup: Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) Encryption/Decryption And The ext4 Filesystem Without Using root Access, Without Using proot-distro, And Without Using QEMU": https://old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1jkl0f8/motorola_mot... (old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1jkl0f8/motorola_moto_g_play_2024_smartphone_android_14/)
by ano-ther | 2025-04-09 10:30:41+00:00
Faster indeed

> A trial in which Holborn's escalators became standing-only improved the speed customers got through the station, Transport for London (TfL) has found.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-35354471.amp

https://foi.tfl.gov.uk/FOI-2015-1920/2015-1920-Report%20on%2...
by bob1029 | 2025-04-09 10:31:15+00:00
Not guessing is perhaps the most important thing to the business.

I developed a lot of my problem solving skills in semiconductor manufacturing where the cost of a bad assumption tends to be astronomical. You need to be able to determine exactly what the root cause is 100% of the time or everything goes to hell really fast. If there isn't a way to figure out the root cause, you now have 2 tickets to resolve.

I'll throw an entire contraption away the moment I determine it has accumulated some opacity that antagonizes root cause analysis. This is why I aggressively avoid use of non-vanilla technology stacks. You can certainly chase the rabbit over the fence into the 3rd party's GitHub repo, but I find the experience gets quite psychedelic as you transition between wildly varying project styles, motivations and scopes.

Being deeply correct nearly all of the time is probably the fastest way to build a reputation. The curve can be exponential over time with the range being the value of the problem you are entrusted with.
by kristianp | 2025-04-09 10:31:28+00:00
Yes you're right, it's -U on linux (1). On Mac its -f (2). Linux also has -f, which is equivalent to -a -U .

(1) https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/ls.1.html

(2) https://ss64.com/mac/ls.html
Ask HN: First time manager, feel like an imposter
by moocow21212 | 2025-04-09 10:31:48+00:00
Hey all, so I'm a data engineer who has become an engineering manager. I'm replacing a manager who has amazing knowledge of internal systems and I feel like an imposter. It will take a long time for me to built up any where near the understanding of the business and processes and understanding who knows and how each random system works.

I'm thinking the best option would be for me to focus on a few key projects that I can get my head around but I'd appreciate any advice from people who have been in my position.

I'm replacing a manager who has great knowledge of internal systems and business history. I don't have that.
by Doxin | 2025-04-09 10:31:54+00:00
Of course they are very different things, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I'm just drawing peoples attention to the parallels that do exist.

> The reason why you'd pull the plug is because there is no prospect of survival

Same goes for a body bred to have no brain, surely. Of course that moves the dilemma to "is it ethical to create humans with no possibility of survival", which is a different question equally worth debating.
by bko | 2025-04-09 10:32:08+00:00
The charitable interpretation is that this isn't real science. If you have gender studies papers like the fake "Human Reactions to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity in Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon" that showed dog parks were "rape-condoning spaces" where canine interactions reflected human rape culture and systemic oppression. They get through the system even though they are obviously satire. And yes, it was peer reviewed and even recognized as a significant contribution to feminist geography during the journal's anniversary celebration before the hoax was revealed

There were always things we considered science that are no longer considered science or harmful (blood letting, lobotomy, race science, etc)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair
by axegon_ | 2025-04-09 10:32:32+00:00
Yes, I do. I'd never use an LLM for any meaningful or important information because by design, they will simply shove the most likely next token and you get a ton of responses which are pure nonsense if you start digging into it. Mind you, I've been noticing that Google has been terrible for a long while now. Kagi seemed alright at first but it also gave a lot of nonsense. The final straw for Kagi was the fact that they are backed by yandex and by extension fund the russian terrorist state. Lately I've switched to Qwant and so far it covers almost all of my needs.
by Aeolun | 2025-04-09 10:32:42+00:00
I just accepted I wasn’t going to find anything comparable, and just have to bite the bullet and accept software that has way less features, but at least consistently works, and doesn’t randomly decide to run at 800% CPU when a single file changes.

Now on team Zed. We’ll see how long that is good before it enshittifies too. I’m not sure if I should be happy they’re still not charging me for it.
by ahofmann | 2025-04-09 10:33:30+00:00
What do you mean? What is huge to you? For me a static blog on a small vps would start to crumble at around 30 to 150 requests per second. This number is broad because the are a lot of moving parts even in this scope. This results in 2.5 million to almost 13 million page views a day. To reach numbers like that you need to get reeeeaally popular. With some planning a static website can be served billions of times a day before saturating the network stack.

So what are you talking about?
by lo0dot0 | 2025-04-09 10:33:46+00:00
> NAT/STUN world you were trying to avoid

The clean way to build this is with firewall configuration, opening ports, and static IPs. NAT/STUN and dynamic IPs are just a hack and I don't understand why people pretend this is an acceptable solution for professional networking. Working around an infrastructure that isn't a natural law but can be changed at our will seems like a big waste of time.
by bregma | 2025-04-09 10:34:49+00:00
I have never had any reason to believe my government is stealing my money, or even has any interest in stealing my money. It's not some centralized criminal organization like it is becoming in the United States or maybe in other third-world countries. I do pay my share of taxes (for which I receive excellent value), and some of that goes to consumer protection including banking and financial institution regulations.

Who I don't trust completely with my money is banks and financial institutions. That's why I have a government who regulates them. And hey, it has worked where elsewhere it has failed (see 2008 global financial crisis).
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-09 10:34:51+00:00
>> This is exactly correct, LLMs did scale with huge data, symbolic AI did not. So why?

Like the rock salad you're mixing up two disparate contexts here. Symbolic AI like SAT solvers and planners is not trying to learn from data and there's no context in which it has to "scale with huge data".

Instead, what modern SAT solvers and planners do is even harder than "scaling with data" - which, after all, today means having imba hardware and using it well. SAT solving and planning can't do that: SAT is NP-complete and planning is PSPACE-complete so it really doesn't matter how much you "scale" your hardware, those are not problems you can solve by scaling, ever.

And yet, today both SAT and planning are solved problems. NP complete? Nowadays, that's a piece of cake. There are dedicated solvers for all the classical sub-categories of SAT and modern planners can solve planning problems that require sequences of thousands of actions. Hell, modern planners can even play Atari games from pixels alone, and do very well indeed [1].

So how did symbolic AI manage those feats? Not with bigger computers but precisely with the approach that the article above seems to think has failed to produce any results: heuristic search. In SAT solving, the dominant approach is an algorithm called "Conflict Driven Clause Learning", that is designed to exploit the special structure of SAT problems. In Planning and Scheduling, heuristic search was always used, but work really took off in the '90s when people realised that they could automatically estimate a heuristic cost function from the structure of a planning problem.

There are parallel and similar approaches everywhere you look at, in classical AI problems, like verification, theorem proving, etc, and that work has even produced a few Turing awards [2]. But do you hear about that work at all, when you hear about AI research? No, because it works, and so it's not AI.

But it works, it runs on normal hardware, it doesn't need "scale" and it doesn't need data. You're measuring the wrong thing with the wrong stick.

____________

[1] Planning with Pixels in (Almost) Real Time: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.03354 Competitive results with humans and RL. Bet you didn't know that.

[2] E.g. Pnueli for temporal logic in verification, or Clarke, Emerson and Sifakis, for model checking.
by rcarmo | 2025-04-09 10:34:55+00:00
Is this on ollama yet?

Edit: I just gave it a very simple prompt: "Give me a Python script to anonymize strings inside a file. The strings are 4-character long and inside single quotes, like this: 'abcd'"

And it is hopelessly trying to decide the regex, missing it time and time again, for the past 5 minutes.

Claude, o1-mini, o3-mini and even gpt-4o did it in seconds.

So I'd say this is very far from being useful...