MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-11 17:12:39+00:00
The "faster horses" comment is unfortunate, both because Henry Ford was a huge Nazi and because it's a dramatically wrong idea of what people actually wanted that only makes sense if you're already so car-brained[0] to think that the only alternative to a car is a horse. At least in cities, you had trains, trams, and omnibuses; not to mention walking was also an option.

There's a tendency in consumer tech companies to look at TikTok as the ultimate goal: everyone wants a pipeline to pump entertainment slurry into, and the old versions of the product are just worse slurry pipelines. But this is wrong. Old Spotify and Netflix aren't "faster horses". They're the train connecting a walkable urban core that got replaced with a never-on-time bus route[1] while the government encouraged everyone to move into car-dependent suburban prisons.

Like cars, entertainment slurry pipelines exist for the benefit of the pipeline owner, not the creator nor the viewer. Nobody asks for TikTok, it's just a global minima in the reward function[2] of "how do we most actively exploit creative industry". The platform owners want you to forget about the artists on their platforms so that those artists can't tell you to move to another platform. It's akin to one of the nightmare scenarios trotted out by copyright maximalists during the Napster Wars of the early 2000s, except the owning class now has significant economic interest in the platforms, so it's OK now.

[0] I have a pet theory that cars were a fascist long-con to destroy cities and atomize society to avoid the creation of class solidarity and durable political movements against large business interests.

[1] Remember when Netflix rented DVDs? And had almost everything, because physical media has really robust consumer protections?

[2] If you think my "cars are fascist" theory is insane, wait until I talk about AI.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-04-11 17:12:40+00:00
I have had two separate "best managers" for different reasons, both based on the circumstances.

On a small, focused team where all members were highly experienced & competent specialists, the good manager kept the team focused on the actual business goal we were trying to solve, and especially by making decisions in the times when the team didn't have a clear consensus about how to approach something. Sometimes it's more important that a decision be clearly made than that it be exactly correct, and having someone with the authority to do that and the willingness to take responsibility for the consequences is incredible for team morale. But most of the time the team will come to a solution on their own and the manager can be part of that but also be able to step back and let it happen. And then sometimes it's more important that the decision be exactly correct than that it be made quickly, and an individual with practiced discernment between these situations is a treasure.

In a bigger company my best manager understood their role as a primarily political one mediating the needs of their team (both as a team and as individuals) with the sometimes contradictory needs of the broader business. They "manage up" by presenting the team's work to leadership in a way where leadership can understand the value of the team's work. And they "manage down" by contextualizing business decisions to get team buy in when possible, and just generally being a buffer between the changing whims of leaders and the daily work of the team. Blocking interruptions, arguing about whether things should be done, taking the heat when things go wrong.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-04-11 17:13:25+00:00
Maybe I'm wrong, but I can't help but feel this is a solution in search of a problem.

I feel like "building a simple website" has been a solved issue with templates for decades now. The only thing you need to add is the text, and for a useful website, you're already going to have to be typing 90% of that into the prompt anyway - most of what an LLM is going to add will be more of a value-subtract than a value-add.

Sure, that still leaves the tweaking and customization, but I feel like that's the part most people enjoy the most? Humans love decorating.

Maybe I'm seeing this the wrong way, and I'm forgetting truly non-technical folks exist, and this is for the people who would otherwise be forcing their nephew to help them make a basic website, and that's the role the LLM is playing here, as a conversational interface. I think the marketing copy for this announcement is total bullshit, then (plastering "AI" all over the announcement is more for marketers than customers), but I can at least see that use case.
by rdtsc | 2025-04-11 17:13:57+00:00
It's a port of entry. Once they flagged her for a search they can and do search electronic devices. Officials there may also deny those kind of visas on a whim seemingly. The next step is usually being sent back to the country of origin where the visa was issued and re-applying for it at the embassy. I don't think her status of a J-1 student automatically cancelled. Except in this case it wasn't safe to send her back to Russia so she ended up in detection.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-11 17:13:59+00:00
I did read it, and that argument is bullshit, just like a hypothetical argument that e.g. the government can mow down protestors because they held a mass trial declaring ("satisfied due process") that all people in the street are guilty of a crime and subject to the death penalty. Nothing in the Constitution precludes such an interpretation.

There is no way to write words that preclude all such interpretations, that does not make all possible interpretations valid or reasonable.

> I'm unconvinced that the Supreme Court will look towards public sentiment.

Yet stunningly, SCOTUS decisions overwhelmingly align with cultural attitudes of their time because that is in fact the role of SCOTUS — to adapt interpretations of text to the current cultural moment. That's why it's notable in the few occasions where they conflict.

I know originalists and textualists like to act otherwise, but they're liars, and you know this because they do in fact rule against the text of law when the text conflicts with their cultural imperatives.
by gota | 2025-04-11 17:14:00+00:00
This is not core the to article, but -

> However, most examples of high agency agents operate in ideal environments which provide complete knowledge to the agent, and are ‘patient’ to erroneous or flaky interactions. That is, the agent has access to the complete snapshot of its environment at all times, and the environment is forgiving of its mistakes.

This is a long way around basic (very basic) existing concepts in classic AI ("Fully" vs "partially" observable environments; nondeterministic actions; are all, if I'm not sorely mistaken, discussed in Russel and Norvig - the standard textbook for AI 101).

Now, maybe the authors _do_ know and choose to discuss this at pre-undergrad level like this on purpose. Regardless of whether they don't know the basic concepts or think its better to pretend they don't because their audience doesn't - this signals that folks working on/with the new AI wave (authors or audience) have not read the basic literature of classic AI

The bastardization of the word 'agent' is related to this, but I'll stop here at the risk of going too far as 'old man yells at clouds', as if I'd never seen technical terms coopted for hype
by sdesol | 2025-04-11 17:14:06+00:00
When dealing with prompts, there is no such thing as reproducible builds, since we are dealing with a non-deterministic system. The purpose for connecting prompts and conversation to code is to aid in debugging and developing new features. I also believe by connecting code to conversations, we will produce better LLMs in the future.

I would say AI has generated about 98% of my code for my chat app in the last 3 months and it was definitely not vibe coding. Every function and feature was discussed in detail and some conversations took over a week.

My reasoning for building my chat app wasn't to support vibe coding, but rather to 10x senior developers. Once you know how things work, the biggest bottleneck to a senior developers productivity is typing and documentation. The speed at which LLMs can produce code and documentation cannot be matched by humans.

The only downside is, LLM don't necessary produce pretty or more readable code. The more readable code is something I would like to tackle in the future, as I believe post-processing tools can make LLM code much more readable.
by ern | 2025-04-11 17:14:19+00:00
I see AI like the reading glasses I’ll soon need — not because I can’t think clearly, but because it helps cut through things faster when my brain’s juggling too much.

A few years ago, I’d have quietly filed this kind of article under “too hard” or passed a log analysis request from the CIO down the line. Now? I get AI to draft the query, check it, run it, and move on. It’s not about thinking less — it’s about clearing the clutter so I can focus where it counts.
by chilmers | 2025-04-11 17:14:46+00:00
Um, yes they do. The left sidebar on the desktop app is titled "Your Library". On the mobile app, it is the third nav icon at the bottom right of the screen.

You can save albums to the library by opening the album page and clicking the circled-plus "Save to Your Library" button. It then appears in your library under "Albums". You can search the library, sort by recently played, recently added, alphabetical, creator. You can also save singles, playlists, podcasts and artists to your library. If you go into settings, you can connect your library to locally stored files.

I could go on. This took me literally 1 minute of opening up Spotify and looking at the UI.
by nsypteras | 2025-04-11 17:14:46+00:00
Cofounder splits are extremely common. Cofounder "couples" counselors are a thing you could look into to help resolve your differences. Your VC might have recommendations for one. If you ultimately decide to split, I'd recommend at least one of you (or "the company"?) getting a lawyer to draw up a formal separation agreement you both sign in order to split in the cleanest possible way.
by zer00eyz | 2025-04-11 17:14:58+00:00
Run.

Pivot, means turning on an existing axis. If you were building "product M" and on the way built "L" and it turns out that it's more useful/profitable thats a pivot.

You're flailing around trying to make your VC some money. You clearly aren't happy with this.

Let's be candid, you could go found a micro startup every month for the next 12 months and one of them is likely to make enough to pay your own bills. You dont need to build a unicorn you need to build a small business... one that supports at least you.
by ruben_varnish | 2025-04-11 17:15:31+00:00
TinyKVM is certainly technology that in itself is rather groundbreaking, but it is obviously even more powerful in the context of request handling at lightning speed. But you are right it could be used for other things.

Would you have read this if neither Deno, Varnish or TinyKVM would have been in the title? ;)

But we hear you. Will put a page on our website and should probably consider seeing up a community site as well as it is indeed, grabbing some attention.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-11 17:15:45+00:00
In the near term it makes more sense to position nix as a common interface between app developers and distro maintainers and not as a direct-to-user way to cut their distro maintainers out of the loop entirely (although it is quite useful for that).

Ideally, a distro maintainer would come across a project packaged with nix and think:

> Oh good, the app dev has taken extra steps to make life easy for me.

As-is, I don't think that's the case. You can add a flake output to your project which builds an .rpm or a .deb file, but it's not commonly done.

I'm guessing that most of the time, distro maintainers would instead hook directly into a language specific build-tool like cmake or cargo and ignore the nix stuff. They benefit from nix only indirectly in cases where it has prevented the app dev from doing crazy things in their build (or at least has made that crazyness explicit, versus some kind of works-on-my-machine accident or some kind of nothing-to-see here skulduggery).

If we want to nixify the world I think we should focus less on talking people out of using package managers which they like and more on making the underlying packages more uniform.
by notatoad | 2025-04-11 17:15:49+00:00
i think people's view of netflix's business model is heavliy biased by what they want netflix to be.

i get it, i hate what they've become too. i'd like to believe there's a world where paying for content is a better model than selling ads. but the reality is that every time netflix makes a decision that the internet gets angry about, their balance sheet looks better.
by kashunstva | 2025-04-11 17:15:57+00:00
> @downvoters, do you have any arguments to add?

Not a downvoter, but the idea of proportionality is core to liberal democracies. It’s why only illiberal states would cut off the hands of a petty thief, or execute drug offenders, and so forth. Wrecking a person’s life over frog embryos, irrespective of her imprudence or her boss’s carelessness is a disproportionate response. That’s my argument. It smacks of the sort of arbitrary cruelty and pettiness that runs through the very core of this administration.
by n_ary | 2025-04-11 17:16:01+00:00
> Is it just hard to maintain that level of enthusiasm over time? Is the sum of possible money just too desirable?

I do not recall the book/essay or the original author, but I recall the quote that “everybody has a price they can’t resist, find out that price…”.

If your enthusiasm product is successful and has potential to be milked, someone somewhere will figure out your price and eventually buy you out.
by hinkley | 2025-04-11 17:16:15+00:00
I haven’t used it enough to be able to say yet, but I believe the BEAM avoids part of the problem Ian Cooper (Where Did It All Go Wrong?) rediscovered, which is that microservices don’t min-max the inter- versus intra-modular friction in systems.

I would not say that Beam eliminates this problem in any way, but I do think it lowers the slope of the line. The self-consistent idioms and functionality, especially with deployment, auto recovery and load balancing, reduce the inter-module friction. It makes a system where 12 engineers can easily manage 30 endpoints, and your surface area can still follow a power law.
by FloorEgg | 2025-04-11 17:16:36+00:00
That's all true. Process and bureaucracy are guard rails, and guard rails limit change. So when the whole system is barrelling towards a cliff (default, hyperinflation, kinetic war), what should the leaders try and do?

It probably seems like I'm defending their actions, I genuinely don't know if their actions are correct and I'm not defending them. I'm just acknowledging it seems like many US institutions haven't been appropriately evolving, and now the US as a whole is between a rock and a hard place.

If I'm going to spend time thinking about these things (that I have virtually no control over), I would prefer to do it in a curious and mostly emotionally detached way.
by ukuina | 2025-04-11 17:16:48+00:00
https://archive.is/MujoE

> OpenAI is getting ready to unveil a number of new AI models, sources familiar with the company’s plans tell The Verge. Among the new AI models will be a release of what I’m expecting will be branded GPT-4.1, which one source describes as a revamped version of OpenAI’s GPT-4o multimodal model.

> OpenAI is also readying the full version of its o3 reasoning model and an o4 mini version that could debut even sooner. AI engineer Tibor Blaho discovered references to o4 mini, o4 mini high, and o3 in a new ChatGPT web version earlier today, suggesting these additions are imminent. I understand o3 and o4 mini are both set to debut next week, unless OpenAI moves the launch plans around.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-11 17:17:21+00:00
Being a consumer rather than a producer of tech is strictly a business decision. There's significant cost to producing and maintaining a language, and Ericsson no longer wanted to pay the upkeep.

That's not necessarily an indictment on the language itself. The alternative would have been to keep using it while also open sourcing it, but I'm guessing they just wanted to be able to hire cheaper C developers or whatever the flavor of the time was.
by amarant | 2025-04-11 17:17:27+00:00
That's a very keen observation!

It's probably profitable in a lot of cases to follow those metrics, shovelware content is cheaper to produce, and since the median user pays the same subscription fee as the enthusiast, you get better margins producing slop for the uncaring masses.

You need enthusiast businesses owners to produce quality product.

Damn, I never thought of this before, but it explains so much!
by bhouston | 2025-04-11 17:18:01+00:00
Another reason why consultants are good in government is because of unions. I am generally pro-union, but a side effect of unions, at least in my experience, is that you will have a proportion of incompetent people who can not complete anything and you can not effectively get rid of them. Consultants who are clearly incompetent or even just not a good fit are much easier to get rid of.

Although the large consulting firms are also not great if they are just shipping software requirements overseas for cheap software dev labor, that also can be very ineffective. So many never ending government projects are a result of this. On the surface everything is competently managed (grant charts forever, with perfect org charts), but at the strategic level of actually getting it to work and on-time is lacking (because there are a ton of cautious "professional managers" who don't know how to actually ship.)
by _mlbt | 2025-04-11 17:18:11+00:00
Most rural communities will not be willingly surrendering their firearms under any circumstances. They are heavily armed, yet they have very low rates of gun violence, at least until tyrants come for their guns that is.

Contrast that to urban areas where extensive gun control laws are in place. The issues are social and cultural and are not something that a gun ban will solve.

We are not Western Europe or Australia.

Also, like I said in another comment, guns are everywhere here and that toothpaste is already out of the tube. Most guns are not registered. No one knows for certain how many there are and who owns them. There will at best be no cooperation with forced confiscation, and most likely there will be active resistance against such a tyrannical incursion upon the rights of free people. Even law enforcement and large swaths of the military are unlikely to cooperate with confiscation efforts.
by adamkittelson | 2025-04-11 17:18:13+00:00
It is wildly disingenuous to just copy paste that line from wikipedia and not the rest of the paragraph.

> In February 1998, Ericsson Radio Systems banned the in-house use of Erlang for new products, citing a preference for non-proprietary languages.[15] The ban caused Armstrong and others to make plans to leave Ericsson.[16] In March 1998 Ericsson announced the AXD301 switch,[8] containing over a million lines of Erlang and reported to achieve a high availability of nine "9"s.[17] In December 1998, the implementation of Erlang was open-sourced and most of the Erlang team resigned to form a new company, Bluetail AB.[8] Ericsson eventually relaxed the ban and re-hired Armstrong in 2004.

- edit, poster was quoting a quote in the article, not wikipedia, the article is the one omitting the context
by jedberg | 2025-04-11 17:18:49+00:00
OPs specific complaints about Netflix and Spotify are mostly a result of their success. Back in 2012 Netflix had a lot of movies because Hollywood didn't value streaming and were willing to sell the streaming right for most of their content for tiny amounts of money. And there were no other streamer.

Spotify is in a similar boat. The music companies didn't value streaming and were willing to sell their entire catalog to the one player in the ecosystem (or in the case of music, to everyone for the same low price)

But also, personalization actually drives a ton of revenue. When I worked at Netflix, when the recommendation system went down and we defaulted to curated lists, streaming would drop 20%. And that was in 2013. I can only imagine what the drop is today when that system goes down.

Personalization drives a ton of revenue, and TikTok is the best at it, so it's no surprise that OP sees everything "going to TikTok"
by nodumbideas | 2025-04-11 17:19:17+00:00
Interesting article - I wonder if the version of entrepreneurialism entering social norms is tied to the economic environment. When interest rates were low in the 2010's and there was ample VC money, we had lots of examples that reinforced the entrepreneurial idea of the tech startup. The ideal was starting a tech company that could be acquired.

Maybe higher interest rates are partially driving the shift towards entrepreneurship through acquisition/sweaty startup ideas? You certainly hear more about it today in an environment where you have lots of retiring owners and an emphasis on cash flow.
by sdesol | 2025-04-11 17:19:52+00:00
> Why not just put the conversation / prompt at the end of the commit/PR message?

This might be something I would do. My only concern is, the conversations can be quite long and mean very long. My "Chat Flow" right now is to discuss what needs to be done. Produce the code, which can span multiple chats and then have the LLM summarize things.

What I think might make sense in the future is to include detailed chat summaries in commit messages and PRs. Given that we get a lot of text diarrhea from LLMs, I think putting them in a LLM as is, may do more harm than good.
by BeetleB | 2025-04-11 17:19:56+00:00
Yeah, I was referring to the job security aspect, given all the layoffs.

But yes, the federal package is good, but not fantastic. It's on par with what a typical company provides. Salary is decent, too. Not FAANG, but not below industry average. More or less, just like a typical industry job.

State/city jobs tend to have much better benefit packages, but lower pay (often a lot lower). They also tend to be relatively chill workwise.
by bcardarella | 2025-04-11 17:20:12+00:00
The amazing thing about Erlang and the BEAM is it's depth of features. To the OP the Behaviour/Interface of Erlang is their biggest take away. For me I believe it is how you require far far less development resources to build complex systems than you would require in any other language (provided comparable experience in both stacks). And for many the lightweight processes and programming model.

OTP itself has so much in it. We've been working on compiling Elixir to run on iOS devices. Not only can we do that through the release process but through using the ei library provided in Erlang we can compile a Node in C that will interface with any other Erlang node over a typical distributed network as you would for Erlang, Elixir, Gleam, etc... furthermore there is a rpc library in Erlang where from C we can make function calls and interface with our Elixir application. Yes, the encoding/decoding has an overhead and FFI would be faster but we're still way within our latency budget and we got this stood up in a few days without even have heard of it before.

The larger point here is that Erlang has been solving many of the problems that modern tech stacks are struggling with and it has solved for scale and implementation cost and it solved these problems decades ago. I know HN has a bit of a click-bait love relationship with Erlang/Elixir but it hasn't translated over to adoption and there are companies that are just burning money trying to do what you get out of the box for free with the Erlang stack.