MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: My CEO wants to go hard on AI. What do I do?
by throwaway778 | 2025-04-24 16:32:41+00:00
I'm the lead software engineer at a company building a B2B hardware/software product in the US. Great team, great technology, great PMF and good progress on revenue targets. There are lots of opportunities for how to develop the product further. It's been an extremely hard scale-up but we are finally starting to see it pay off.

I'm struggling with the CEO being increasingly focussed on investing heavily in AI. I'm not opposed to using this tech at all – it's amazing, and we incorporate a variety of different ML models across our stack where they are useful. But this strategy has evolved to the point where we are limiting resource on key teams aligned with core business to invest in an AI team.

The argument seems to be that they've realized the only way to achieve the next round of funding is to be "AI-first". There is no product roadmap for what this looks like, or what features might be involved, or why we'd want to do it from a product point of view. Instead the reason is that this is the only way to attract a big series C round.

I'm not well-informed enough to know if this is the correct approach to scaling. Instead of working on useful, in-demand product features, it feels like we're spending a lot of time looking at a distant future that we'll struggle to reach if we take our eye off of the ball. Is this normal? Are other organizations going through the same struggle? For the first time in five years I feel completely out of my depth.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-24 16:33:06+00:00
> > Standard mail forwarding lasts 12 months. You can pay to extend mail forwarding for 6, 12, or 18 more months (18 months is the maximum).

That's kind of awkward when you consider people will find that address for source code where that license file just wont be updated for decades to come, if at all.
by diggan | 2025-04-24 16:33:07+00:00
In some countries, it is somewhat of a question "why" though. For example, banks in Sweden stopped carrying cash, and AFAIK (at least when I lived there) you interact with them either online or via the telephone, even cards are sent your home address instead of being picked up the branch and so on.

Contrast to where I live now (Spain) where I can still go to the bank to deposit/withdraw money, so the use case for the branch/building/office is kind of obvious.
by samspot | 2025-04-24 16:33:19+00:00
A common mistake in accessibility is to assume accessibility is mostly for users who are blind. I've rarely seen the opposite approach, calling something accessible that is very much not accessible to a person who is blind. A url is much more accessible for many people with disabilities than the postal mail.

Even if you mean access instead of accessibility, presumably a person who can find a way to acquire stamps can just as easily make it to a library with public computers.
by jihadjihad | 2025-04-24 16:33:44+00:00
What's really cool is if you go to a site like [0] that shows the "true" size of countries etc. (i.e. not distorted by a projection), Indiana is probably the most analogous state to South Korea, in terms of size and shape. But South Korea has 7x the population of Indiana!

Really puts into perspective a movie like "Train to Busan", which would be like taking a train from Gary to Madison!

0: https://thetruesize.com
by Majromax | 2025-04-24 16:33:59+00:00
> Surely there are people trading in these contracts that... don't want their oil delivered to Cushing?

A big-enough buyer will know how to get oil from Cushing to their facility, often by pipeline. One who doesn't really want oil in Cushing is likely to close out their futures trade before the settlement date, treating it like a purely financial transaction.

> It seems like such a bizarre setup to literally require all the oil to come to this one specific town, I assume I'm missing something obvious?

Futures contracts need to be based on the price of something, but the price of a physical good depends on location. Delivery of a barrel of crude to the South Pole would be much, much more expensive – and more variable – than delivery to a big oil terminal. Contracts for physical goods need some kind of agreed-upon reference point, even if most of the time things get financially settled without delivery.
by alabastervlog | 2025-04-24 16:34:19+00:00
Talent and hard work at what is what's missing from these discussions, I think.

I literally don't even know what kind of work I should do if I wanted to make a billion dollars. I think it's mostly delegating, and convincing people to give me ownership of things that throw off money that I get, or to invest in things for which I have such ownership so my ownership becomes more valuable. But in concrete terms, I don't even know what to do to make that happen, like, step 1 of that process, I have no idea. Just being talented at programming and working hard at it (more talented than I am, and working harder than I do, even) doesn't seem to be a great way to get there. You have to focus on and have talent for activities that cause capital to end up owned by you, and I have zero idea where to even start with that kind of thing.

Meanwhile, I was socialized as a kid into a smear of multiple Fussellian "Prole" categories, plus his "Middle", so I have to hype myself up and still feel bad just to hire a plumber and not hover around them because I feel like I ought to be helping (and definitely feel like I've failed on some level any time I choose to do that instead of doing the work myself), and the notion of owning a business but not working at, or just being a kind of hype-man for it mostly for my personal benefit, weirds me the fuck out, it feels fragile and strange. Why would people let me do that and make so much money from it? It's so weird; I get that's how things work, but the idea of doing it feels scary and kinda gross, and I don't mean because of risk of failure.

I think I'd need a huge mindset shift and a totally different skillset to get actually-rich. I'd need to be a different person entirely. Meanwhile there's a long list of things I am or could become talented at, and could work hard at, and that produce real value, that might make me a living but will never get me past seven or maaaaybe with a ton of right-place-right-time luck ten digits of lifetime earnings, let alone net worth.
by latchkey | 2025-04-24 16:34:51+00:00
Hi, this is actually pretty important for my business. I've been waiting for the driver to be released for a year now. We got the binary a few months ago under NDA, but open sourcing it, is next level for us.

What I wrote about this on twitter: https://x.com/HotAisle/status/1914549886185611627
by sherdil2022 | 2025-04-24 16:35:27+00:00
Wow! This is one well written and all encompassing article. Whether someone is brand new to C# or have been using C# from the beginning, this serves both as a great introduction and to also brush up on the .NET ecosystem. Covers almost everything that needs to be covered - all in one article. Kudos to Dr Milan Milanović
by diggan | 2025-04-24 16:35:32+00:00
> But getting upset about US citizens not using all the same standards in their daily lives as many other places is just silly

Good thing it wasn't a complaint then, just questions from someone who doesn't know how it works across the pond :) And it seems to be the story of someone outside of North America trying to interact with the North American standards, not some internal confusion between internal states or whatnot.
by jonathanlb | 2025-04-24 16:35:52+00:00
I would argue that social media’s positive-feedback engine contributed to its own demise. Anec-data:

After being terminally online on Instagram, I decided to took a two-week break because I was noticed I was mindlessly scrolling through content that I enjoyed. After the two weeks, it was striking to note that almost all videos followed a pattern- a jarring hook in the first two seconds, a provocative question, rapid-fire cuts and a soundtrack. Most videos have to follow this proven formula, but in doing so, they'll be like all the other videos and will then have to take the next step to engage users, so videos become more aggressive and formulaic, which for me, gets in the way of the content.

This is completely omitting the fact that quickly scrolling past accounts you follow will trigger Instagram to suggest clips that are more provocative in an effort to capture one's attention. Even if you're intentional about what you consume, the app is adversarial to your own intentions.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-24 16:36:23+00:00
Agreed, unless you see real, tangible reasons to do so.

While I was talking to my partner (at the time) about her taking a part-time job while waiting on school, I worked for an employer that absolutely earned my loyalty:

She had enrolled in school for her pre-vet med course. But due to a mix up with financial aid or loans or similar, she woke up one morning to find that at about 6am the university had sent her an email saying that they'd not received tuition from her, and that they would soon be dropping her from her course. By the time she'd woke up they'd already done so. She panicked. I knew we'd done most of the work so I told her to jump in the shower and we'd go to the college and try to get it taken care of.

I told my boss (co-founder and CTO, though not so much a startup - small, but established a decade or more and profitable) I'd be out of touch for a few hours trying to deal with an issue. He and I talked a lot, and he could tell something was up so he asked what was up and I explained. His response earned a lot of loyalty from me (though we managed to get it taken care of without this):

"Let me know how everything goes. If there's nothing else that can be done, give me a call and we can put her tuition (remember, this isn't even his employee, but an employee's fiancee) on my corporate Amex, and we'll work with Chuck (company accountant) to figure out how we can handle it all on the back end."

I realize you can be cynical too, and look at this akin to the FAANGs offering laundry, daycare, etc., with the ultimate goal being "the less time you spend doing these things, the more you spend making us money", and there are of course aspects of that, but this was also very human and going above and beyond (like I could never in any world imagine a situation where your boss says "We can pay your partner's tuition and then we'll figure out payroll deductions or something to get it reconciled").
by rahen | 2025-04-24 16:36:54+00:00
Those are very relevant for a Linux laptop, but much less so for a Linux smartphone. An AOSP-based distro like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, or /e/OS paired with Termux provides almost a all of this, with the added benefit of ART - quite possibly the most polished runtime in the Linux ecosystem.

You can even plug a bluetooth keyboard and run Emacs on your Android / AOSP phone nowadays.
by RHSeeger | 2025-04-24 16:36:55+00:00
There's a lot of discussion whether you should be loyal to your company, what the company does to earn it, etc.

My question would be, what does loyalty to a company actually mean, as far as how it impacts your choices?

- You're willing to work on a Saturday one week instead of Thursday, because there's something critical that needs handling?

- You're willing to work longer hours, possibly unpaid, now and again when there's something critical that needs handling?

- You're willing to work longer hours, possibly unpaid, on a regular basis because the company needs it to survive?

- You're unwilling to leave for a better job offer, because it will cause problems for the company?

- You're will to do more than your own job (underpaid) because the company can't afford to hire someone to fit that job?

There's a ton of different things, and different ones fall into/outside the loyalty bucket depending on who you ask.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-24 16:37:57+00:00
People who insist Apple makes good hardware are falling for marketing. Apple historically has had constant engineering poor choices and bad designs and outright flaws that they just never acknowledge, and for some reason people take that as "good".

Back in the day, Apple laptops used to cook and kill themselves with poor GPU heat management.

Several versions of macbooks shortened a display cable such that it would degrade over time because it simply wasn't up to task, and eventually your screen would be borked and have absolutely ungoogleable issues (this happened to me)

They had an entire run of macbooks with flawed batteries.

The entire keyboard fiasco, all in an effort to bikeshed computer thinness FFS. Meanwhile even before the butterfly tech, macbook keyboards have always been trash. They have un-ergonomic keys and no travel and just seem to prioritize aesthetics over usage.

Internal connectors have 50v backlight pins right next to logic level pins which means instead of a drop of water just killing the backlight power supply, it routes 50v through everything and kills half your mainboard components.

Pre M series macbooks hard thermal throttling issues if you charged them from the ports on one side, but not the other.

Apple laptops have NEVER had good thermal management.

Soldered SSDs that are stupidly tiny, especially in the early M1 machines that had 8gb RAM and bad swap behavior that was actively killing people's SSDs

Apple buys good screens to put in their machines, and the frame is pretty rigid, and THAT'S IT. Nothing else about their machines is a step above other laptop manufacturers hardware wise
by hylaride | 2025-04-24 16:38:26+00:00
I 100% agree. We can't do everything ourselves, but we need to be serious about things.

It's also going to mean several very hard decisions. There's going to need to be some choices between [tax cuts if you're from the right | social programs if you're from the left] and spending on these kinds of things. I also have some very nervous feelings about long-term planning with all the partisanship in the current environment.
by i5heu | 2025-04-24 16:38:58+00:00
I put this paper into 4o so i can check if it is relevant, so that you do not have to do this too here are the bullet points:

- Vision Transformers can be parallelized to reduce latency and improve optimization without sacrificing accuracy.

- Fine-tuning only the attention layers is often sufficient for adapting ViTs to new tasks or resolutions, saving compute and memory.

- Using MLP-based patch preprocessing improves performance in masked self-supervised learning by preserving patch independence.
by duxup | 2025-04-24 16:39:01+00:00
Work with them on a product roadmap?

I've seen folks wanting big changes and we sit down and draw things up and surprisingly it looks like the old roadmap. Everyone is happy and I don't say anything about the similarities, and most importantly we're on the same page ;)

Sometimes when leadership asks for big changes, even when they say big changes, you might find if you get into the details it's not THAT big a change.

In the meantime don't let your mind run too wild assuming and worrying about what they might be asking for. I do that too, it's a developer thing I think, we start considering possibilities or even misused terminology and we get into a loop ;)
by Brian_K_White | 2025-04-24 16:39:51+00:00
I am saying that their "but if a man did it" argument has at least 2 large plot holes.

Some groups have some explicable defensible necessity for the discrimination. People would indeed have a different opinion about a man violating his way into a group for women recovering from being violated by men. This mgaician group can not, or at least has not, produce any such justification of fundamentally unavoidable necessity.

And the group has to actually be merely a social club as they said. They used those words as part of their argument, so you can't consider any groups with any kind of material consequences when comparing "but what if a man did it". If a man is a knitter and there was agroup that billed itself as the worlds best knitters, that is a material consequence. There is a badge that is recognized as indicating the best, and they meet the standard, yet they can not have that badge that tells clients that they meet the standard. This group does appear to have that quality at least somewhat, and so is not just a "social club".

And so the argument is just gratifying garbage.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-04-24 16:40:22+00:00
> I might agree with that, although part of me is glad that there's at least one major platform that Chrome hasn't taken over.

> Five years ago, I'd have agreed. Today Chrome seems like the King of Dark Patterns because it can get away with it. It's the one single app on my Mac that makes me specially configure cmd-Q to quit it. Manifest v3. Web Integrity API. Etc., etc., etc. Google does this because they can. They haven't been the better actor in ages.

One of my biggest fears with the EU coming down on Apple is that they'll force Apple to allow "real" Blink-powered Chrome (vs. the current shell around WebKit), and that we'll wind up with another late-90s/early-00s browser monopoly. Blink is already at something like 90% market share on desktop and 60% on mobile (basically everything not iOS/macOS), and Google is already acting near-unilaterally on new features.
by klibertp | 2025-04-24 16:40:57+00:00
> Sounds like there is the functionality, but lacking the visual cues/affordances?

Yeah, some things are missing (arbitrarily moving control to a given line (even if it precedes the current one) in a function, stepping into some functions[1]), but mostly they're there, just clunky to access and view. It's getting better, though - I checked the cookbook page[2] and found a project[3] that I didn't notice previously, which should help quite a bit with convenience. Even with that, though, LispWorks[4] still looks better... ;)

[1] The ones compiled with a low `debug` setting; they're either impossible to step into, or you land in the decompiled source. Trying to step into a function call should recompile that function automatically with debug instrumentation enabled.

[2] https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/debugging.html

[3] https://github.com/mmontone/slime-breakpoints

[4] https://www.lispworks.com/images/lw-ide-cocoa.png
by skydhash | 2025-04-24 16:41:17+00:00
And that's OK! I'm not trying to gatekeeping anyone from the title of coder or programmer. But what is fine for quick small scripts and throwaway code can be quite bad even for smallish projects. If you're trying to solve a problem in a systematic way, there's a lot of concerns that pertain to the durability of the solution.

There's a lot of literature about these concerns and a lot of methodologies to alleviate them. I (and others) are judging LLMs in light of those concerns. Mostly because speed was never an issue for us in prototypes and scripts (and it can be relaxing to learn about something while scripting it). The issue is always reliability (can it do what I want) and maintainability (can I change it later). Performance can also be a key issue.

Aside: I don't know the exact problem you were solving, but based on the description, that could have been done with systemd timers (macOS services are more of a pain to write). Yes, there's more to learn, but time triggering some command is a problem solved (and systemd has a lot more triggers).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-24 16:41:23+00:00
No one wants to pay the true cost of civilization, because it is expensive and humans are cheap and short term driven.

The amount of debt, both on the books (~$36T US federal debt alone) and off books (~$9T for US infra refresh alone, climate, etc) is near $100T, if not more. Everyone's equity would be wiped out if we had to pay up. "Extend and pretend."

Financial Times: Why governments are 'addicted' to debt - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1jhoU9Mp_U
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-24 16:41:53+00:00
> And all of this adds complexity, more things to go wrong.

This argument is one of the reason why a backend engineer could just add the created_at and updated_at fields without asking a product owner.

It doesn't make much sense from the pure product perspective, so the standard answer will be "no, let's add them when we have a real case they're needed". The product I'm inheriting right now misses these fields on half of the tables. Except when you really want the data, it won't be there as you're not going back in time.

Trying to convince someone that it's worth it will also give the impression they're optional, when you already decided you need them. So at the end of the day, it's your responsibility as an engineer to do what's required, without punting it to non technical stakeholders to push your back.

I also wouldn't ask a product manager if they think table schema should be orthogonal.

Now keeping or not IPs or user IDs in a table is a whole different story and requires a lot more consulting, and not just with the PO.
by v3xro | 2025-04-24 16:41:54+00:00
There is still a rather large area of things that you can do that are not passive sitting-on-couch/sipping-cocktails "leisure" but are nevertheless not classed as "work" because there is no monetary compensation (hobbies being a nice example). Especially if you are self-motivated, you don't need monetary compensation and a boss to tell you what to do, and still enjoy all the benefits of "work".
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-24 16:41:55+00:00
Funny I've been developing an adaption layer that implements the functionality that I use in

https://docs.python-arango.com/en/main/

over tables in Postgres that has a PRIMARY _key and a JSONB document field. The issue is that I have a number of prototypes I've developed with arangodb but the license is awful and I don't feel like I can either open source or commercialize any of them until I'm running on an open source database.

It's a fun project because I don't need to support everything in python-arango, in fact I don't even need to support 100% of the features I use because I am free to change my applications. Also it's a chance to make the library that I really want to use so already it has real integer and UUID primary keys.

I just added a feature to have the library manage _created and _updated fields not just because I thought it was good in general but it was a feature I needed for a particular application, a crawler that fetches headlines from the HN API. I want to fetch headlines right away so I can avoid submitting duplicates but I also want accurate counts of how many votes and comments articles got and that involves recrawling again in two weeks. Of course _created and _updated are helpful for that.
by _mlbt | 2025-04-24 16:42:01+00:00
Not true, there is significant evidence that actually favors the lab leak hypothesis…

https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2025/03/28/covid-1...

Additionally the Biden administration and other world governments suppressed the lab leak hypothesis which means that researchers seeking government funding had an incentive to support the official wet market narrative instead…

https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5058339-biden-adminis...