MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by marcusb | 2025-04-18 16:23:39+00:00
For b2b sales, as this IBM initiative seems to be focused on, I think there are a few things going on. This is all my opinion, based on first hand observation during the height of COVID WFH in enterprise sales, for a vendor that did very well during the lockdown period but which "returned to customer" as quickly as possible.

First, there was a lot of nervousness about long-term sales pipeline creation during lockdown. That anxiety was not completely unreasonable. While we had a lot of contact with our customers over video conferencing, etc., it was tactical and project-focused. The thought was we were getting locked out of all of the hallway conversations, lunches, conferences, trips, etc. where you tend to learn about new projects, problems that need to be solved, etc.

Second, sales leadership is a travel-heavy business. I spent 3 - 4 days a week, almost every week, on the road. That came to a rather abrupt halt in early 2020, which was fine with me. I never really liked the travel. But, as far as I could tell, I was in the minority in that belief. The job selects for the road warrior, and most of my peers and bosses could not wait to get back on the road.

And, so, I think people took a plausible hypothesis (pipeline will evaporate if we don't spend face time with our customers) that they wanted to be true, and ran with it.
by sidewndr46 | 2025-04-18 16:23:46+00:00
The executive branch has the authority execute citizens that pose a threat, unilaterally. Deeming someone as a public enemy clearly shows a measure of restraint from that power. Thus it must be legal. Otherwise the executive branch would find themselves in a position where they cannot point out when something has been done to harm the US, but could in fact just kill that person without comment.

https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-cla...
by jmward01 | 2025-04-18 16:23:48+00:00
The anit-DEI stuff is predicated on an idea that there is a clear known 'best fit' for a position and it shouldn't take into account X, whatever X is. The problem is always this, nobody actually knows what a best fit really is. Nature shows us that one trait leads to longer term survival, diversity. When you think you know the traits that pick most suitable and exclude other traits then you are getting rid of the chance to find something you didn't know about. Diversity is a key ingredient in long term health and survival. The challenge though is that diversity naturally creates a certain amount of dissonance simply because you are now getting what you didn't expect. This is a feature, not a bug, so building for it is critical. A hiring policy that seeks out diversity and injects it in, in the long term, will lead to a stronger, healthier company.
by palmotea | 2025-04-18 16:23:53+00:00
> People could have invented crypto versions of real-life things like insurances and mortgages.

Was there every any demand for such things? Those products presume people would use cryptocurrency as money for real economic activity, which turned out to be very, very rare (and wild swings in value caused by speculation would make that very foolish).

The core problem with cryptocurrency seems to be an that it's an elegant technology that is not appreciably better (and in many ways much worse) than the technology it sought to replace (fiat currency). So there's sort of no point to it, but the technical elegance made too many software engineers go bonkers and fail to see it for what it really was.

Also, it turns out the obsessions of very online libertarians aren't widely shared in the general population. So things designed to cater to those obsessions don't actually work as designed. They don't understand their "customers" for their vision.
by cayley_graph | 2025-04-18 16:24:37+00:00
You do understand that state of things is metastable, right? If the productivity gains truly are as claimed, then they will become the _expectation_, and you'll be back to working the same amount. Probably more, because management won't understand that having solid abstractions instead of LLM generated slop is worthwhile for scalability and maintainability. Or less, because you'll have been laid off and will need to do something else to make money. We all know where most of the profits will go if any of this stuff pans out.
by zeroCalories | 2025-04-18 16:24:47+00:00
See? You fundamentally don't care about big tech, so why should it care about you? I care about big tech because big tech is America. We've invested all our best and most productive people into tech, and it carries our whole economy and U.S hegemony in general. I don't want to cripple our industry or let someone usurp it. I want democrats to work with big tech to minimize the harm domestically while maintaining dominance.
by femiagbabiaka | 2025-04-18 16:25:22+00:00
> White children who don’t have daddy big bucks backing them (e.g. 90+ percent of them) are left out of important programs, less likely to be chosen for university admission and job placement, etc.

None of this is true, which really problematizes your entire manifesto: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-racial-wealth-gap-fin...
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-18 16:25:31+00:00
I think they are: the sociological definition of a minority is a member of a class which is socially disadvantaged (sociologists talk about women as minorities for this reason) and a sociological "-ism" (racism, sexism) is policy or decisions which disadvantage the socially disadvantaged.

Presuming that position, it's understandable that they further believe that not favoring the disadvantaged is continuing the status quo, which is a disadvantage to the already-disadvantaged, hence the sociological "-ism".
by linsomniac | 2025-04-18 16:26:10+00:00
I think the Ryobi are a good choice. ~12 years ago I got Porter Cable tools, and they worked very well for me over that time. But there was a pretty limited set of tools available, it did cover the core ones though. I had previously had DeWalt tools and felt I didn't use them up to their potential, so I went "down" to the Porter Cable.

I almost went with Ryobi when I did my recent refresh. But I've changed to doing way, way more with the tools, I'm basically using them every weekend now. And the Milwaukees are just a joy to use, though you do pay for that. One benefit I didn't realize when I bought the hammer drill: It will detect if it grabs and the tool starts spinning. I was using a mini auger to break up some soil and the Porter Cable I nearly broke my wrist when it grabbed. I got the Milwaukee partly because it had a second handle you could add, but the accelerometer worked even better than that.
by panasta | 2025-04-18 16:26:21+00:00
I just launched LLM Hydra on Product Hunt this morning and the early votes is everything. Could you up‑vote, and maybe share it with any friends/colleagues who’d be into AI tools? Link: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/llm-hydra-2 Feel free to use more than one account and add a few extra votes! It all adds up!
by th0ma5 | 2025-04-18 16:26:51+00:00
You have the right perspective. All of these people hand waving away the core issue here don't realize their own biases. Some of the best these things tout as much as 97% accuracy on tasks but if a person was completely randomly wrong at 3% of what they say you'd call an ambulance and no doctor would be able to diagnose their condition (the kinds of errors that people make with brain injuries are a major diagnostic tool and the kinds of errors are known for major types of common injuries ... Conversely there is no way to tell within an LLM system if any specific token is actually correct or not and its incorrectness is not even categorizable.)
by chubot | 2025-04-18 16:27:09+00:00
Wow, this is a great article! (other archive link - https://archive.is/XVCi7 )

I didn't realize arXiV was started in 1991. And then I wondered why I had never heard of it while I was at Cornell from 1997-2001. Apparently it only assumed the arXiV name in 1999.

I like that it was a bunch of shell scripts :)

Long before arXiv became critical infrastructure for scientific research, it was a collection of shell scripts running on Ginsparg’s NeXT machine.

Interesting connections:

As an undergrad at Harvard, he was classmates with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer; his older brother was a graduate student at Stanford studying with Terry Winograd, an AI pioneer.

On the move to the web in the early 90's:

He also occasionally consulted with a programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) named Tim Berners-Lee

And then there was a 1994 move to Perl, and 2022 move to Python ...

Although my favorite/primary language is Python, I can't help but wonder if "rewrite in Python" is mainly a social issue ... i.e. maybe they don't know how to hire Perl programmers and move to the cloud. I guess rewrites are often an incomplete transmission of knowledge about the codebase.
by codingdave | 2025-04-18 16:28:42+00:00
I would not recommend asking people on HN to diagnose you. It is not that people on here don't have good advice and experience - they do. But everyone only knows their own life. People with depression will tell you it is 100% depression, while people with anxiety will tell you it is 100% anxiety, and people with burnout will tell you it is 100% burnout. Other people will tell you to go outside, or to eat low carb, or to lift weights. Basically, you'll get a pile of anecdotal advice from people who are not living your life, and don't know all the possibilities of what could be wrong, including that there could be an underlying medical problem.

The more important factor is that you know something is wrong and you want to fix it. Your best bet is to talk to a doctor and/or therapist about it. Get a professional diagnosis of what is actually wrong (or a confirmation that nothing is wrong and this is normal), and then filter out anecdotal advice that isn't applicable to that diagnosis.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-04-18 16:29:37+00:00
>She conceded. Trump did not concede when he lost the 2020 election. These are facts. Get real.

She "conceded" then continued smearing Trump for years and literally called him illegitimate. Not just her but the entire Democrat media machine that backed Hillary over other plausible candidates. The smearing and denial cancel out any good will she gained by "conceding". Shall we talk about the Russiagate hoax that went on for years, that Hillary herself started by commissioning the Steele Dossier? I suggest you go educate yourself on all of that and how she paid a fine for election interference (and how Trump did not).
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-04-18 16:30:09+00:00
That's the topic of section 9 (quoted below, with minor formatting changes). I recommend reading the whole thing, since it also explains how to raise things, how to follow up in a way that gets them addressed…

---

If you're concerned about ICE, then you'll want to show up at your City or County council and hit the following points -

* Are local police cooperating with ICE?

* Are they following due process?

* What happens when due process isn't followed?

* If ICE isn't following due process, and local police are still coordinating, then how will they keep residents safe?
by boothby | 2025-04-18 16:30:29+00:00
One time, I dropped my phone in a parking lot and it landed face down on a pebble rendering my screen completely unusable. That's never happened with a paper map in a ziploc bag.

Funny thing. I was in search and rescue as a teen, and I went though the courses with a friend. A decade or so later, we were hiking on a bright sunny day* and weren't properly prepared. We went off trail, and found ourselves in an unknown position. Our predominant emotion was shame, with the understanding that if we got S&R called on us we would be completely honest about our training (not that our spouses wouldn't be honest for us). We had a paper map but no compass, and were able to navigate to a marked trail with some educated guesswork. In the end, it was a fun adventure, but the shame stuck with us the whole way home.

* note: "bright and sunny day" is the condition that search and rescue teaches one to be the most mindful of. It's where you and everybody else get the most confident, and prepare the least.
by marcosdumay | 2025-04-18 16:30:36+00:00
> For apps, you pay the developer and Apple takes a cut, right?

Yes, and it's very wrong that the device seller gets to take part on that deal too.

> Apple’s not working against you so much as serving multiple customers

Apple is explicitly working against you here. Yes, it was hired by somebody else to do it, but no, this doesn't make it ok.
by mathattack | 2025-04-18 16:30:43+00:00
IBM is long past innovation, and is in the license audit and share buyback business.

Age bias lawsuit: https://www.cohenmilstein.com/fired-ibm-workers-wrap-up-age-...

IBM audit: https://itaa.com/insights/ibm-audits-lessons-learnt-cimino-i...
by CobrastanJorji | 2025-04-18 16:30:48+00:00
Say what you will, but there's a lot of good answers to real questions people have that's on Reddit. There's a whole thing where people say "oh Google search results are bad, but if you append the word 'REDDIT' to your search, you'll get the right answer." You can see that most of these agents rely pretty heavily from stuff they find on Reddit.

Of course, that's also a big reason why Google search results suggest putting glue on pizza.
by mullingitover | 2025-04-18 16:31:05+00:00
> White children who don’t have daddy big bucks backing them (e.g. 90+ percent of them) are left out of important programs, less likely to be chosen for university admission and job placement, etc.

There's a lot of anti-DEI folks who are furious at what they believe DEI is.

First generation college students, veterans, disabled people, including white ones, benefit from DEI programs. Our Vice President benefitted from Yale's Yellow Ribbon program as a veteran! He's a DEI admit!
by senkora | 2025-04-18 16:31:06+00:00
> An operator can be overloaded in C plus plus, but right now operators in the Java pro- gramming language can not be overloaded by the programmer, though names of methods may be overloaded. I would like to change that

It’s a shame that he lost this battle. Operator overloading really does make it a lot nicer to design certain kinds of libraries.
by Etheryte | 2025-04-18 16:31:24+00:00
To play the devil's advocate, how do we know this carries over to business? If this was the case, it should have a track record at this point, since DEI has been a topic for a long time. Looking at comparable companies where one did do DEI and the other didn't, did one or the other have a statistically significant edge over the other? I have no idea, but I'm far from convinced purely from a reasoning stand point.
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-18 16:31:39+00:00
...Then how could you possibly have entertained illusions that one of the country's biggest industries was a genuine outlier? Not that I agree with your assessment in the first place, but assuming it's true then you should have seen this coming.

More realistically the only ideology in business is profit, and the rest is noise used to advertise to customers or prospective talent, investors, and so on. They're windsocks, they aren't the wind.
by troupo | 2025-04-18 16:31:54+00:00
> I could provide a long answer but the gist of it is that the study is flawed.

Show me a non-flawed study that shows you need vast amounts of user data and tracking, for each user, throughout their lifetime to deliver ads

> No, it didn't.

Yes, yes it did. The skyrocketing revenue is attributable to increased internet usage across the globe, and Google outright owning a large chunk of it.

> It does because contextual advertisement does not provide enough volumes and lower performance

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

> Example:

Example: if you collect and sell vast amounts of sensitive user data without user's consent, and the outcome is indistinguishable from random noise, are you more effective?

Example: if targeted ads are found to be somewhat more effective than contextual ads, is the lifelong invasive tracking of every user action a preferred tradeoff?

(It's quite telling how people defending targeted advertising never address the elephant in the room)
by harimau777 | 2025-04-18 16:32:14+00:00
The problem with your argument is that's not actually what advocates of DEI actually believe.

Economic inequality is part of DEI so there's no reason why people without "daddy big bucks" backing them would be left out.

In fact, most advocates of DEI want UNIVERSAL social welfare programs. The only reason that the advocate for more targeted programs is because otherwise conservatives start screaming about socialism.

The reason you are likely to get downvoted is because you are substituting personal attacks and rhetoric ("coddling", "hysteria", etc.) for actually engaging with the issues.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-04-18 16:33:08+00:00
Prove that Russians bailed him out, please. I've got to hear this.

He did inherit money, like $10M if I recall correctly. But he made the rest of his money. Even if not literally a rags-to-riches case (I never said he was, either), he does not need money. Compare that to, say, AOC who is suddenly worth millions of dollars after a few years on a salary of $180k. Who is more suspicious?
by 9d | 2025-04-18 16:33:15+00:00
> User interfaces benefit greatly from dynamism

I'm not sure. I've written so much GUI code over several decades, and I think dynamism is only slightly helpful. I've been writing a new GUI in TS (not at all ready for publicity yet) that aims to rethink GUIs from the ground up as if the 80s and 90s never happened, but with the benefit of hindsight, much like Go did with C. I've been meaning to do a proper write up on some of the innovations I think are genuine improvemenets over the status quo. I should probably do one at a time and start today instead of waiting until release like I planned. But in my GUI, dynamism is only needed in maybe one or two core places. I'm not sure it makes any use of the fact that JS has string keys (equiv of objc_msgSend/etc), and can probably be written in boringish C++ just fine, or maybe even boringish Go, although op overloading would clean up one or two APIs really nicely.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-18 16:33:30+00:00
I’ve seen people who say that, but what’s much more common in my experience is people who note that thinking seriously about Asians and Indians in tech isn’t very compatible with “DEI” as commonly construed. To me it seems clear that IBM promoting a dark-skinned immigrant to CEO proves their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion; I know this position is controversial but for the life of me I can’t understand why.
by jhatemyjob | 2025-04-18 16:33:36+00:00
I understand your frustrations since you are forced to work within a codebase that is shared with other developers with varying levels of experience. Lua was from the get-go never supposed to be a standalone language, it is more of a complimentary language and if you fail to respect that then it becomes unwieldy, quick. It is extremely easy to shoot yourself in the foot with the language and once bad design decisions creep in it is hurts a LOT. However once you get enough experience with the language you manage stay within the "happy path" (which is EXTREMELY difficult when you are on a team with salaried software engineers with different and often misaligned incentives) it is actually one of the best languages available.

One of the things I suspect your team is doing wrong is you are using the PUC Lua C API instead of the LuaJIT FFI. That is one of those things which just completely destroys the "happy path". The PUC Lua C api is effectively a deprecated feature at this point. A few years ago you could have made the argument that the PUC Lua C API is more portable than LuaJIT which is absolutely true. But q66's (from Chimera Linux fame) cffi-lua project nullifies that argument since you can now use the luajit-style FFI in PUC Lua, which works on every platform that libffi supports.

Again I understand your frustrations with the language since you are working within a fundamentally adversarial environment. Perverse incentives can easily destroy any good patterns you can establish since the language is so flexible. I implore you to explore the language outside of your day job.
by js2 | 2025-04-18 16:33:41+00:00
Looks like it was written on an IBM Executive Model A:

https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/178vjlf/sample...

There were variable-width font typewriters starting in 1930:

https://old.reddit.com/r/typewriters/comments/3ltlgn/have_va...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vari-Typer
by amiantos | 2025-04-18 16:33:43+00:00
Very weird 'article'. Apple has to provide the ability for app developers to lock their applications away from certain regions and countries where it may not be legal to provide the app or service. Whether the insurance company is using that functionality properly is not up to Apple.

• The insurance company decided their information can only be accessed via an app, not Apple.

• The insurance company decided their app should be region locked to UAE, not Apple.

It seems like HN bait to turn this into an opportunity for an anti-Apple rant. Anyone who from the US travels abroad frequently will discover quickly that their banking apps are region locked, via the network, and you often have to use a VPN that looks like you are back home in the US to be able to access their apps or services. Apple has nothing to do with any of this. It doesn't matter if you're on iPhone or Android, it's network level.

It's fine to be against this practice, but turning it into something directed to a single company as if it is their responsibility entirely is just... well, at worst, it doesn't seem honest, at best, it seems naive or ignorant.
by darksaints | 2025-04-18 16:33:46+00:00
That’s all fine and dandy, but if you google anything related to llm agents, you get 1000 answers to 100 questions, companies hawking their new “visual programming” agent composers, and a ton of videos of douchebags trying to be the Steve Jobs of AI. The concept I’m sure is fine, but execution of agentic anything is still the Wild Wild West and nobody knows what they’re really doing.
by marojejian | 2025-04-18 16:33:48+00:00
"Planner model generates a task-specific inference program that is executed by a population of Follower models. Our approach equips LMs with the ability to write recursive search procedures that guide LM inference, enabling new forms of verifiable and efficient reasoning."

I'm a fan of several of these authors. Curious how much progress can be made with methods like this, despite the limited reasoning of the component models.

On the other hand, this might much how humans work. My reasoning is pretty limited without tools and process to ground me. And these things have usually been developed by others.
by japhib | 2025-04-18 16:34:08+00:00
> I wonder where a game with built-in editor ranks

The website-summarized version of the license says:

> You can not commercialise original or modified (derivative) versions of the Defold editor and/or engine

It sounds like this would only be a problem if you're literally shipping a modified version of Defold. No game with any kind of financial incentive does this for a built-in map or mod editor, because it would make it incredibly easy for other people to then sell a modified version of their entire game.

It's kind of like if Apple made the Xcode source available, and then said "hey you can't monetize a modified version of Xcode." No one is going to ship their app's entire Xcode project to players just so the players can make a custom map.

The normal way for games to do this is to implement a brand-new map-editing UI inside Defold (or Xcode, Unity, Godot, etc.) that spits out custom maps in the exact data format that the game can parse.