MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-04-14 05:37:56+00:00
Yep, it sucks. Speaking from experience - I was laid off a few years ago. I was sad my time ended, but my path forward was to leave SF with money and time to visit countries I'd always wanted to see.

It's a trend away from the post-WW2 "promise of lifetime employment". Over the decades, companies have crept toward "human autoscaling" so slow no one noticed. You're far from alone - every other company is doing it. Go see the numbers at https://layoffs.fyi . When the whole industry is doing something, companies must follow suit to stay alive.

Nurture your network! Keep being present on their feeds. Reach out to the ones on your team that you had personal relationships with. Some will shun you; it's not personal, they're ashamed and fearful. It is human nature, same as the company's behavior toward you is a company's nature.

There was never a better time to take things into your own hands. Go look at @IndyDevDan's content on youtube and test the limits with agentic coding: https://agenticengineer.com/state-of-ai-coding/engineering-w...

Spend your 8-20 paid weeks agentic-coding (not vibe-coding) silly projects for your nieces and nephews. You'll come back stronger and more employable than ever.

Don't be sad to be kicked out. The boot that kicked you was attached to a Hills Hoist.
by saghm | 2025-04-14 05:40:36+00:00
> In the United States, employers with more than 100 full-time, non-probationary employees must provide 60 days notice of most planned layoffs[0]

This seemed quite surprising to me, and from reading your reference, I don't think it's nearly as broad a protection as it seems to me like you're stating it. the law seems to apply to companies that you describe, but the types of events that they need to provide notice for don't seem like "most planned layoffs" to me; the employee guide lists the following as potentially being covered:

• A plant closing (see glossary)—where your employer shuts down a facility or operating unit (see glossary) within a single site of employ- ment (see glossary and FAQs) and lays off at least 50 full-time workers;

• A mass layoff (see glossary)—where your employer lays off either between 50 and 499 full-time workers at a single site of employment and that number is 33% of the number of full-time workers at the sin- gle site of employment; or

• A situation where your employer (see glossary) lays off 500 or more full-time workers at a single site of employment

I don't think most layoffs in the US are due to shutting down an entire office, a third of an office with at least 150 people, or 500 people from the same office. I'd expect most layoffs to either be much less concentrated in a single location or not large enough to hit the defined thresholds.

[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn [1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ETA/Layoff/pdfs/Worke...
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-14 05:40:43+00:00
It’s beyond my realm of expertise so I can’t speak confidently, but my hunch is that many of the responsiveness papercuts are cross-domain in nature, which makes them more difficult to track down and fix (not to mention makes who’s responsible for fixing them more murky).

Another big chunk likely comes down to the tradeoffs all the big DEs have made in favor of making development easier or improving DX. This is understandable but at the same time it would be nice if at least one took a hardline stance towards commiting performance reductions and placed responsiveness as a chief concern, much as the operating systems of yesteryear did.
by fpoling | 2025-04-14 05:42:09+00:00
The thing that is often missed in debates about entropy and Universe is that the classical notion on entropy is not compatible with General Relativity. Richard Tolman almost 100 years ago proposed an extension that was compatible.

One of the consequences of that extension was a possibility of a cyclic universe. On expansion one sees that classically defined entropy increases but then it will decrease on contraction.

These days that work is pretty much forgotten, but still it showed that with GR heat dearth of the universe was not the only option.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-04-14 05:43:19+00:00
If you ask it to explain your previous input, and explain the output, can it do that?

yes. Searle's fundamental misunderstanding is that "syntax is insufficient for semantics", but this is just nonsense that could be only believed by someone that has never actually tried to derive meaning from syntactic transformation (e.g. coding/writing a proof)
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-14 05:43:56+00:00
Only if you have a finite set of theories. If you have infinitely many theories that could explain a phenomenon, eliminating some swath of them brings you 0 new information, in information theoretical terms. The problem with SUSY and String theory and other similar physical theories is that they have many free parameters that can have any value that hasn't yet been ruled out by experiment. So if you build a collider twice as large and find nothing, you'll find that your parameter that today has possible range [n, +Inf) will now be known to have range [2n, +Inf). That doesn't actually mean anything at all, though. That doesn't actually tell you anything: you'll need infinitely more experiments to know what's the value of that parameter.
by neilv | 2025-04-14 05:44:12+00:00
Not all. You're talking about douchebag companies.

If I try to hire someone in the future, and I'm talking straight with a candidate, about how we do things and what we're looking for, and they just nod their head, like I'm going through BS rituals that your stereotypical MBA thinks is professional to say but not mean... I will be sad.

And if, while they're BSing me, they're congratulating themselves on having "mastered how the game gets played"... I will be angry.

(This is another reason I won't Leetcode interview. It's signalling that the company is all about disingenuous baggery theatre.)
by intended | 2025-04-14 05:44:13+00:00
Globalisation Also creates markets for the more advanced goods and services to be sold.

If we are going to wade into the deep waters of international trade, then you can’t look only at america or American workers without getting blind sided constantly.

At the depth you are talking - globalization has created more nations than anything else.

The undermining of democracy came with increased deregulation and increased lobbying and wealth concentration.
by ocimbote | 2025-04-14 05:46:31+00:00
I would disagree, but on,y considering I think this is not the right prompt to test against. Hence not the right question.

While you're asking to find creative ways to get rid of the player, I think what LLMs are unable to do (at this point?) is to come up with the idea of an aging mirror, let it sit for a while and only then get back to it when they met its attached character.

The dungeon master did not follow a track of events but rather picked interesting somewhat random contents and moments from the campaign and picked them up to create new story lines.

That doesn't seem like something an LLM would do easily.
by Lerc | 2025-04-14 05:46:39+00:00
>I did not in any way "trivialise AI". LLMS are amazing and a massive accomplishment. I just wanted to contrast them to Asimov's conception of AI.

Point taken. As lelandbatey said, your comment seems to be the one case where it's not meant to trivialise.

>I don't believe that LLMs are capable of thinking. I don't believe that computers, as they exist now, are capable of thinking (regardless of the program they run). I do believe that it is possible to build machines that can think -- we just don't know how.

The (regardless of the program they run) suggests you think that AI cannot be achieved by algorithmic means. That runs a little counter to the belief that it is possible to build thinking machines unless you think those future machines have some non algorithmic enhancement that takes them beyond machines,

I do not assume we will "accidentally" create thinking machines, but I certainly think it's not impossible.

On the other hand I suspect the best chance we have of understanding consciousness will be by attempting to build one.
by degrees57 | 2025-04-14 05:46:43+00:00
I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.

But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.

I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.
by shelled | 2025-04-14 05:48:06+00:00
Is there a way to find out current average/going price of shares (I have ESOPs; I have not yet exercised and was laid of sometimes ago) of an unlisted US company? I would also not like the company to find out (if possible).

Can I even sell in secondary market? I do not live in USA. Can the company stop me from selling and also refuse to buy it back themselves?
by mvkel | 2025-04-14 05:50:13+00:00
I'm not sure what your point is. If you already have a successful co that doesn't need to raise, then yeah you probably don't need to practice seed stage pitching.

Also:

> If you have a profitable company that needs to scale to do more business, just walk into a bank.

Where they'll ask you to put up all your personal assets as collateral in exchange for a 20% loan on your existing accounts receivable
by DrFalkyn | 2025-04-14 05:50:36+00:00
This is becoming more common. Students are entering high snchool already having taken geometry in the 8th grade. When I graduated in the late 90s, we had calc 3 (we called it multivariable calc) and linear algebra, partially because a bit under half the class would run out of math by their senior year. They also were starting to offer differental equations and complex analysis. This was a magnet program. When I went back for my 20th reunion, I was told only maybe 5-10% didn’t already have geometry.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-04-14 05:50:49+00:00
As per a question that someone posted on HN recently, should all US businesses that rely on goods coming from overseas (especially China) be seeking alternate paths for their goods, like the Vietnam re-shipment example?

If the rules are changing by the day, how can anyone be expected to follow them, and what resources are available to monitor and / or enforce these rules? Double that for monitoring / enforcing bastion-country re-shipments?

Is import monitoring and enforcement done by federal government employees?
by arrosenberg | 2025-04-14 05:50:56+00:00
Maybe! I don't think a few jobs in advertising are going to make or break things. It is also going to be easier for us to spin up factories to make microwaves than it will be for China to spin up a consumer economy to buy them. They also may blow it by trying to invade Taiwan, the US doesn't have an outstanding X-Factor like that, we already elected him.
by whytevuhuni | 2025-04-14 05:51:17+00:00
I am referring to Rust scaling up to where C is now (i.e. try to remove C from the picture).

As in, if there will ever be a Rust equivalent of KDE/GNOME (e.g. maybe COSMIC), it will have similar libraries. They will have to be in Rust, and will have to be statically linked. And they will eventually grow up to be the size of KDE/GNOME (as opposed to the tiny thing COSMIC is now).
by jval43 | 2025-04-14 05:51:25+00:00
I was an active contributor to /r/espresso for a while, but in the process of the hobby I realized I disagree with some of their advice and best practices. Minor stuff really.

I would not describe the sub as toxic or anything, but it's literally impossible to get a dissenting opinion across on Reddit. Other hobby subs were the same.

Every single time I mentioned an opinion differing from the "hive-mind" consensus it was downvoted to hell, with no responses, counter arguments or anything resembling discussion. I would have liked to trade experiences but that's not possible.

While at the same time some of the other posters giving advice freely admit they don't actually have experience with what is discussed and are just repeating older posts.

There is no real value in that, and nowadays you can get mostly the same experience by just asking ChatGPT. Both have no clue and no real opinion of their own when it comes to details.

I take part in a few forums now, and it's a breath of fresh air. Much better experience and a lot more personal as well.
by ajuc | 2025-04-14 05:52:40+00:00
Balance is hard mostly because the possible results are too binary. Either you win or you're dead. Stakes are so high that you tend to err on the safe but boring or you risk TPK.

Not only is this boring (it gives players less opportunities for making high-stakes decisions during the fight) - it also makes it harder on GMs to balance encounters.

If you let players and enemies decide to flee or negotiate at any point - the encounters can be much more deadly without turning into TPKs. Players now have more decisions to make on each round (and they can debate during the fight if they should run or not - which is a potential for great roleplaying moment).

And when they decide to run - a successful retreat is an interesting tactical challenge by itself allowing players to use abilities and combos that they seldom need during traditional fight.

One of my favorite moment of roleplay was when our barbarian was arguing with our curious druid whether to check out a very sketchy haunted manor. Eventually they went in and there was a huge battle, druid (against the rest of the team) poured blood into a well and a demon appeared. Half the party started running, other half was fighting with the demon minions, the demon started bargaining with the druid for his soul, barbarian started to run but after 2 turns turned back and tried to fight the demon while the rest of the party also went back and disabled druid to save him.

Eventually the party escaped from the manor (killing the demon was out of the question, it was obviously too powerful).

Our DM was always telling us he never balances the encounters - it's on us to escape in time :) And there were MANY dead PCs. Some players were on their 3rd character by the end of 1.5 year campaign.

Resurecting a dead PC was a major plot point - we had a noble lady from one of the most important NPC noble houses in our party, and she died. We tried resurecting her, but one of the players had to sacrifice something (we rolled d100 and only that player managed over 95, to persuade the god to resurect the character he had to promise to become a priest of that god - and he did multiclassed because of this). The god was basically Loki, and he tricked us - the player character was ressurected as undead :)
by steve200512 | 2025-04-14 05:53:08+00:00
This is an excellent article! As a team leader, the most critical responsibility is to define the company's direction clearly. Only by creating substantial value for the company will your team become indispensable,and this value isn’t necessarily tied directly to revenue; it could be efficiency gains or other strategic advantages. Throughout this process, it’s essential to continuously align with key stakeholders to prevent misalignment and quickly assess how initiatives impact the company’s product value, which helps prioritize efforts. These are insights you won’t find in books or courses,they must be earned through hands-on experience.
by kkaatii | 2025-04-14 05:53:20+00:00
Love it! This is a very useful tool to provide me with introductory (but granular enough) information about new investment ideas that I have.

Just two cents based on my usual workflow --

1. I like to compare companies within the same industry, so it would be good if i can ask follow up questions after reading a report like "How does company Y compare with company X on XX metrics?"

2. I understand that the reports are generated by a model; if that is true, maybe you could cross-reference the fillings with their corresponding earnings call transcripts (should be available for free on many investment websites) and highlight what is being discussed/asked in the calls as well

Again, thank you for the great work. Already pinned your site to my browser's investment workspace XD
by rmason | 2025-04-14 05:54:27+00:00
Here's Google's announcement:

https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-...

I thought John Rush's tweets helped me understand it better. He has several AI agents in the market already. Until now you had to hard wire agents like firecrawl.dev if you wanted to say crawl the web.

Now with A2A you can let the AI Agent discover the best solution on its own for the job. I have found sometimes we have a tool that we use as developers that might not be the best choice but its something we know so it comes without the learning curve.
by xp84 | 2025-04-14 05:54:56+00:00
> Still not sure why on Earth car manufacturers

Like all similar "why don't they have at least a self/community-supported open basic API" questions, the answer is usually the same: They're afraid someone else might create something of value, in part using their API, without them getting their own beaks wet in the process. If you want to integrate with a Nissan Leaf, even if all you wanted were the most harmless read-only access, they'd like you to request a biz dev meeting with them where they'll be happy to talk ruinous terms.

For a related story, see how Chamberlain (MyQ) torched the great, community-built Home Assistant integration it once had for no reason at all. They're afraid somehow they could stop getting the kickbacks from the likes of Walmart and Amazon delivery which they enjoy today, seeing themselves as co-owners of your garage door.
by peblos | 2025-04-14 05:57:12+00:00
> Capacitors can hold charge for a long time, so no touchy. It probably wouldn’t kill you, because capacitors don’t actually store that much energy9, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t kill you, so, no touchy!

I'm recalling the time I was trying to load a "backed up" game on my original Playstation using the disc swap [0] method while the chassis was open.

Since I had the top lid off, I had to hold the disc tray closed button for it to spin up. While looking away to pick up the other disc my pinky moved and touched a capacitor and had me on the receiving end of a massive zap.

I've never touched a capacitor since, thank goodness.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDopEevII3o
Show HN: Quickinput.ai – AI text enhancement in any application
by andyspider | 2025-04-14 05:57:56+00:00
QuickInput brings AI directly into every input field on your computer - emails, chats, docs, anywhere you type.

Key features: • Universal compatibility with any text input scenario • Quickly access via hotkey (Ctrl+Alt+Q) or floating input bar • Intelligent context recognition adapts to your current application • Seamless text insertion without copying and pasting • Conversation memory across different applications

Just launched with a free 14-day trial. Looking for feedback from the HN community!
by biztos | 2025-04-14 05:59:36+00:00
That’s great, and the polar opposite of how I experienced layoffs (of others, then eventually of me).

But one thing that could be better is transparency around severance, so you know in advance what it will be should you get laid off. (Six months may or may not be “generous” depending on tenure.)

When I was laid off we got what was “customary” in that country, but before the offer was on the table nobody was sure we’d get it. It’s so much nicer when this is a matter of law — I’m all for a ~ free labor market but severance requirements help to balance the risk so the employees can relax and do their best work.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-04-14 05:59:51+00:00
I don't think it makes sense to redefine symbiotic relationships where one side benefits "more". If both sides benefit, but you throw a tantrum because the other side benefits more, we generally consider that to be childish. What are you going you do, demand that wheat pay its fair share?

Alternatively, there are always many different perspectives and humans naturally default to the human-centric perspective, all else being equal (for obvious reasons).
by fyai_dev | 2025-04-14 06:00:05+00:00
In a world where even our online personas are getting smarter, what happens when you program your AI doppelgänger to be as audacious as it is brilliant?

Buckle up for a journey into a realm where AI isn’t merely an assistant, but a brutally honest mentor ready to push you out of your comfort zone and into a future that’s as challenging as it is exhilarating.
by cmsparks | 2025-04-14 06:01:37+00:00
>There when would one update the tools? You can’t “trigger” an event which causes a tool change without some hacky workarounds

Tool calls can trigger tool changes. Consider an MCP server exposes a list of accounts and tools to manage resources on those accounts:

1. MCP session starts, only tool exposed to the client is the `select_account` and `list_accounts` tools

2. MCP Client selects an account with `select_account` tool

3. MCP Server updates tools for the session to include `account_tool_a`. This automatically dispatches a listChanged notification

4. MCP Client receives notification and updates tools accordingly

IME this is pretty ergonomic and works well with the spec. But that’s assuming your client is well behaved, which many aren’t
by monero-xmr | 2025-04-14 06:02:44+00:00
No I’m shitting on people who buy short term pleasure then bitch about long term poverty.

I’m a frugal person. Seriously. I have so much money I can do literally anything I want. I live in this insane palace that is the most beautiful piece of property you have ever seen. And I still pinch pennies, buy in bulk, have a deep freezer, drive used cars. It doesn’t make logical sense but I just have programmed in me to be efficient.

And I look around me and see endless complaints and no one is efficient. People waste so much money on bullshit. It has worn me down to be quite cynical and skeptical
by rajnathani | 2025-04-14 06:02:45+00:00
> “We literally make them out of scrap! We also take in second-hand laptops and e-waste from countries like Dubai and China, fix them up, and sell them at half the price of a new one,” he explains.

This part is pretty surprising (maybe it's only a single source saying this so it could be non-truthful), because given China's electronics ecosystem that I would expect the repair ecosystem to be the most efficient and best there. But then maybe because the standard-of-living is higher in China that it would be cheaper to ship unrepaired electronics to India and the repair being done here, as repaired old electronics would have less value in the market in China.
by o11c | 2025-04-14 06:03:52+00:00
In case anyone needs to do the sort of "fix up scattered declarations and move them to headers", you really want to use:

gcc -Werror=missing-declarations -Werror=redundant-decls

(last I checked, Clang's implementation of this was buggy and half-useless, but I'll admit I stopped using Clang)

I recommend this for well-maintained code too, just as another way to keep the code smells away. For a lot of projects this will only require adding a bit of `static` that you were too lazy to write.
Tell HN: Sites are bluffing with their cookie pop-ups
by ConspiracyFact | 2025-04-14 06:04:01+00:00
For the longest time I always hit "Accept all", because if I'm going to look at stuff like wikileaks etc. I use incognito mode, and I obviously wanted to use the site requesting permission, so I didn't want it to break. Just for fun I've started to always click "Reject all" or "Necessary only" or whatever the non-"Accept all" option is, and...not a single site has functioned worse in any way.

This may be old news to many, but I found it mildly amusing.