MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by smusamashah | 2025-05-13 08:01:12+00:00
You would not hire or go to a a mentally unstable doctor. If a doc hallucinates or makes a mistake, it will be rare. They can self introspect and work on it if they realise there mistake even. AI is NOT same. It has no self reflection, hallucination isn't rare. AI is not mentally stable in any sense.
by Zoethink | 2025-05-13 08:03:30+00:00
A few years ago, I pitched an internal developer tool that would've saved hours of manual QA work. I had data, a working prototype, and even initial support from a couple of engineers.

It went nowhere. Why? I didn’t do any pre-alignment. I presented it cold in a leadership meeting and watched people nod politely… then forget about it the next day.

Reading about Nemawashi and Engineered Serendipity now makes it painfully obvious what I missed: those informal 1:1s, quiet pre-chats, and planting the seed before the meeting.
by avidiax | 2025-05-13 08:03:56+00:00
The part that irks me is the sense that this person advocates these methods always, as though it's a cheat code for success.

I think we've all had to deal with difficult people or organizations that might need methods like these to allow them to come to a mutually beneficial decision either faster or at all.

A common technique I've heard of is "hairy arms". This is from the graphic design world, an area that practically everyone thinks they are qualified to judge or comment on. Some stakeholders will always give a comment or request a change, no matter what is presented. So the technique is to put hairy arms on the mascot, the lady, etc. A small flaw so that stakeholders can feel that they've given feedback, been heard, but avoid large changes that often cause multiple rounds of feedback.

Should you use that technique on everyone and every project? I think that's a bit disrespectful. Should you use that technique when dealing with a client that always has feedback, even on excellent work? Probably.
by piva00 | 2025-05-13 08:04:50+00:00
I will basically copy-paste my other reply[0] to you because you are spreading a narrative that is potentially wrong (and at the very least quite misleading):

There has been no conclusive post mortem, the issue is still under investigation[1], this is a blog post by a tech company, not an authoritative agency with findings, basically speculation being used as a marketing article...

This article[2] also calls out the rumor mill about renewables being a cause:

> Political groups such as the far-right VOX – which has historically pushed back against climate action such as the expansion of renewables – also pointed to the blackout as evidence of “the importance of a balanced energy mix”.

> However, others rejected this suggestion, with EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen telling Bloomberg that the blackout could not be pinned on a “specific source of energy”:

> “As far as we know, there was nothing unusual about the sources of energy supplying electricity to the system yesterday. So the causes of the blackout cannot be reduced to a specific source of energy, for instance renewables.”

> Others have sought to highlight that, while it was possible solar power was involved in the initial frequency event, this does not mean that it was ultimately the cause of the blackout.

It's all inconclusive and the narrative that solar is the culprit is being pushed by anti-renewables, let's wait until there's an official conclusion to the investigation instead of peddling bullshit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43970583

[1] https://www.entsoe.eu/news/2025/05/01/iberian-black-out-ents...

[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-what-we-do-and-do-not-know-ab...
by CelestialMystic | 2025-05-13 08:04:57+00:00
You and many others (reading through the comments) are pretending that an information leak is on the same scale and severity as major safety concerns people may have about the safety of physical structure. It is obviously asinine comparison and why you will always get such push-back and people instinctively know they fundamentally different.

You also haven't thought about how many unintended consequences it will have. It will affect things like open source, hiring and how it will affect smaller niche cultures that rely on pseudo-anonymity or just want to do fun things.

Just off the top of my head:

Am I going to need a license to build a EDuke32 package for AUR?

Am I going to need a license to add a plugin to a piece of software?

Will I need a license to stick a gist on github?

Many people that currently make the laws in industry (just look at the UK online safety act) don't understand/won't care about any of the nuance.

>I just think there has been entirely too much demonstrated harm to start with the premise of “anyone can build any software they want at any time, with zero liability”.

Actually it is the opposite. I and many others could argue that it has improved the world immensely. I can talk to people that share my interests from all around the globe, I have the ability to work internationally and never leave my home. I've just recently I've taught myself how to fix many of my own vehicle problems at home using Youtube and do some basic maintenance around the house.

I can get any niche product delivered to my door in a matter of days. All of these are massively positives that have benefited the world immeasurably.

> These students may be liable for things after the fact, but that is hardly any consolation to the people that may have had their intimate personal data leaked. Even if they are successfully sued by everybody on the site, how much money could they possibly squeeze out of a bunch of college students? I don’t know how you can prevent this without some up front thing, such as a license, rather than making them liable after the fact.

A license will guarantee nothing. You should assume that anything you put online can be leaked. I can control the amount of information I put on most sites by either giving them false information or being pseudo-anonymous / anonymous.

However regulation in my country is going to force photo ID for platforms such as Discord (and many others) under the guise of age checks. This will mean that I have to give a third party my ID which has all my data or not use the service. This will tie my identity on Discord (which is pseudo-anonymous) to my Discord account.

So licensing/regulation actually guarantees more data leaks. Because I can't vet the company that deals with the ID check, not can I easily circumvent information gathering. Sure I will probably be able to defeat most of this with a VPN. But it is more of a PITA.
by LadyCailin | 2025-05-13 08:05:32+00:00
Yes, I have. You aren’t allowed to build a faulty bridge, even free of charge.

Maybe you are allowed to build that faulty bridge in, I dunno, Laos or whatever, and if people go to Laos specifically to drive on your bridge, then that’s on them if it collapses. But countries can and do successfully regulate how software is handled in their jurisdiction, see GDPR for example. It’s not an unsolvable problem, and even if there are cracks (like there are with GDPR), the solution isn’t to throw our hands up and say “welp, nothing to be done, just have to accept that sometimes people’s intimate personal details gets leaked.”

If you think my suggestion is bad (which it very well may be), happy to hear your take on how to prevent things like this and and other negligent software.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-13 08:06:14+00:00
It’s actually closer to 20mins by mass transit. As that link I shared demonstrated

Also I’d argue the Santander Cycles are a form of public transport (just not mass transit like buses or the tube)

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/cycling/Santander-cycles

But honestly, you’re the first Londoner I’ve spoken to who considers 30 minutes by foot a long way away. Even by London standards, that’s close. For suburban dwellers, 30 minutes by foot wouldn’t even get them close to their nearest art gallery (and I don’t even mean “major” galleries either).

And your insistence on limiting things by “major” instances is odd. London has a strong culture of smaller independent amenities. Many of which are a lot closer than Soho and Southbank.

This is honestly the first time I’ve ever heard anyone complain about a zone one apartment being a long way from stuff.
by stavros | 2025-05-13 08:06:28+00:00
You can use Ollama or LM Studio, both in API mode, to return the responses. I believe they offer audio support, but I'm not entirely sure.

However, if you're looking for instruction following (like an agent), I've tried to implement my own agent and have lost faith. Even GPT-4.1 will regularly gaslight me that no, it definitely ran the tool call to add the event to my calendar, when it just didn't. I can't get any more adherence out of it.
by scheeseman486 | 2025-05-13 08:06:53+00:00
I probably could have thown in an extra comma.

What behaviour? Who did what? You made the vaguest of assertions, assume everyone downvoting you knows what you're talking about, then proceed to get upset over it, which is pathetic. Don't get on my back for not being clear when you can't even communicate what it is you're angry about.
by seanhunter | 2025-05-13 08:07:23+00:00
I did my music postgrad at the Guildhall school of music and drama, which is in the Barbican. Fun facts:

1) Orlando Bloom did the drama course when we were there. Famous music students there include Bryn Terfel, Jaqueline du pre and tons of others.

2) I say we because my wife did a music postgrad there at the same time but we didn’t meet until we left even though we were once on the same openday concert program together. (My composition was chosen to represent the jazz courses so I was in a group that played that - my wife won a chamber music award so she was playing later in the concert with a guitarist, but us jazzers didn’t get to see that).

3) We didn’t meet because she did early music whereas I did the jazz course and all the lessons on the jazz course were underground. You may think I am joking but literally all our lessons were in the basement except for if we had a visiting musician do a masterclass (then they used to use one of the nice airy and bright above-ground rooms, some of which have a lovely view of the lake).

4) As well as the concert hall which people have mentioned, there is a theatre and at least 2 cinemas as part of the Barbican complex. If you know where to look there are parts of the old roman wall and at least 2 ruined medieval churches. You are also not far at all from one of London’s real hidden gems, the cathedral of St Bartholomew the great, a medieval cathedral down a little side alley near Smithfield market that tons of people in London don’t even know exists. Oh and for Americans, Benjamin Franklin once worked there as a typesetter[1]

My wife now teaches at the Guildhall. It’s a pretty special place especially this time of year when it’s nice. You can go sit out by the lake in the sunshine, watch the ducks etc. It’s really peaceful even though you are yards from old street, moorgate, liverpool street etc some of the busiest parts of london.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Bartholomew-the-Great
by lazide | 2025-05-13 08:07:29+00:00
The power source needs to be able to temporarily/momentarily provide large portions of the grids energy demands to provide what was needed. Something batteries are typically well suited for.

Mechanical inertia in generators also tends to do well in these situations.

PV panel supply was just not nearly large enough, and if you look at overall PV capacity as a percentage of their grid capacity, it’s pretty obvious it was never going to be enough to stabilize any serious issues.
by bjackman | 2025-05-13 08:08:17+00:00
This is a strange take to me. What do you think engineering management _is_? It's fundamentally a political role. This reads to me like "it's sad that most football managers never get to kick a ball".

I'm sure there are places where that job is primarily about engineering... But that's just a place that doesn't actually need EMs! Maybe you are saying this is the ideal org, and yeah I probably agree. So I guess this is just a semantics thing.
by oblio | 2025-05-13 08:08:22+00:00
> There are even economic theories that start from that tenet (globally referred to as "trickle-down-economics").

Those economic theories are not proper economic theories. As in, mainstream economists don't support them. That theory is propaganda in service of some specific political parties.

> I don't see the contradiction between the two propositions "government is for the ruling class" and "there have been some progress".

"There has been some progress" is a gross understatement considering the age we're living in. There has been tremendous progress and the lifestyle difference between the poorest members of a developed country and the richest ones is much, much smaller than that between the poorest and richest members of a country 200+ years ago.
by pwagland | 2025-05-13 08:08:25+00:00
> You can't say an opinion is false - it's an opinion.

I agree that op thought: > [that] there's [no] debate that ATC staffing is a major issue right now, and the FAA really did blow up its hiring pipeline to further DEI goals

Grandparent only said that there is clearly debate over this.

To say that no-one can disagree with op, or point out an opposing point of view, because is their opinion, is not furthering discussion.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-05-13 08:09:49+00:00
Inspired by [1] to post. It's an old video but I think it's exceptionally well-made and deserves to be shared.

There's also a French version [2] but francophones say it's hard to comprehend due to the accent (and all French is hard to comprehend for me anyway so I wouldn't know the difference).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43961226 Universe expected to decay in 10⁷⁸ years, much sooner than previously thought

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DynLBcmOTGs
by speedbird | 2025-05-13 08:09:49+00:00
OP, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

Stop being so different and try to match what companies are looking for.

Remote only.

Single letter surname.

This constraint, that constraint, you’re getting the answer you are telling the market to give you.

Yes there are now significant barriers you face: x months not in a relevant role, laid off, 20 years in the industry without a management role.

If you’re pitching yourself against people who have 3-5 years experience, will work 50-60 hour weeks coz early in career and lifestyle unencumbered, it’s not going to go your way.

That means you have to go the extra mile to fit what is wanted.

And yes, that likely means significant drop in salary / attractiveness of role / commute etc.

Maybe there just isn’t the work where you are and you will need to move, maybe your mother too.

Talk to people in the industry you know and trust about this, not HN.

I’ve been in similar situations, currently in a very tech role at 62, but that’s not usual.

Wish you the best
by DarkWiiPlayer | 2025-05-13 08:10:45+00:00
> Even if you can enforce this somehow

This is super simple to enforce.

For starters, we only really care about the companies developing big commercial AI products, not the people running said models on their home PCs or anything along those lines.

If a company starts offering a new AI model commercially, you simply send someone to audit it and make sure they can provide proof of consent, have their input data, etc.

In most cases, this should be enough. If there's reason to believe an AI company is actually straight up lying to the authorities, you simply have them re-train their model in a controlled environment.

Oh and no, you don't need cryptographically secure random numbers for AI training and/or operation, so you can easily just save your random seeds along with the input data for perfectly reproducible results.

This isn't an enforcement problem, it's a lobbying problem. Lawmakers are convinced that AI will solve their problems for them when reality is that it's still mostly speculation on someone at some point finding a way to make it profitable.

In reality, training and even running AI is still way too expensive to the companies selling them, even without considering the long-term economic impact of the harmful ways they are trained (artists contribute to GDP directly, open source projects do so indirectly, and free services like wikipedia are an important part of modern society; AI is causing massive costs to all of these)
by globular-toast | 2025-05-13 08:11:06+00:00
The point wasn't really about having your own copy of the commit history, it's about having your own copy of the refs (which is all a branch is in git). Basically, your master branch is not the same branch as GitHub's master branch or anyone else's. This is one of the things people don't really seem to understand about git. It means you don't have to do the "feature branch" thing, for example, you can just do commits on your master branch then submit a PR.
by twelve40 | 2025-05-13 08:11:55+00:00
> Engineering managers don't pitch projects

when you work among 180 thousand other people, a good chunk of you energy will be spent on justifying your existence.

in a top-heavy, cutthroat place like a FAANG, people will fight fiercely for promotions (that's half a mil extra cash in your pocket this year!), and for managers that means getting into the newest hypest shiniest projects or fall behind and eventually get kicked out. The way you join hyped-up projects (or even hear about them before it's too late): you invent one if you have the balls and the energy to pull it off, or persuade someone influential to let you join an existing one. So, strong disagree on "managers don't pitch projects".
by atoav | 2025-05-13 08:12:45+00:00
If you're persuading people to do the wrong thing you're still proving how great and influential you are — if things go sideways you can still move to the next place /s

There are people whose entire careers are built on this!

Counterintuitively this is precisely why the people who care more about things being right than about winning need to work on their persuation skills: Otherwise the wrong thing will get done and guess who will have to deal with it.
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-05-13 08:13:00+00:00
If there is one area I feel being expert, this is titles. I’ve been running a community website for over 15 years and it’s been 10 years since my only moderation activity there is fixing titles while other people moderate comments for hate speech and obscenities.

When I first started moderating titles, users took it personally, so I had to back off manual post-moderation and built a dozen pre-moderation filters that forced people to write proper titles. I blocked long sequences of uppercase letters, obscenities, too short and too long titles, duplicate postings, greetings, improper use of punctuation, series of exclamation and question marks and god knows what. It worked, but it drove away some users.

A few years later, I relaxed the pre-moderation filters and reintroduced post-moderation. This time, I sent automatic notifications to users as titles of their posts changed. I kept receiving complaints, I so I developed a few tricks that would reduce the number of complaints. Instead of rewriting a title, I took user text that represented the essence of the post and put it as the title, keeping the original spelling and even case, so that the user clearly sees that the titles comes from his own post.

Later on, I joined a media company and observed editors rewriting titles of journalists, detecting patterns in the changes. I followed Huffington Post’s research on A/B testing of titles and read blogs of their admirers. I even did some A/B testing on titles myself.

At some point, I even shook the dust off my machine learning skills and searched for correlations between titles and the votes on comments below.

It’s been a few years since I adopted a new approach to title moderation.

I removed titles. Entirely.

Users are presented with a generously sized textarea to write their post or comment, and the title is generated from the first few words of it. There was a bit of magic first, like skipping the greeting, but I ended up removing almost all of it. New users are confused by the apparent lack of title, but this only forces them to think through the text. Oldtimers know exactly what to expect in the title and adapt accordingly.
by te_chris | 2025-05-13 08:13:31+00:00
Worth pointing out that, as a concert hall, it's extremely mediocre acoustically ( same as the Royal Fesitval Hall) - albeit pretty and I love it dearly. There was a plan to build a new, proper concert hall but it got scotched. Probably deservedly but it would've been wonderful to have a concert hall worthy of our musicians and enesembles.
by AstralStorm | 2025-05-13 08:14:18+00:00
The policy results in a lot of wasted effort and inefficiency.

Even secure systems like Tails have an option for persistence for that very reason.

Lack of session management is in fact annoying in the OSes, X11 protocol is generally unsupported anyway.

True persistence, however, is indeed in storing the scripts and advanced things in a backup archive, properly labelled. Sadly there is no good site to share these to reduce the unneeded effort.

Distributed archive, for that matter.
by ownagefool | 2025-05-13 08:14:29+00:00
For some reason, whether that be scale, or dysfunction, you tend to end up with disparate silos even in relatively well run orgs.

I did a stint with a large US org where my SOW was to do azure (hashicorp) vault. The org already had about 20 aws vault clusters, GCP was a likely new target.

I sold k8s. That was seen as risky despite being less overall work, so I delivered direct on azure clusters, then was given a SOW to do k8s POC ( with a view to doing GCP ).

POC delivered a fairly production like service in ~a week using the most junior person on the team, only to spark outrage that I ( a person with about 10 YOE with k8s ) had delivered a POC without discussing with the core platform team ( which was intended to be POC 2, separating the issues of concern ).

Now I get why people do platform teams, and this platform wasn't bad ( more work than rolling my own equivalent; but the processes in theory ensure the less experienced people don't do terrible things ).

End result was pretty much a blocker on GCP vaults because we were awaiting said platform team to deliver for us, and me ( a contractor that delivered several at risk SOWs ahead of schedule ) cut loose because we're blocked by the other team.

In such an org, it's the job of the EM to advocate for their delivery stream, mine didn't quite manage it that day.

However, this org was probably the best ran at scale I've ever seen ( usually you can nuke an org in like 10 minutes after they give you access to the SCM & CI/CD ).
by joha4270 | 2025-05-13 08:14:33+00:00
Yeah, that matches my understanding. It was the

> a flight control feature the pilots didn't know about

phrasing that made me take issue. To me, it implies that if just the pilots had known about MCAS in detail, the crashes wouldn't have happened, implicitly placing the blame on them. While the reason for both the faulty system and the lack of knowledge can be attributed to Boeing trying to save money, which I think is a more fair target for blame.
by coolcase | 2025-05-13 08:15:57+00:00
Yeah you are papermanning the comment, and that aint cool.

Given the strength of the posted article (by Tracing Woodgrains) I cannot see the debate either. It is airtight. Non partisan. Nuanced. Stone uncovering. Dozens of references. Led to real world change (albeit unfortunately not in the best way due to politics). It's an A+++ article. I need heavy convincing that it is flawed.

Forget how many HN comments because who cared. Is there any debate that Steve Jobs died? No. That got 1000s of comments. Yes I papermanned your paperman there see!

Rather than point to an irrelevant factoid, what is the factual issue in that article, if any?