MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by DecoPerson | 2025-05-24 10:54:17+00:00
Just write a clear and concise summary of a contract.

“You get: [these features]”

“I get: [money and the IP]”

“We measure success and payment milestones are triggered by: [Clear KPIs and deadlines]”

Make sure the 1-2 page doc has your name on it, and ask your boss for permission to drop a paper version on the desks of the higher ups.

You can be employed and enter into a separate contract.

Edit: I just re-read the original post and saw that the OP is a software engineer. Ignore everything I said. This sounds like a terrible idea. You’ll burn all your bridges if you pursue this avenue.
by px1999 | 2025-05-24 10:54:36+00:00
Consider this (possibly very bad) take:

RAG could largely be replaced with tool use to a search engine. You could keep some of the approach around indexing/embeddings/semantic search, but it just becomes another tool call to a separate system.

How would you feel about becoming an expert in something that is so in flux and might disappear? That might help give you your answer.

That said, there's a lot of comparatively low hanging fruit in LLM adjacent areas atm.
by Tallain | 2025-05-24 10:54:46+00:00
For many writers and creative types I've read and talked to, the use of AI for pretty much any reason is equivalent to crossing the picket line.

When so many models are trained on illegally-obtained data (libgen, etc.) and provide profit without acknowledgement to the folks whose creative output made said profit possible in the first place, it feels really icky to put it lightly.

What's more, the creative process is about pulling something out from inside of you, examining your ideas and yourself, and maybe showing it to the world. Feedback from others, editors or readers or whatever, is a reciprocation of that. Or if you keep it to yourself, you've learned and grown anyway, and have honed your craft for the next time you try it.

What reward is there in computer mimicry? How does AI empower this process?

From a commercial aspect it all sucks. Creatives are devalued and the creative process is arrested. This isn't new, though. Ever since we started calling entertainment "content," you could see it coming. It's a struggle Hollywood's faced since the studio system, even before. We had the subversives in the Code era, the new wave people, the auteurs, and so on, all fighting that good fight against the business people who spoke only in dollars and cents. So it was, so it shall be.

I don't think there will be an AI takeover in creative writing, except for maybe a hiccup where slop content creators chase gold. Already a couple of romance writers accidentally published stories with prompts left in them and have instantly ruined their reputations forever. I think the people interested in reading what a machine wrote are the people interested in making the machine write. Everyone else wants something from a real human.
by criddell | 2025-05-24 10:54:58+00:00
> YouTube, Facebook etc. have an interest in keeping real humans on their platforms and not just bots.

They want a human audience, but I suspect they are fine with bot creators and are probably working on that themselves.

Ever notice all those channels on YouTube and Spotify that are hours and hours of lofi music? They aren’t all human and some of them have big audiences.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...
by einrealist | 2025-05-24 10:55:23+00:00
"and keep a human in the loop whenever single-digit accuracy points matter"

So we are supposed to give up on accuracy now? At least with humans (assuming good actors) I can assume an effort for accuracy and correctness. And I can build trust based on some resume and on former interaction.

With LLMs, this is more like a coin-flip with each prompt. And since the models are updated constantly, its hard to build some sort of resume. In the meantime, people - especially casual users - might just trust outputs, because its convenient. A single digit error is harder to find. The costs of validating outputs increases with increased accuracy of LLMs. And casual users tend to skip validation because "its a computer and computers are correct".

I fear an overall decrease in quality wherever LLMs are included. And any productivity gains are eaten by that.
by snackernews | 2025-05-24 10:55:32+00:00
Workplace safety, environmental protection and human rights laws will never be enforced in the manufacturing industry because they cannot be enforced on the Chinese manufacturing industry.

Western governments would rather citizens lose some rights and years off their life than tolerate a world where their industries become dependent on Chinese manufacturing.

————

Western governments could make models trained on stolen IP toxic if they wanted.

It may not be worth it. The trade off of model capability vs the value of IP law might be worthwhile.

But western governments should show a little dignity and openly make that trade off. We don’t need to appeal to “but China”.
by andyjohnson0 | 2025-05-24 10:58:08+00:00
> I see this as an opportunity to step in and sell the idea of creating frontend for this tool, however I don't want to do anything for free.

Your employer is unlikely to appreciate your trying this.

> hence I learnt about that software

Your employer paid for the software, and you learned about in on their time. They pay you a salary to work for them. Its really that simple.

Best I can imagine working is for you to suggest you initiate a project to build in-house tooling as an employee, and maybe try to get a bonus or promotion out of a successful outcome. But its their decision, not yours.
by madisp | 2025-05-24 10:58:54+00:00
Quick suggestion: maybe contact the vendor company and offer to create a frontend for them instead as a contract thing?

---

I've gone through the exact scenarion in your question though, this is roughly the path I took (Estonia & EU, YMMV in other jurisdictions):

- start by going over your contract - is this overall even allowed? Some companies capture all IP you create 24/7, in this case you'll need to get the contract changed or get an exception

- even if your contract allows doing other work (creating separate IP) outside of company time, still ask for written permission from your manager and possibly a skip level or two. I got a written email from my VP of eng and CTO before proceeding.

- you will probably need to _completely_ separate your own work from the company work. This means using your personal laptop, never working on this during work hours, etc. Separating this sometimes can be hard, especially if you get something like a bug report from your employer - you can't work with it until you're off the clock.

- I also completely cut myself off from the purchasing decision - I let them know I was working on a project, gave them a landing page and let the purchasing team do a decision completely on their own

- if you hope to build a business out of this it's best to be upfront about it, e.g. by telling your manager that you might leave to focus on the business full-time if it takes off

All of this assumes you're on good terms with your employer overall.
by yusina | 2025-05-24 10:59:41+00:00
> I don't want to do anything for free

I don't follow. That's your employer, no? Do they pay you a salary? So you are not working for free. Sounds like this kind of thing is part of your job. Maybe another dept. but it should be possible to work in another dept, part of the time. Talk to your manager, perhaps a manager in the other dept and if it makes sense for the business then this should work out.

If you want to do this on your weekends and then sell it, that doesn't sound healthy.
by diggan | 2025-05-24 11:00:16+00:00
> How would you feel about becoming an expert in something that is so in flux and might disappear?

Isn't that true for almost every subject within computers though, except more generalized concepts like design/architecture, problem solving and more abstract skills? Say you learn whatever popular "Compile-to-JS" language (probably TypeScript today) or Kubernetes, there is always a risk it'll fade in popularity until not many people use it.

I'm not saying it's a problem, as said by someone who favors a language people constantly claim is "dying" or "disappearing" (Clojure), but more that this isn't exclusive to the LLM/ML space, it just seems to happen slightly faster in that ecosystem.

So instead, embrace change, go with what feels right and learn whatever seems interesting to you, some things stick around, others don't (like Coffeescript), hopefully you'll learn something even if it doesn't stick around.
by rwmj | 2025-05-24 11:01:05+00:00
Why would Google/Youtube need to copy existing identities? Given a sufficiently powerful AI it can create a whole new world of characters and content.

I also think your comment is an example of the "just world fallacy" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_fallacy). Google/Youtube has vastly more resources, lawyers and lobbying power than individual creatives.
by Mountain_Skies | 2025-05-24 11:01:11+00:00
Is there a market for it beyond your employer? Ownership issues aside, if you're creating software for just one potential customer who hasn't even solicited you to create it, you're running a very high risk that they won't purchase it, even if it does fulfill a need they have. At least if there are other potential customers, you have a better chance of your time not being completely wasted.
by diggan | 2025-05-24 11:01:52+00:00
> in the worst case scenario we wind up with basically nobody having jobs

Call me optimistic or whatever, but isn't that the best case scenario? If having a full-time job is basically just for the 0.1% or whatever, then we must have figured out a different way of distributing goods and solving peoples needs, that doesn't involve "trading time for money" (a job), and that sounds like it can be a good thing, not "worst case scenario".
by aragilar | 2025-05-24 11:02:06+00:00
True, but Canonical has been a source of issues for a while (as a general rule, I recommend people avoid anything developed/driven by them). I don't see any of the other commercial linux vendors (even Oracle) being that dumb, and the more community-based distros tend to ensure that any kind of tracking is removed, so if you avoid the problematic vendor, you don't have that issue ;)
by dvfjsdhgfv | 2025-05-24 11:02:09+00:00
> And they’re charging 50–100/month to do what anyone could replicate for pennies. It’s not just overpriced — it’s dishonest. The entire business model relies on the user not knowing how simple it really is.

But this is general SaaS model. Wrap thing that are being done by lower level software such as FFmpeg and expose them in a nice GUI ready for use by people who are not technical.

So what can change in the example above is the amount of markup going down, not the SaaS service going away entirely.
by isoprophlex | 2025-05-24 11:03:08+00:00
Rant incoming. I know it's bad form to critique anything but the content... but I wish the story wasn't padded with those bland GenAI eyesores of an image. It's a dumb kneejerk reaction I observe in myself, but the presence of generated graphics anywhere immediately turn me off.

GenAI padded blog post? Guess your content isn't interesting enough. GenAI album cover? Artist must be equally lazy at making music. GenAI graphics on some flyer someone hands me? Please, could have just slapped nothing but text on there & let your content, whatever it is, do the talking.

I know it's there to "make things pop" or whatever but I'm so put off by the ubiquitous blandness, the samey high contrasts, subtle artifacts... Milking peoples' attention is the new smoking, or at least it should be, IMO. Especially if it's done in the most aggravatingly bland style, that of the GenAI image generator.
by Abimelex | 2025-05-24 11:05:06+00:00
That said, I think there is this thing in between of developing LLMs and using LLMs via APIs and the lines are of cause blurry: Training LLMs (or other neural networks). So best I think is to start digging on the surface and going deeper as long as you feel comfortable. Maybe at a certain point you will have the wish for more power full hardware. Thats the point where you need to decide how much to get invested or to rent a cluster.
by Coffeewine | 2025-05-24 11:05:31+00:00
This is bizarre to me - my extended family live in the towns surrounding Massena, NY, and have for about four generations now. The area certainly has its perks, it can be very pretty and there is plenty of room for hunting, fishing and other such pursuits if one is so inclined. Houses are extremely inexpensive, as is a surprising amount of land if that’s what you want. Though the set who are actually farming has declined precipitously over the generations.

The article however rather oversells the economic opportunities of the area - the two best employers are a nearby Indian casino and the prison system, both of which have their drawbacks. Otherwise there is a reason why all the local farmland is slowly being occupied by the Amish, they’re a group that doesn’t care much about the lack of opportunity.

As you can guess, this has led to a big divergence in outcomes. My relatives who have found remote work are living like kings, and the ones who haven’t are really struggling.

I dunno why I’m writing this. I guess it’s just funny to see Massena written about. And Massena is the big city compared to the surrounding towns.
by cess11 | 2025-05-24 11:06:00+00:00
Ibuprofen, naproxen and acetylsalicylic acid are also common.

I prefer acetaminophen due to the main metabolite being a reuptake inhibitor of CB-active transmitters and I don't drink. I take maybe two-four grams per year, so your 40-pill box would last for a decade.
by ptero | 2025-05-24 11:06:24+00:00
I would not do it on the sly.

Unless the company bosses are behind this idea you will need to overcome both legal problems and selling problems. For example, instead of buying your product the execs could fire you and hire someone else to do this internally. I see only three ways you might wing it:

1. Talk to your execs (ideally, the CEO) directly and sell this. On failure, be prepared to work on this internally. If so, ask for more money/promotion, which may not work but will not hurt either.

2. Call the other company and offer to improve their product for more money/promotion.

3. Get a techie friend to front for you: he approaches your company, you do the work, he shares the money. That's really grey area (being charitable). My 2c.
by diggan | 2025-05-24 11:06:34+00:00
> What kind of tasks you give Codex?

Currently in the stage of evaluating Codex (mostly comparing it to Aider and my own homegrown LLM setup). I'm able to get changes out of it, that mostly make sense, but you really need to take whatever personal guidelines you have for coding and "encode" them into the AGENTS.md, and really focus on asking the right question/request changes in the right way.

Without AGENTS.md, it seems to go of the wrong end really quickly, and end up with subpar code. But with a little bit of guidance, I do get some results at least. This is the current AGENTS.md I'm using for some smaller projects: https://gist.github.com/victorb/1fe62fe7b80a64fc5b446f82d313...

With that said, it does get mislead sometimes, and the UX isn't great for the web version. It's really slow, you can't customize the environment, the UI seems to load data in a really weird way leading to slowdowns and high latencies, and overall it's just cumbersome. My homegrown version is way faster for the iterations, + has stateful PRs it can iterate on and receive line comment feedback on, but the local models I'm using are obviously worse than the OpenAI ones, so I'd still say Codex is probably overall better, sadly.
by Ballas | 2025-05-24 11:06:34+00:00
> I hardly feel anything when I take it.

Would that not make it a very effective pain killer? /s

But seriously - you are not supposed to "feel" a drug. Opiates work on a much different mechanism, and you do "feel" them, but that is also the same mechanism that make them so addictive. What you want is a drug that helps you manage pain and not be addictive.
by jpc0 | 2025-05-24 11:06:46+00:00
> Let’s talk about the real stuff: writing C++ in 2025. Naturally I have tried to use the most recent standard, C++20, which has innovative new features such as formatting a string without sprintf, using std::format

C++23 has been around for 2 years, many features are support by most compilers (ahem std::expected)…

> Let’s start with the simplest of things - needing both a .cpp and .h file. I’ve heard modules were a thing, but googling a bit showed that they aren’t really working properly yet, so I ended up not even trying them.

They work fine, the issue is with clangd and even then clangd-19 works fine with modules.

The most annoyance I have with C++ is that it still expects the stdlib to be dynamically linked, which means packaging is a pain and there’s no tooling to make it easier.

Would I write a side project in C++, definitely, my side projects tend to pull in a ton of C libraries that do not have good alternatives in rust. If I don’t need to pull in C libraries I probably don’t need the annoyances of managing memory and lifetimes and I’m writing my code in golang… I have to found the niche where rust is the right tool for the job in my narrow corner, there are places where it is but for me there are the yet.

And I can call C code from golang pretty easily as well…
by ThatPlayer | 2025-05-24 11:07:37+00:00
> some modern AMD graphics cards have USB-C

This should be VirtualLink, which was an attempt at a standard connector for VR headsets. It's basically limited to RTX 2000 and AMD RX 6000 series GPUs. Since it's for VR, most implementations should do data, and it does add 12V for power. The only headset to support it is the PSVR2 a few months ago.

Actually you can get 3rd party PSVR2 adapter pretty cheap. That might be an cheap alternative to the Level1Tech USB-C combiner. Going to get one myself to try.
by ksec | 2025-05-24 11:07:43+00:00
You need to speak to someone / your manager that you can trust.

Sometimes simply asking this question is a red flag because you are suppose to develop for the company. They could give you three months time and have your current workload to somebody else while you deliver.

The thing to ask isn't how you can sell a frontend to your own company. It is how you could use this knowledge to show your skills and get a promotion, bonus, network or whatever you want to your advantage. That is why talking to your manager is important, assuming you trust your manager.
by isoprophlex | 2025-05-24 11:08:03+00:00
If vibe coding works well enough, maybe the entire saas industry can be disrupted out of existence.

We'll replace bland, uninspired, rent-seeking but convenient ffmpeg-as-a-service SaaS tools at a 100x markup by automatically generated, vibe coded tools you can let an AI produce and host in some centralized cloud location at a 10x markup. Thus advancing the inexorable process of disintermediation by technology, turning everyone into a consumer and cutting out middle men everywhere.

Until it's only you and Jensen Huang sitting on top of a pile of your cash, shitting out NVIDIA cards like the sandworms in Dune shit out Spice.
by Geo_ge | 2025-05-24 11:09:17+00:00
A raw point cloud is run through a series of processing steps to label each point with a class, e.g. "Ground", "Low/Medium/High Vegetation", "Building", "Transmission Tower", etc.

https://desktop.arcgis.com/en/arcmap/latest/manage-data/las-...

There will be a different algorithm for each feature class. For example, points that are part of a building might be identified by finding groups of points that form a very flat surface. ML models can also do this based on training data.

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/tool-reference/3d-a...

The final digital elevation model (DEM) is then just taking the "Ground" class from the classified point cloud and using them to triangulate a surface. This differs from a digital surface model (DSM), which will triangulate a surface based on ground+building+vegetation points.
by christina97 | 2025-05-24 11:09:37+00:00
We might well be at the cusp of a huge bubble caused by investor hubris, but this article hasn’t convinced me.

The difference between the stated podcast app and the dot com bubble is that one is making serious revenue at almost 100% profit, whereas one did not even have a revenue model.

Also I think everyone knows at this point that foundation models are a commodity and not a particularly profitable business.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-05-24 11:09:53+00:00
Greedy or not, somebody was going to become the dominant and even hegemonic world power after that colossal war and the nation state dynamics that followed it. Would you have preferred that it be something like the then still Stalinist USSR, or later perhaps the deeply authoritarian (and under Mao batshit crazy on its internal policies) China?

Given the inevitable rise of at least one dominant power, I prefer that it was the United States with its generally benevolent democratic traditions to model off of (even if it itself often poorly applied them overseas)
by ahmedaley | 2025-05-24 11:11:27+00:00
The tool claims to reduce the GPU code size by up to 75% and the CPU code by up to 72% for ML workloads, resulting in total file size reductions of up to 55%.They also claim to achieve reductions in peak CPU memory usage, peak GPU memory usage, and execution time by up to 74.6%, 69.6%, and 44.6%. Authors claim they will opensource the tools here: https://github.com/negativa-ai
by diggan | 2025-05-24 11:11:38+00:00
> Is Copilot just bad, and I need to use Claude Code and/or Cursor?

I haven't used Claude Code much, so cannot really speak of it. But Copilot and Cursor tends to make me waste more time than I get out of it. Aider running locally with a mix-and-match of models depending on the problem (lots of DeepSeek Reasoner/Chat since it's so cheap), and Codex, are both miles ahead of at least Copilot and Cursor.

Also, most of these things seems to run with temperature>0.0, so doing multiple runs, even better with multiple different models, tend to give you better results. My own homegrow agent that runs Aider multiple times with a combination of models tend to give me a list of things to chose between, then I either straight up merge the best one, or iterate on the best one sometimes inspired by the others.
by raattgift | 2025-05-24 11:12:41+00:00
Latitude, mass concentrations, and climate also messed with the half-period/metre ("seconds pendulum") definition; with increasing frequency precision, one would need an almanac, an accelerometer, and probably other tools. Additionally, stabilizing the length of the pendulum under environmental conditions was already known to be tricky, with materials science unable to produce reasonably low thermal-expansion rods prior to the 20th century.

Consequently, the seconds-pendulum/metre relationship gets in the way as one might want to go to sub-millimetre length precision for parts made in different locations or at different times of the day or year. Precision copies of a prototype was more reliable in practice.

(In practice we mostly still generate precise and accurate physical artifacts and make copies from those, it's just that there one can in principle generate such an artifact just about anywhere and anywhen, calibrating with (for example) interferometry <https://iopscience.iop.org/book/edit/978-0-7503-1578-4/chapt...>)

Finally, the Trinity Clock <https://clock.trin.cam.ac.uk/main.php?menu_option=theory> is a neat examination of a well known pendulum clock that's surprisingly accurate (if not really precise; it's been reliably accurate to within two seconds over the course of a month for a very long time, but it's not going to give you a 10MHz sine-wave, and it's not a good for disciplining an oscillator which does so). Do check out the various plots.