MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MPSFounder | 2025-05-07 16:56:07+00:00
The problem is non-technical folks tend to hire other non-technical folks for leadership (MBAs recruit other MBAs). What ends up happening is the leadership structure shifts from one dominated by technically-savvy people, to a culture of business. Best example is Apple (not a startup anymore, but I think my point will rest). Under Jobs, Forstall, Ive and other teams all prioritized product. Currently, Apple's leadership consists of Cook, Luca, Schiller, Eddy Cue, Williams, Ternus and Craig (they are the ones that effectively make the big decisions). Craig and Ternus are the only "engineers", and neither of them have been engineering first. This is not a founders story, but I am trying to highlight how non-technical folks will put in the decision making seat non-technical folks, which will harm your product in the long run. You can be the best engineer out there. If you report to someone who holds the reigns and is not technical, you are facing a tough road. Of course, there will be exceptions. However, this is rather the norm, and in startup culture, where the odds are already stacked against you, I'd advise against it.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-07 16:56:40+00:00
> There's a huge assumption in your comment -- that having 100,000 employees necessarily guarantees (or even makes likely) that you will have some human to help you.

That's not an assumption.

I know that I, and many others, have been able to get a human on the phone every time we needed one. Regardless of the number of those humans actually working claims, in the current system, it is "enough".

I also know that it's impossible to give that level of service when you have 1 employee for every 10 million customers.

That's really all that you need in order to make the judgement that you're not going to get a human.

Side-note: I did a quick search, and found that Allstate has 23k reps that actually handle claims and 55k employees total, so almost half of their workforce does claims and disputes. They also have 10% market share of the US's ~340 million people, so that's, at most, 1 rep per 1500 employees. That's much better odds than 1 for every 10 million.

> A reasonably decent A

And there's the problem - that AI doesn't exist. You're speculating about a scenario that simply hasn't been realized in the real world, and every single person that I've talked to who has interacted with an AI-based "support representative" has had a bad experience.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-05-07 16:56:50+00:00
You know, it's funny, when I was a cs student I always wondered why some of my best cs professors didn't bother using the latest and greatest tooling. As I got older I realized, my time has actual monetary value, and spending time dealing with finicky software is often not worth it. Intellij is like ~ .50c / day, and I'm way more productive with it than I am with vim (and I say this as someone who used to mostly work with straight vim in college). Maybe you don't value your time?
by mcflubbins | 2025-05-07 16:56:50+00:00
Great, but how about letting me have my paid, licensed Rust rover open on two PCs simultaneously?

I have my work PC which I leave on pretty much 24/7 and if I forget to close RustRover, and try to launch it on my desktop (for personal project, or to just work from another room) I get an error that I already have a licensed copy running and it closes RustRover. Sometimes I wake my Laptop from sleep and it does this because I still had an old window open. Really unnecessary...
by vikmex | 2025-05-07 16:56:56+00:00
Hey! Thanks for the feedback! I will fix the -1 second issue and the date format asap! Then I will start looking into adding the option to the ability to edit/delete entries.

Yes, I was thinking about allowing for creating your own activities but just kept if very simple for now. But it's a good idea! I will work on it after fixing the previous tasks.
by taylodl | 2025-05-07 16:57:08+00:00
When AI replaces developers, it might affect around 5% to 10% of IT staff. Even if AI could develop robust code from scant and inconsistent requirements, it would likely only replace up to 50% of those developers. This would result in a 2.5% to 5% reduction in IT staff. That coincides with what CrowdStrike is laying off as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43916858. I imagine we're going to see a lot of announcements like these over the next couple of years.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-05-07 16:57:13+00:00
During boot my shell took 2.5s to start up. Now, it took 0.9s to start up. I have trouble imagining a scenario where scripting is adequate, but a second or two of start up is too much. I'm thinking maybe high-availability migration or something. The benefits to correctness from the (optional) type-system seem worth it even there.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-07 16:57:55+00:00
I'd bet that the vast majority of office jobs that require a degree do not actually need or even check for any of the educational content that the degree signifies. They purely use "college degree in anything" as a generic hurdle. No way any employer hiring some generic office assistant whose job is to move papers from one filing cabinet to another and help schedule meetings, is going to care what that person's major was. They just want to see "degree."
by sippeangelo | 2025-05-07 16:58:03+00:00
This doesn't seem ready for real use. Testing it right now, is miles slower than Cursor for simple edits in the AI panel, and behaves in what seems to be a broken way. I gave up after it started to type out my entire file from scratch for every edit and presenting a diff for the entire file, rather than the few lines that were changed.

Does it not do incremental edits like Cursor? It seems like the LLM is typing out the whole file internally for every edit instead of diffs, and then re-generates the whole file again when it types it out into the editor.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-07 16:58:17+00:00
Are citizens of skinnier countries better-educated, then become less-so if they move to the US and (typically) pack on weight?

If it's not education keeping other countries skinny, why would adding more education be the way we get out of it?

(This works for other explanations, too, like "oh they have more willpower"—so do they lose willpower if they move to the US? No, more likely, a complex combination of factors mostly outside individual control are why they're skinnier in their home country and fatten up after moving to the US; more likely, it's harder to be skinny here)
by p_ing | 2025-05-07 16:58:22+00:00
Samsung 9910 has a 1:1 TB:GB cache size of LPDDR4X memory. I won't pretend to understand the magic NVMe drives possess, but if you got a 4TB or 8TB 9910, could you not in theory pull in all of the data you require to cache?

I would assume, and it might be a poor assumption, that NVMe controllers don't pull in files, but rather blocks, so even if you had a database that exceeded cache size, in theory if the active blocks of that database did not exceed cache size, it could be "indefinitely" cached for a read-only pattern.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-07 16:58:41+00:00
I don't feel the need for Sublime to step it up, because nothing is on their level yet. I tried Zed and went back to Sublime pretty quickly as it is by default lighter weight (the main Zed process is fine but it automatically runs a bunch of nodejs bloat) and doesn't have a bunch of useless AI crap. You can turn those things off in Zed (kudos to them for that at least), but I prefer to stick with an editor that doesn't need to be tweaked to get rid of bloat.
by stonogo | 2025-05-07 16:58:57+00:00
> iced is basically the brainchild of a single developer (plus core team members who tackle some bits and pieces of the codebase but not frequently), who already has a day time job and is doing this for free.

This single-handedly convinced me not to rely on anything using Iced. I have no patience left for projects with that low a bus factor.
by reginald78 | 2025-05-07 16:58:57+00:00
This is what always gets me about it. I get being to lazy to cook and to drunk or busy to drive or whatever. But there are actually tons of pretty good frozen prepared meals these days. If you're lazy and this happens to you all the time, throw a bunch of those in the freezer. Cleaning a baking sheet isn't actually more cleanup work than dealing with take out trash. You'll probably get the food just as fast as the delivery service as well.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-07 16:59:26+00:00
> Npm/node_modules is typically one of the worst offenders, but programmers can do this with any import/library based system.

You can, but I think this thread speaks volumes about the problem with the JavaScript/NPM ecosystem as a whole vs. pretty much any other.

We need something else for the web. The only reason we have 200+ NPM packages for a blank project is because JavaScript is atrocious and has almost nothing built-in. We got crap like LeftPad, isodd, is-array, etc. because of the language. Most of what NPM will pull in on any new web front end project is likely already part of the standard library in C#/dotnet, or Java, Go, etc.

But you could go further back and say it's not javascript's fault, it's the fault of trying to hammer the web into doing things it was never designed to do in the first place. But, we insisted on making it an application delivery platform, and now we're suffering the consequences of that. I'm hopeful for WASM, but ideally I'd love to see a resurgence of native apps.
by TobTobXX | 2025-05-07 16:59:35+00:00
There is nothing "introverted high IQ nerd" about being creative. Think about everyone that is practicing music, artistry, crafts, rhetoric, cooking, languages, philosophy, writing, gardening, carpentry, and whatever you can think of. Most of them don't do it for money.

> [...] how it will affect all types of people and cultures on this planet.

Some will definitely feel without purpose. But I'd argue that just having a job so that you have a purpose is just a band-aid, not a real solution. I won't say that purposelessness isn't a problem, just that it would be great to actually address the issue.

Granted, I do hold a utopic view. I continue to be curious due to my religious belief, where I'm looking forward to life unconstrained by age. Regardless whether this will manifest, I think it is healthy to remain curious and continue learning. So on "how it will affect all types of people": I really do think that people without purpose need to engage in curiosity and creativity, for their own mental health.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-07 17:00:00+00:00
I think there's an interesting implication here: that the actually good (for the customer) support experience is a real human who has access to a RAG where they can look up company documents/policies/procedures, but still be able to use their human brain to make judgement calls (and, of course, they have to be willing to, y'know, read the notes left by the previous rep).
by mikewarot | 2025-05-07 17:00:16+00:00
I imagine coprocessors that don't have separate memory or instructions... they are effectively huge arrays of look up tables, so that the instructions have the data flow through them. We're at the stage where this is possible for all but the biggest of LLMs.

A side effect of doing this mapping, even without the hardware, is that the mapping makes a given task inherently parallel, and much, much easier to spread across low cost CPUs. I think of it as a universal solvent for computation.
by TimWolla | 2025-05-07 17:00:24+00:00
Indeed. It might even result in out of range values due to implicit rounding (`3.5 + (4.5 - 3.5) * (the largest float smaller than 1)` results in 4.5, which is unexpected).

I'm a contributor to the PHP programming language and a maintainer of the randomness functionality and did some research into this topic to provide a floating point generation method that is as good as possible and came across the "Drawing Random Floating-point Numbers from an Interval" paper by Frédéric Goualard.

PHP 8.3 ships with a method generating random floats from arbitrary intervals based on the γ-section algorithm described in that paper. The PHP documentation goes into additional detail:

https://www.php.net/manual/en/random-randomizer.getfloat.php

As part of the implementation I also reached out to Prof. Goualard with some questions for clarification regarding the behavior for extreme values, which resulted in an Corrigendum being published, since the algorithm was buggy in those cases (https://frederic.goualard.net/publications/corrigendum.pdf). The entire exchange with Prof. Goualard was really pleasant.
by frankfrank13 | 2025-05-07 17:00:32+00:00
Having worked at Mck, what I could very well imagine happened behind the scenes here was

1. This BA/Asc was on <4 hours of sleep, maybe many days in a row

2. They walked into that meeting thinking they had completed exactly what the client (your wife) wanted

And after the meeting (this I feel more confident about, as it happens a lot)

1. A conversation happened to see if the BA/Asc wanted to stay on the project

2. They said yes, and the leadership decided that the best way to make this person feel safe was to always have a more experienced person in the room to deal with hiccups (in this case, the perception of low quality work)

Isn't that... good? What else would you expect
by scoofy | 2025-05-07 17:00:34+00:00
More feel good propaganda.

Let’s blaming Exxon shareholders for the consequences of most people deciding they shouldn’t be the one who rides an ebike to work.

That burger you had for lunch is really McDonald’s fault… for selling burgers instead of vegetables.

Just like in California, where the “new homes” we aren’t building are required to have electric ranges, but literally everyone else never had to change.

It’s all big corporations… nothing to do with housing policies or the fact that your property values could go down if we built more. Nope, just corporations.
by senordevnyc | 2025-05-07 17:00:35+00:00
The comic is an example of the principle, not advocating that our ultimate goal is discourse that is civil or polite.

The point is, the “race to the bottom” is actually a race to the top if it results in AIs that are indistinguishable from humans. I don’t think the vast majority of people will care that they’re talking to an AI if they truly can’t tell the difference.

Would you? How do you know I’m not an AI?
by malfist | 2025-05-07 17:00:47+00:00
Why do you think that information is widely available?

Perhaps it's because there's a government program requiring it's disclosure and specific testing process?

If MPG labeling laws go away, what makes you think Ford will continue disclosing those values? And if they do, why wouldn't they start declaring MPG values driving downhill in a windtunnel giving the vehicle a tailwind?

You don't have to look too far to find those examples. Go to your local dealership that has some of the super duty trucks for sale. Notice how their spec sheet where the MPG is disclosed says "MPG testing not required" or something similar. Now how are you supposed to compare two trucks from the same brand, much less across two brands?

No third party certification is involved in those vehicles. Why do you think a third party would get involved in passenger vehicles if we relax the disclosure laws?
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-07 17:00:47+00:00
The only way that will change is if companies stop requiring college degrees as a "check the box" step to even get considered by some automated hiring system. _That_ is what is driving universities as diploma mills, not the universities themselves.

See what jobs you can get these days with a high school diploma, and you understand the economics of a university degree.

This also ties in with the US no longer manufacturing much of anything -- which created a lot of decent jobs that didn't require a college degree. Those jobs are gone.
by baranul | 2025-05-07 17:00:52+00:00
> So I implemented a borrow checker for D...

D's implementation of a borrow checker, is very intriguing, in terms of possibilities and putting it back into the context of a tool and not the "be all, end all".

> I can also say confidently that the #1 method to combat memory safety errors is array bounds checking. The #2 method is guaranteed initialization of variables. The #3 is stop doing pointer arithmetic (use arrays and ref's instead).

This speaks volumes from such an experienced and accomplished programmer.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-05-07 17:00:59+00:00
What kills me more is originally when they released Kotlin, and I saw Kotlin Native, I assumed they would go all in on Kotlin Native, and allow you to produce fully native JRE based apps (JRE based in the sense that it can take full advantage of those libraries the JRE provides, or any plain old Java Object) and produce native and highly performant binaries.

It seems .NET already has a really mature AOT, I'm really hoping .NETs AOT reaches the point where all .NET code can be AOT'd someday.

I feel like Kotlin could do so much more, but its stuck in standstill. There's even some language features that are still missing such as Inline Classes, Pattern Matching, and even Reflection, all things that Java supports directly.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-07 17:01:05+00:00
It is kind of weird. Why does a life insurer have 100,000 employees. I'm really only familiar with term life. All the "customer service" is pre-purchase. Once you buy it, you forget it other than making the annual payment. There's nothing to manage, no real customer service required until and unless you die.

I suppose whole life where there is a cash value and investments being managed might have a more ongoing service need, but I'm not familiar with that.
by hadlock | 2025-05-07 17:01:19+00:00
Humans and LLMs are built differently, it seems disingenuous to think we both use the same methods to arrive at the same general conclusion. I can inherently understand some proofs of pythagorean's theorem but an LLM might apply different ones for various reasons. But the output/result is still the same. If a next token generator run in parallel can generate a performant relational database that doesn't directly imply I am also a next token generator.
by nnnnnande | 2025-05-07 17:01:22+00:00
Turning this into a moral discussion is besides the point, a point that both of you missed in your efforts to be based, although the moral discussion is also interesting—but I'll leave that be for now. It appears as if I stepped on ArthurStack's toes, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and reply.

My point actually has everything to do with making money. Making money is not a viable differentiator in and of itself. You need to put in work on your desired outcomes (or get lucky, or both) and the money might follow. My problem is that directives such as "software developers need to use tool x" is an _input_ with, at best, a questionable causal relationship to outcome y.

It's not about "social clubs for software developers", but about clueless execs. Now, it's quite possible that he's put in that work and that the outcomes are attributable to that specific input, but judging by his replies here I wouldn't wager on it. Also, as others have said, if that's the case, replicating their business model just got a whole lot easier.

> This is technically what everyone should aspire to be

No, there are other values besides maximizing utility.
by jenadine | 2025-05-07 17:01:26+00:00
That repo is to download a small template (why do we need a crate for that?), and it still pulls `gpui` directly from the Zed monorepo via a git dependency.

That kind of setup is fine for internal use, but it’s not how you'd structure a library meant for stable, external reuse. Until they split it out, version it properly, and stop breaking stuff all the time, it's hard to treat GPUI as a serious general-purpose option.
by andrewflnr | 2025-05-07 17:01:40+00:00
I have a smiley face rendered in retroreflective tape on the back of mine. I figure it's both bright and triggers the very sensitive human visual system for detecting faces. It's hard to say how much it helps, especially since I put it on basically the same time I started riding at all, but I don't often have people tailgating me. ed: and it was only a couple bucks, that's nice.
by mettamage | 2025-05-07 17:01:47+00:00
> I learned deeper truths about where startups can win and compete.

Now that I'm working at a big organization (a Fortune 500 company), I can relate. I'm by far the most innovative person in my team and I'm being held down because I'm not doing my role (as I'm not a dev but a data analyst at the moment).

If I'd be doing my role however, then we wouldn't be innovating and the C-suite wants us to innovate with AI. I'm the only one at my department that can create actual AI automations. And the IT department is basically stripped out by upper management.

If anyone wants an actual dev building AI automations and think how we can disrupt with the state of the art, my email is in my profile.
by zvitiate | 2025-05-07 17:01:59+00:00
There's a huge assumption in your comment -- that you know how insurance works. "Most" probably aren't working in sales and marketing; I'd heavily dispute anything above 50% and I feel like 33% might be pushing it? I don't want to get overconfident here, but this claim feels off-base.

Insurance isn't like a widget. People have actual legal rights that insurers must service. This involves processing clerks, adjusters, examiners, underwriters, etc. Which then requires actual humans, because AI with the pinpoint accuracy needed for these legally binding, high-stakes decisions aren't here yet.

E.g., issuing and continuing disability policies: Sifting through medical records, calling and emailing claimants and external doctors, constant follow-ups about their life and status. Sure, automate parts of it, but what happens when your AI:

a. incorrectly approves someone, then you need to kick them off the policy later?

b. incorrectly denies someone initial or continuing coverage?

Both scenarios almost guarantee legal action—multiple appeals, attorneys getting involved—especially when it's a denial of ongoing benefits.

And that's just scratching the surface. I get that many companies are bloated, and nobody loves insurance companies. No doubt, smarter regulations could probably trim headcount. But the idea that you could insure a billion people with just 100, or even 1000 (10x!), employees is just silly.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-07 17:02:00+00:00
They are talking about the CFL bulbs (compact florescent), which have that cool colored industrial look lighting. Like all their examples, it is a grain of truth spun into ridiculousness. Most of the development of CFLs was in the 1970s because of the energy crisis. In the 1990s, they were promoted for use by the government and power companies, with rebates and other subsidies. The government didn’t start banning incandescents until 2012, after warm light LEDs had been around for a long time.
by josvdwest | 2025-05-07 17:02:37+00:00
Yes Cline is more reflective of the actual price of inference from frontier models. It's not realistic to offer 500 requests at $20/month without severely limiting what these models can do.

People who have become adamant Cline users over a significantly cheaper option have found the ROI of a higher performing AI coding tool far outweighs the inference costs. Even $500/month is negligible if it can 5x (or more) the output of a high-salary engineer.
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