MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by runako | 2025-05-31 01:42:00+00:00
Have done a few turns through e-commerce over the years, and I agree 100% with you.

That said, in the context of a Marks & Spencer-sized company (~$13B revenue), it absolutely can be a competitive advantage to in-house e-commerce if it is resourced & staffed appropriately. They are talking about a £300m hit to profit, so they appear to have some headroom for running a complex site.

Doing in-house gives the opportunity for a company to fix the kinds of things you mention with dodgy plugins etc. It also lets them take advantage of Doing Things Our Way, which sounds silly until you consider that Doing Things Our Way is how they got to be so big. And of course, in-house builds are still allowed to use off-the-shelf software where it makes sense.

Also DIY allows companies to adopt new stuff at their own pace. This tends to be important at times of tech transition like it appears we are now reentering.

Will reiterate that e-commerce is hard & there are really no easy answers.
by mickelsen | 2025-05-31 01:43:11+00:00
Oh, that sucks. I used my same ID created on ebay.com for shopping, or even selling the odd thing or two, while travelling to different continents ever since I created it in 2009. It still seems to work on the different storefronts with the same ID (.com, .co.uk, .de...) like Amazon, and keeps the international addresses I added before.

I've seen stories of ebay/paypal account closures for people who were <18 at the moment of signing up, getting honored a decade later. Not sure about if your multiple accounts had anything to do with it. I think I'll avoid making any changes to mine, except shipping addresses while travelling.

Honestly I just avoid them these days, they promoted too hard their full service international shipping for US sellers, which was always much more expensive than standard USPS, and really slow, but it handled the whole customs thing if your package ever got caught, because the custom duties were pre-collected. Still unreasonably slow, considering most of the time the packages were weeks in the US bouncing around before even leaving, whereas something coming from China or Europe, which used to take 1.5 months a decade ago to Chile, now get to the door in as little as a week.
by _rousbound | 2025-05-31 01:43:42+00:00
I would love something like that for Lua.

Am I wrong to think that these language simplifications turn thing harder?

I would prefer to teach a real programming language, although introducing only a subset of features.

For example, pretend we have only variables, strings, numbers, booleans, "ifs", "fors" and tables.

I think that's enough to introduce someone to programming.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-05-31 01:44:51+00:00
there must be some other mechanism, as my brain is already blacked by the mentioned pigments. My "grey matter" -> is "black matter" now.

I did not go through psychosis episodes. Which doesn't mean, others won't. Now, that I've life long experience with, I would recommend fresh-mens to wait until 25th birthday - and then "it's your birthday, you can party like it's your birthday". If one did not start before that mature age, its likely never happen.

drink less, smoke more ;)
by kumarvvr | 2025-05-31 01:45:51+00:00
> 39 AI Developer Growth (Google Ecosystem as Proxy) = +5x to 7MM Developers Y/Y

I am sure a majority of those are from India.

A small industry has formed here imparting "AI" training, for very cheap, online and courses with duration of a few months to 2 years.

https://www.shiksha.com/online-courses/artificial-intelligen...

India School of Business, one of the highest ranked business schools in India, is offering leadership courses with a touch of AI, for as little as 10 lakh rupees (about 11000 USD). For a majority of IT folk in India, that is a very reasonable amount for a course from a very reputed institute.

Many IT folk here are scared to the core about their jobs and there has been a mass movement towards AI certificates. While the courses teach the basics, none of them are at a university level. Most of the students are only users of tools though.

Would you call them AI developers? Meh. They get by. Most of the work in India is back-office work anyway, and these AI engineers end up doing data related tasks mostly.

Very few are actually building worthwhile AI stuff.
by qgin | 2025-05-31 01:46:44+00:00
I often see people say “AI can’t do ALL of my job, so that means my job is safe.

But what this means at scale, over time, is that if AI can do 80% of your job, AI will do 80% of your job. The remaining 20% human-work part will be consolidated and become the full time job of 20% of the original headcount while the remaining 80% of the people get fired.

AI does not need to do 100% of any job (as that job is defined today ) to still result in large scale labor reconfigurations. Jobs will be redefined and generally shrunk down to what still legitimately needs human work to get it done.

As an employee, any efficiency gains you get from AI belong to the company, not you.
by mainfram | 2025-05-31 01:47:57+00:00
Author here.

Big Tech can bankroll moonshot AI projects, but what about the rest of the economy, including Fortune 500 companies and the vast ocean of manufacturers, miners, service organisations, utilities and government organisations? They still have to walk into Monday’s strategy meeting and figure out how the crazy pace and depth of change impact their strategy. I compiled this 80-page PDF (Generative-AI Business Strategy Primer, CC-BY-4.0) to shift that conversation away from features, co-pilots, and buzzwords to deeper sense-making.

HN probably isn’t the main audience, but this community excels at dismantling shaky assumptions. There is a significant gap in how we perceive GenAI. On one hand, we have VC and Big Tech-driven incredible advances and hype; on the other, we have quarter-obsessed management that has lost intellectual rigour in navigating the world they strategise within.

I am foolish to try to bridge this gap, but we can recruit from the old economy those who can play the new game.

Thank you for any feedback.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-31 01:48:17+00:00
The US has actively downgraded and nerfed the equipment they’ve sent. That’s well-documented and standard US policy wherever they send military equipment. Ukraine received circa 1980 US military tech. Not exactly state-of-the-art.

And yes, the US is much more capable at EW than Russia. No one seriously believes otherwise, Russia doesn’t even have the ability to fabricate the materials necessary to be competitive.

The US does not share their state-of-the-art with their closest allies. There is no version of the world where they are sharing anything close to that with Ukraine. They reserve their most advanced capabilities for themselves.
by dunham | 2025-05-31 01:49:32+00:00
Idris[1] and most of the dependent typed languages that I've looked at use de Bruijn numbers. (As does my own[2].)

The Idris implementation also has a list of names in scope as an argument to the type of a Term, which makes the compiler (also Idris) check if you're making a mistake with your de Bruijn indices. (I did not do this in mine, but I should have.)

Edit: Oh, I see you mention reusing computations, that may be a bit more subtle. I'll have to look at your repo to see what you mean by that.

[1]: https://github.com/idris-lang/Idris2 [2]: https://github.com/dunhamsteve/newt
by roenxi | 2025-05-31 01:49:48+00:00
The article doesn't actually present any evidence that humans+computers can beat computers. The closest thing I spotted was "I accomplished the feat in 38 moves, in a sequence that no computer would consider or find ... I did not subsequently find a win". So the computers disregarded a line that didn't work.

The actual evidence he listed suggests this is a war between different humans to work out who has better computer hardware ("the lack of decent equipment is being felt quite notably in Russia, where embargoes have limited access to new hardware and the latest chess tools. As a consequence, the Russian team finished near the bottom of the standings in the last Correspondence Chess Olympiad"). Cool and all, I can imagine people having a lot of fun, but it isn't obvious they are competing based chess skill here. The computers are bringing the chess skill and the human seems to be bringing logistic, financial and clerical support to operate the computer.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-31 01:49:49+00:00
Companies reducing young hires because of AI are doing it backward. Returns on AI will be accelerated by early-career staff because they are already eagerly using AI in daily life, and have the least attachment to how jobs are done now.

You’re probably not going to transform your company by issuing Claude licenses to comfortable middle-aged career professionals who are emotionally attached to their personal definition of competency.

Companies should be grabbing the kids who just used AI to cheat their way through senior year, because that sort of opportunistic short-cutting is exactly what companies want to do with AI in their business.
by eru | 2025-05-31 01:50:37+00:00
> I am going to guess you and I have some underlying philosophical differences. I fully believe in the power of competitive markets, however, the primary market structured around profit is not always (or even often) the best for global scale issues.

Profit might not be a particularly good incentive, but the others are worse.

> Given that we cannot appropriately price externalities nor enforce them, we often want organizations which are motivated socially or by values.

Just waving your wand doesn't automagically make any organisation (government or otherwise) motivativated socially or by values. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

> The trade off in efficiency is irrelevant. I don’t want a company seeking maximum efficiency in some areas, I want things that are driving for stability or durability. Or social good. Or other measurements.

Sure, but just stating that desire that doesn't make it happen.
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-31 01:51:25+00:00
In my experience the more expensive part of this when actual money is on the table is just the requirements gathering at the very beginning. I am saying that from the perspective of web, military, cloud, and infrastructure.

In order to see this as an actual concern you have to think about it only in terms of outside parties operating via contract. Do not think about this in terms of internal only at the megacorp because the financials are wrong almost every time.
by uqual | 2025-05-31 01:53:17+00:00
It's good to finally have something "between" Best Buy and Central Computer (et al) back in the SV after Fry's died its slow and painful death as the previous Micro Center in Santa Clara closed.

Unfortunately this new one is in the same shopping center as Harbor Freight and it's close to where I live - this could get expensive... Mean to shop at one, end up shopping at both...

The lines on the "insider" opening day 5/28 were pretty long - I waited about an hour in line just to get into the store and the checkout line was over an hour long.

However, based on my purchases that day, I fear they will be unpleasant to shop at - even when busy, they were annoyingly upselling extended warranties. The sales associate on the floor tried to sell me on a plan for a laptop I bought and then, while there were hundreds of people waiting to checkout, the cashier spent time doing so AGAIN. Both were just following their mandated scripts and were at least nice about it all. They apparently also have some sort of rule that the customer buying something like a laptop also needs to "meet" with the sales associate's manager/supervisor - which was a completely useless awkward perfunctory handshake (and the customer survey asked if this meeting had happened so it appears to be an annoying institutional rule).
by gnabgib | 2025-05-31 01:53:37+00:00
Related: Microsoft-backed UK tech unicorn Builder.ai collapses into insolvency (168 points, 7 days ago, 135 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080640

Microsoft-backed Builder.ai collapsed after finding potentially bogus sales (31 points, 8 days ago, 9 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064162
by kumarvvr | 2025-05-31 01:54:47+00:00
> AI User Adoption (ChatGPT as Proxy) = Materially Faster vs. Internet Comparables

This is also interesting to see. ChatGPT currently has about 20 million paying subscribers and 400 million weekly active users.

Did 100 million people use chatGPT a few months into opening. Sure, but that was because of massive hype and word of mouth viral moments.

Is is comparable to Internet usage, especially from "years launched" X axis. Definitely not.

> 59 AI User Adoption (ChatGPT as Proxy) = Materially Faster + Cheaper vs. Other Foundational Technology Products

Another pointless comparison.
by 0xfaded | 2025-05-31 01:55:00+00:00
Last time I was in Prague my friend brought me straight to the local pub, and without even ordering beer came out. Everyone knew each other and each other's dogs (Prague is very dog friendly, in fact one of the dogs was in the kitchen begging scraps). I have vague memories of similar scenes growing up in Australia, and have seen similar in Ireland. I don't know if anywhere like it in US cities, but maybe it's still like that out in the country.
by thangalin | 2025-05-31 01:57:19+00:00
KeenWrite[1] is my FOSS Markdown editor, which is based heavily on CommonMark. The editor can call R functions (with a knitr-compatible syntax[2]). The tutorials[3] demo embedding CSV file contents. This creates a "living" document in that changing the contents of the CSV data (the source of truth) changes the output document.

[1]: https://keenwrite.com

[2]: https://yihui.org/knitr

[3]: https://youtu.be/XSbTF3E5p7Q?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP...
by arcanemachiner | 2025-05-31 01:58:28+00:00
> the customer survey asked if this meeting had happened so it appears to be an annoying institutional rule

Whenever I get a survey that asks dumb questions like that, I just answer "yes" so that the employees don't get harassed for not asking those dumb questions to me in person.

"Were you warmly welcomed by a team member?" You bet I was!

"Did one of our team members tell you about our partnership with the Heart and Stroke Foundation?" Sure, why not?
by rayiner | 2025-05-31 01:59:04+00:00
I’m in favor of Americanism. That means giving more respect to the college dropout who built a startup than the college professor who never built anything. That means bottom-up, participatory democracy, where the masses decide what direction to go and the experts figure out how to get there. And it means little-c conservatism—contrast the American revolution to the French revolution.

I think Harvard is great. Society needs elite scientists, etc. But they need to stay in their lane.
by kumarvvr | 2025-05-31 02:00:26+00:00
> 69 Enterprise AI Focus – S&P 500 Companies = 50% & Rising Talking-the-Talk

Corporates are going to talk about the current in-vogue thing always.

They talked about Blockchain.

They talked about crypto

They talked about anything that when not spoken about made the investors feel the board is behind in the world.

> 72 Enterprise AI Adoption = Rising Priority…Bank of America – Erica Virtual Assistant (6/18)

Ok fine. People are using it. 2 important questions. Did the users have other choices, over which they chose this. Did the users feel happier than other methods.

Without this data, this is just feeding the hype train.
by martin-t | 2025-05-31 02:04:59+00:00
> You must live on some fascist oligarchy.

Sadly, I am becoming increasingly convinced I do. [1]

You're falling for one simple trap. Yes, even if things are (mostly) improving for everyone, they are improving massively faster for those already rich.

On top of that, I am not even sure they are improving. Some people are paying a third or even a half of their salary just to have a place to live. I even heard the situation in some cities is that people are struggling to feed their kids and keep the heating on.

[1]: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
by absurdo | 2025-05-31 02:05:55+00:00
Basically yeah. You live in a world of layered servitude and, short of a financial windfall that hoists you up for some time, you’re basically guaranteed to work your entire life, and grow old, frail and poor. This isn’t a joke, it’s reality for many people that’s hidden from us to keep us deluded. Similar to my other mini-rant, I don’t have any valid answers to the problem at hand. Just acknowledging how fucked things are for humanity.
by kijin | 2025-05-31 02:06:34+00:00
Redis has always been in universe as well. Most things in Ubuntu are in universe and practically unmaintained.

Getting your software into the default package managers is not necessarily the best choice for a new and fast-moving project. You'll be stuck answering bug reports for an ancient version and monkey-patching it for the life of the LTS release. It's much more ergonomic, both for maintainers and users, to run your own PPA or repo with the latest version.
by okayestjoel | 2025-05-31 02:08:04+00:00
I believe none of the other 9 million have a unique solution. My nonogram solver goes over every possible configuration for each row and column based on the clues, and either fills in squares that must be filled (all possibilities overlap) or marks squares that must be empty. So if the solver reaches a point where there is ambiguity about what the next move is, then it is deemed not solvable (without guessing). A good example is a 5x5 puzzle where each row and column clue is "1": there are many possible 5x5 pixel grids that share those set of clues. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding your question.
by pdevr | 2025-05-31 02:08:57+00:00
Observations and personal opinions, after glancing through the slides:

* The entertainment industry will be transformed drastically. Music and movies will be transformed by AI to such an extent that the next generation will find it hard to believe how the industry operated.

* The moonshot will be biological research and research in general. When a breakthrough happens, it will transform our health for the better in astonishing ways.

* In terms of direct adoption, the urban-rural divide is vast.

* Less democratic countries will have an advantage over the democratic countries in terms of fast execution, unless the latter manage to integrate private-public operations effectively.

* I've liked Mary Meeker's reports since the heydays of TechCrunch. This report has a lot of details that I did not know. Nevertheless, I didn't see a single point that stood out.
by kumarvvr | 2025-05-31 02:12:20+00:00
> 75 Enterprise AI Adoption = Rising Priority…Yum! Brands – Byte by Yum! (2/25)

This does not pass the smell test.

https://www.yum.com/wps/portal/yumbrands/Yumbrands/news/pres...

Above is the press release. AI comes up 3 times, including the title. Release talks about AI-Driven platform to streamline operations of franchisees. Ok fine. But how exactly does AI enhance operations at the franchisee level? Especially if all they are providing as part of the SaaS are "Backed by artificial intelligence, Byte by Yum! offers franchisees leading technology capabilities with advantaged economics made possible by the scale of Yum!"

I mean, sure, if at their corporate office, they are using data analysis to predict demand and allocate resources or raw materials to improve profitability, ok. But that can be done quite effectively with statistical analysis.

Where exactly does AI come into the picture is unclear.

Yet, the slides show this as some sort of a monumental achievement, especially highlighting "25000 restaurants are using at-least 1 product". Sure, they are going to use, if that is what the franchise owner provides them, probably for additional cost.

Yum brand has 61000 restaurants as per their website. Looks like they rolled out a new solution, and about 1/3rd have been successful in adopting the new platform. Others may be in the line to do the same. Is this related to AI, or is this related to regular software changes / updates / revamps?
by whartung | 2025-05-31 02:12:59+00:00
Well, I really like this thing.

I like that it's a daemon. You can connect to it from various clients, do stuff, disconnect, and your stuff is still there when you come back, your processes are just running in the background. Conceptually, it's no different than SSHing into your favorite remote system.

In contrast to most other image systems, that are not, routinely, just a long running generic processor.

It's not "Lisp OS", but it's Lispy-ish OSey-ish.

They have their own cool little, byte code compiled Lisp, with the mailbox, and multi-processing intrinsic, and those isolated name spaces, which is nice. There's no shared memory, just message passing. That's fun and geeky.

Mailboxes/queues are not ubiquitous on Unix systems compared to streams and pipes and sockets. The queues, while they exist, are not readily lifted in the shells and such, so they become a specialty item.

Whereas in Unix, you can craft simple services using, well, anything, and inetd, that's still different from a long running mailbox listener.

They have different purposes, and the systems that use one as their hammer vs the other, will look different. But the important thing is making those services simple to make and use.
by sigbottle | 2025-05-31 02:14:10+00:00
Ah, I always forget that there's intermediates that aren't just matrix multiplies in ML.

A single python interpreter stack frame into a 10^4 * 10^4 GEMM C BLAS kernel is not a bottleneck, but calling 10^8 python interpreter stack frames for a pointwise addition broadcast op would be a bottleneck.

Does pytorch overload common broadcast operations though? I was under the impression that it did as well. I guess this is what `torch.compile` attempts to solve?
by sigbottle | 2025-05-31 02:16:05+00:00
> your python code rapidly resembles a lower level language and not just scripting

I thought the point of numeric processing frameworks&languages in general is that if you can express things as common math equations, then geniuses will go in and implement the hyper-optimal solutions for you because the'yre extremely common. If anything, it should resemble scripting even more, because you want to match the structured way as much as possible, so the 'compiler' (or in this case backend C libraries) can do the lifting for you.
by mholm | 2025-05-31 02:16:25+00:00
> Sure, it's trivial, but it's way faster than doing it myself

That's the clincher for me. So much software work is just excecuting on a design, not inventing anything new. Being able to do 5x the trivial work in an hour is life changing, and it lets me pull my head out of that work to see how I can make larger process improvements. AI doesn't need to rewrite the linux kernel in Rust to be extremely valuable to the average developer
by tdeck | 2025-05-31 02:17:16+00:00
Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this in a different way, because here's how I see it.

If these tools are really making people so productive, shouldn't it be painfully obvious in companies' output? For example, if these AI coding tools were an amazing productivity boost in the end, we'd expect to see software companies shipping features and fixes faster than ever before. There would be a huge burst in innovative products and improvements to existing products. And we'd expect that to be in a way that would be obvious to customers and users, not just in the form of some blog post or earnings call.

For cost center work, this would lead to layoffs right away, sure. But companies that make and sell software should be capitalizing on this, and only laying people off when they get to the point of "we just don't know what to do with all this extra productivity, we're all out of ideas!". I haven't seen one single company in this situation. So that makes me think that these decisions are hype-driven short term thinking.