MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dogleash | 2025-06-04 15:35:01+00:00
> We were constantly faced with product leaders (VPs of Product, CPOs, PMs, etc.) who were very excited about adding Cord to their existing product. They saw the value unambiguously. And then we’d get to the dev team and face a stonewall of NIH syndrome alongside a clear preference for building it all themselves, even when that meant shipping a vastly less-useful product to their end users.

You are painting the adoption problem as the software team having a different opinion on the build-or-buy decision. It could be they were OK with "buy" but didn't like your product for other reasons.

You've said that management teams liked the idea of your product, not that engineering teams liked working with your product. All software these days is built on stacks of OTS software. Of all the external dependencies they took on, why was yours different?

I've been on a bit of a tear recently, throwing away internal tech from 5-15 years ago that was inventive at the time, but where high quality off the shelf solutions now exist. I've still skipped on number of things I've wanted to pull into our stack. But they're too opinionated when they should be stupid libraries or flexible external services. I can't reshape our existing software to fit their idea of how our product can make life easier for them.
by skydhash | 2025-06-04 15:35:14+00:00
And for most things, you already have a basic idea on how to implement it (or where to go to find information). But then you have to check your assumptions about the codebase and that's a time sink, especially in a collaborative environment. Like what is the condition for this modals to appear? And without realizing it, you're deep into the backend code deciphering the logic for a particular state with three design documents open and a slack chat going with 4 teammates.
by neom | 2025-06-04 15:35:16+00:00
yyeaaah, i built a cloud. :) I love VMs. I'm a disciple of Alex Polvi. Lets call it an "Immutable Application VM" Stack. Each application service (or a logical group of application services) is packaged directly into an immutable VM image, and the orchestration manages these VMs directly. No separate container runtime or container orchestration layer on top of the VM. So you have an Immutable, Bootable System Image, but you would use kvm plus .iso plus orchestration tech. Basically, why does nobody built a cloud on the cloud lol??

(I helped build digitalocean from zero the pre-IPO, so I'm verrry rusty, this all might be nonsense/wrong think, and happy to be told as much! :))
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-06-04 15:36:04+00:00
Let me give my two cents. I remember when people used to think ai models are all the rage and one day we are gonna get super intelligence.

I am not sure If we can call the current sota models that. Maybe, maybe not. But a little disappointing.

Now everyones saying that ai agents are the hype and the productivity gains are in that, the Darwin Gödel paper which was recently released for example.

On the same day (yesterday), hn top page had an ai blog by some fly.io and the top comment was worried about ai excelling and that as devs we should do something as he was concerned what if companies reach the intelligence hype that they are saying.

On the same day, builder.ai turned out to be actually Indians.

The companies are most likely giving us hype because we are giving them valuation. The hype seems not worth it. Everyones saying that all models are really good and now all that matters are vibes.

So in all of this, I have taken this.

Trust noone. Or atleast not take things at face value of ai hype companies. I genuinely believe that ai is gonna reach a plateau of sorts at such moment like ours and as someone who tinkers with it. I am genuinely happy at its current scale and I kind of don't want it to grow more I guess, and I kind of think that a plateau might come soon. But maybe not.

I don't think that its analogous to species but maybe that's me being optimistic about future but I genuinely don't want to think too much as it stresses my brain too much and makes evene my present... Well not a present(gift)
by vdfs | 2025-06-04 15:36:16+00:00
We had the same issue because Marketing was using a stupid landing page SaaS tool to generate sales, it was connected directly to Stripe and we didn't have any control over it. We discovered the problem through Intercom, which notified us about a high volume of bounced emails (automatically sent after purchase). It was clear what was going on after discovering the same pattern.

To fix it, I had to proxy that unreliable SaaS software to implement CAPTCHAs and stronger bot detection. It was essentially a MITM-style proxy but for protection. It was fun to implement
by unoti | 2025-06-04 15:37:03+00:00
This is the video I wished I had seen when I was a kid, feeling like assembly was a dark art that I was too dumb to be able to do. Later in life I did a ton of assembly professionally on embedded systems. But as a kid I thought I wasn’t smart enough. This idea is poison, thinking you’re not smart enough, and it ruins lives.

https://youtu.be/ep7gcyrbutA?si=8HiMqH2mMwsJRNDg
by uberman | 2025-06-04 15:37:05+00:00
Would you let a police officer search your home just because they say they wanted to? Would you let them search your phone just because they said they wanted to?

I fully accept that there are some places and situation where these searches are approved but police should not do law enforcement based on the notion that "we want to be able to do this". If they want to force brick a device then a judge can approve a request or order that.

Just hypothetically, let's say there is a protest against the police and let's also agree that police can act "as they want" with respect to mobile devices. What would stop the police from geo-fencing all phones at the protest and bricking them?
by uludag | 2025-06-04 15:37:05+00:00
I've grown to believe the following more extreme (or maybe reasonable) version of what you said:

- A good lawyer with or without AI will likely win in court against a mediocre lawyer with AI

- A good SWE with or without AI will likely ship features faster/safer than a mediocre engineer with AI

- A good doctor with or without AI will save more lives than a mediocre doctor with AI.

I've experimented with this personally, stopping all my usage of AI coding tools for a time, including the autocomplete stuff. I by no means found myself barely treading water, soon to be overtaken by my cybernetically enhanced colleagues. In fact, quite the opposite, nothing really changed.

- A good doctor + AI will save more lives than a non doctor + AI, who will perform better than just AI

I find even entertaining the opposite conclusion comical. Think of, for example, a world acclaimed heart surgeon. Are people seriously entertaining the idea that a rando with some agentic AI setup could outperform such a surgeon in said field, saving more lives? Is this the level of delusion that some people are at now?
by keiferski | 2025-06-04 15:37:05+00:00
Here’s a counter argument: I don’t want to live in the kind of world implied by a focus on life extension. I’m okay with it “happening in the background” in the way that modern medicine has improved lifespans over the last century. But I wouldn’t want it to be a direct imperative part of everyday life.

I don’t inherently have a problem with the idea of people living longer, and I don’t really have an issue with research going into it - but I do have a problem with the cultural environment that would exist under such a philosophy. All adventurous spirit would evaporate, all dangerous activities banned or strongly discouraged.

If the only way you can die is by getting physically injured, you can expect social pressure against doing anything that is even the slightest bit physically dangerous. The world would be a scared, fearful place, and I think this is a net negative for the human spirit.

I don’t worry about that too much though, as I do think you’d get a major counter cultural backlash to such a cultural situation. You can already feel echoes of it today: white collar workers looking for a job that is “more real” or with their hands; kids wanting to be Navy Seals or join the military purely because they can’t stomach the office lifestyle. A certain percentage of people will always prefer adventure to safety and cold rationality, and you can see this emerge as a trend frequently throughout history (e.g., Romanticism coming after Enlightenment rationalism.)

That also touches on a second point, which is that the entire life extension project is basically a domain of the rich in hyper individualist Western countries, functioning as an ersatz replacement for a heaven they no longer believe in. It’s fundamentally a rejection of the reality of death in human existence, and that is partially why it may simply be outcompeted by more group-oriented cultures that aren’t as centered on maximizing individual experience as long as possible.

I’m just guessing here, and perhaps there is no data to support this, but: I get the impression that people with robust family and community lives are less concerned with maximizing their individual lifespans as much as possible. This is probably because they derive more meaning from their place in that community than in their individualist existence. And you could probably also bring in religion and the belief in an afterlife here (see birth rates correlated with religiosity, for example.)
by Spivak | 2025-06-04 15:37:05+00:00
I mean that's basically what all these image search indexes do. They look at an image and add a bunch of tags for whatever they see in the photo that can be queried later. It works really well and armed with one of these models and word2vec you can build your own search quite easily.

tensorflow object detection is one such means. Hosted solutions would be Amazon Rekognition.
by altruios | 2025-06-04 15:37:32+00:00
not who you are replying to - but: Shakespeare was limited by the number of interactions he had with humans. He did not have the internet.

We also have neurology as a science now. So that's one bit of evidence for the claim.

Of course Shakespeare had a profound understanding of human nature. And of course he did not have the working vocabulary and knowledge base of modern psychology which has been built up over time by many humans working together. Two things can be true.
by DSMan195276 | 2025-06-04 15:37:47+00:00
IMO the problem is that, at least right now, the AI can't examine the patient itself, it has to be fed information from the doctor. This step means bad doctors are likely to provide the AI with bad information and reduce it's effectiveness (or cause the AI to re-enforce the biases of the doctor by only feeding it the information they see as relevant).
by munificent | 2025-06-04 15:37:54+00:00
> And because I'm so slow it takes too much time for me to not think that it's a waste of time because I could have done something more meaningful instead.

I struggle with this too, especially because knitting is so slow and I'm in the unusual but fortunate position of having my other hobby (writing a couple of books) clearly having had much more impact.

There's a part of my brain when I knit that's like, "You know if you spent this hour working on another book, it would leave a bigger mark in the world."

But I also know that part of that impulse is unhealthy. I wrote those books for a lot reasons, many of which were good. But some of that drive did come from a sense that I'm not enough just being me and I need to be making something of value for as many people as possible to consider myself worthy.

I'm trying to grow out of that mindset and accept myself just as I am. So I consider time spent knitting as sort of exposure therapy for getting used to the idea that I deserve to take time for my selfish joys.
by alpineidyll3 | 2025-06-04 15:38:21+00:00
People love to have opinions about how technologies should develop, but time and again, market realities are what guide their development. People easily get emotional about life extension, and it grabs a lot of attention because of that, but all those feelings don't measure up to the impossible to extrapolate tertiary effects of any technology which transforms lives, life extension definitely being one.

I'd argue that it's pretty clear that lipitor is partially to blame for our present gerontocracy muddle, but the issue there is that lipitor transfers mortality from the heart to many other conditions, some of which impair thinking. Life extension isn't a monolith, nor are the mechanisms of cellular age in animals. It's a blanket for 1000s of possible technologies. Productive conversations about it would be nuanced, and related to details about a particular technology, which these conversations never seem to rise to the level of. Definitely not this piece or fukuyama's either.

I come to HN for nuance.
by jmsdnns | 2025-06-04 15:38:31+00:00
I was at Penn's first AI conference last year and heard Dr Lilach Mollick's keynote where she said this is shown to be true over and over. She doesnt seem to publish often, but her husband Ethan always has a lot to say about AI.

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/everyone-is-above-average
by apsurd | 2025-06-04 15:38:46+00:00
This sounds like the free will argument. we're just complex receptors to stimuli, we don't choose anything, we receive inputs and react accordingly. "it's just biology"

in this sense there's no discussion on why humans chooses kids or heroin, or taking a shit. The answer is "they don't"

so this isn't about kids. you've made up your mind about all reality.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-06-04 15:38:55+00:00
In theory, I agree with this.

However, one constant I've observed over my career: the quality and speed of the work I produce has not significantly contributed to career advancement. I know I'm appreciated for the fact that I don't cause more problems, and I usually make the total number of problems go down. I mention this because if quality/speed was truly valued, I believe I'd see more career-related growth (titles, etc) from it at some point in the last 20 years of my career.

This isn't to say AI won't be helpful. It is, and I use it some. But the whole schtick around, "SWEs must adopt AI or they'll be left behind," reeks of thought-terminating influencer BS. If people had great ways of assessing programmer productivity, we wouldn't need the ceremony-ridden promo culture that we have in some places.

(Arguably most of my career advancement in the last 5 years or so has come mainly from therapy: emotional regulation, holding onto problems that cannot be fixed easily w/o being consumed with trying to fix them or disengaging completely, and applying all that and more to various types of leadership.)
by zevon | 2025-06-04 15:39:10+00:00
I look at the PP machines like I would at a traditional toolroom mill or a standard desktop 3D printer: Middle-ground compromises with relatively sharp upper limits (that can often be worked around by putting in way more work). I've actually been in contexts where even the standard PP-machines were too big.

However, I'd also like to have a bigger shredder and the approach of simplifying it an making it from available resources sounds great. Do you know if concepts like hacking leaf springs have been tried out in the PP project or in another context and if there are machines/blueprints available?

Btw: As far as I know, a lot of the design of the PP-machines has evolved by way of largely self-taught and more or less chaotic experimentation. So, it seemed to me that most of the development work on the machines is actually much closer to the contexts you refer to than it is to fibre lasers and specialized metallurgy.
by iforgotpassword | 2025-06-04 15:39:23+00:00
And luckily the "plain English" the AI outputs is always 100% correct, so we don't have to worry about buggy python code down the line because those python devs got incorrect instructions. I mean how should they even verify anything, they're python devs, and perl will look like complete gibberish to them.

So they might have saved all that time, but what's gonna be the impact of incorrect reimplementation? What does that software do?
by ackfoobar | 2025-06-04 15:39:39+00:00
> you are consciously adding to the known problem. Blaming "someone else" doesn't change the decision

The "known problem" is plastic going to the landfill, which is barely a concern. awongh's original comment mentioned two plastic problems worthy of concern - microplastic and ocean plastic. Neither of that is related to disposable plastic going to the landfill.
by Aurornis | 2025-06-04 15:39:40+00:00
I disagree. This is a rare case where “trickle down” actually would work: If the ultra rich want to pay their way to discovering longevity improvements, it won’t be long before companies everywhere are competing to bring those same discoveries to the masses at ever-lower prices.

If ultra rich want to fund longevity research with their money then bring it on. Their personal spending on research doesn’t subtract from other issues like healthcare policy.

There was a time when things like refrigeration, televisions, and mobile phones were only for the extremely wealthy, too. Imagine if we had halted research on those because we didn’t think it was fair for only rich people to have those things.
by zoizoi | 2025-06-04 15:39:59+00:00
Location: Munich, Germany Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Python, Chemistry, Material Science Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakob-blahusch/

Hello, I just finished my PhD in chemistry. My research focuses on understanding and controlling the unique properties of these materials, particularly how the lone pair expression leads to ferroelectric and luminescent properties. Using a combination of advanced characterization techniques – including single crystal X-ray diffraction, powder diffraction, differential thermal analysis, and various spectroscopic methods – I investigate how organic cations can template both the electronic and structural properties of these hybrid materials. Currently, I also explore the use of machine learning assisted approaches to investigate these templating effects. Now I am looking for new opportunities in industry to apply my skills.
by taeric | 2025-06-04 15:40:00+00:00
Ish. The catch is we spend a ton of effort on teaching these models to recognize specific things in pictures. Then we ask it to not do that task, but instead count something on the picture. Which, we oddly don't spend a lot of time training the model to do.

It is a lot like the experiment where you ask people to say what color some text is. With the trick where some of the text is the name of another color. Can be surprisingly hard for people that are good at reading.
by parasec | 2025-06-04 15:40:04+00:00
Beside all the helpful comments: If this is a serious problem for your business, invest in Cloudflare or other professional bot-protection. They do fingerprinting and similar stuff.

Also, if you implement your own methods, do shadow-banning of bots that you identified. These attacks will stop if the time and effort the malicious actor has to invest outweigh the benefits, so the more time and effort you let them waste, the better. A good example are unsolvable and ridiculously captchas. That is obviously a double-edged sword - you need a good way of whitelisting known good actors, so the effect of false-positives on your customers is minimized.
by skydhash | 2025-06-04 15:40:05+00:00
Sometimes, one of those decisions was right in the past, but is wrong in the current context (eg. the company is now trying to get governments contracts). Changing one of these have rippling effects on all the decisions, so you're trying to reconcile the two sets in a way that minimizes the need to rewrite code. It's more like a research lab than a factory assembly line.
by ffsm8 | 2025-06-04 15:40:20+00:00
to begin with, youve already switched the hacker from an advertiser to the operator running the website.

but ignoring that: none of what youve written there has been enabled by an identity provider hosted by the state. These scams already exists, today and various "special" users fall victim to them.

but lets ignore that too: these verifications are usually done interactively and cannot simply be played back, as you need to actually react to the actions of the person verifying your identiy

but lets ignore that too: its _highly_ unlikely the service will make users upload IDs and get verified via video etc on every connection. I'm gonna bet this is a one-time action, and after that you'll probably have to simply authenticate via 2-3 factors (username, password, biometric, sms, email, e-pass, certificate etc) - so what you're insinuating (this service makes people numb to such situation) is implausible. Especially in the context this scenario is in: merely verifying >18 yo
by supplied_demand | 2025-06-04 15:40:25+00:00
==You can be absolutist about personal moral choices, but writing this reply used precious resources that are destroying the planet, on a device that almost certainly also contributed to pollution and human misery.==

Fortunately, I live in a state with some of the greenest energy sources in the country. Living here is a choice I make.

I also made the choice to write my comment and "use" those resources. I own that choice and the consequences. My comment simply suggests that you should own your choices and their consequences, too.

==people weaponize their choices against others for their own gain.==

It feels like you are doing a form of this when you dismiss the individual's contributions to global trash issues and outsource the blame to "others." You have gained peace-of-mind by convincing yourself you aren't part of the problem.
by criddell | 2025-06-04 15:40:27+00:00
I sometimes wonder if I'm broken in some way. I bought my first guitar in 1996 (a Mexican Fender Stratocaster) and my last guitar in 2018 (a Gibson SG). I've taken lessons with three different teachers. I've worked through a Hal Leonard book series. I've subscribed to Guitar Tricks for a while then switched to Justin Guitar. I have YouTube playlists a mile long where I try to learn songs. I keep a guitar in my office to help me stop thinking about a problem when I get stuck.

After all this, I don't know any (real) songs from start to finish. The closest I come is playing Nirvana's About a Girl.

I might have some kind of rhythm disability. If I try to play along with a record, I'm almost always lost right away because I start strumming to match the drumming pattern or the vocal rhythms.

It's so frustrating, especially when I see how fast my kids learned to play an instrument. They make it look so easy.
by munificent | 2025-06-04 15:40:33+00:00
Agree on all accounts. I very much enjoy the limited woodworking I've done, but the logistics are much trickier than knitting.

I do find whittling to be an interesting middle point. Like knitting, you don't need a dedicated workshop. It doesn't take a lot of set up and tear down for a given session. You can fit the project and tools in a small space.

Of course, you're shedding wood chips the whole time, so you can't really whittle on the couch. And you sure as hell can't do it on an airplane. But you can do it when, say, camping with friends, or sitting on the back porch when it's nice out.