MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ednite | 2025-06-04 18:07:26+00:00
Thanks for sharing this. I'm actually starting to explore integrating an agent into one of my SaaS solutions, based on a client request.

To be honest, my experience with agents is still pretty limited, so I’d really appreciate any advice, especially around best practices or a roadmap for implementation. The goal is to build something that can learn and reflect the company’s culture, answer situational questions like “what to do in this case,” assist with document error checking, and generally serve as a helpful internal assistant.

All of this came from the client's desire to have a tool that aligns with their internal knowledge and workflows.

Is something like this feasible in terms of quality and reliability? And beyond hallucinations, are there major security or roadblocks concerns I should be thinking about?
by lapcat | 2025-06-04 18:07:37+00:00
> and just to play devil's advocate

Your comment would be improved by simply removing that phrase. It adds nothing and in fact detracts.

> just like with open vs. closed offices or remote vs in-person, maybe some people have all the human interaction they want outside of work and don't mind "talking" to some AI as long as it gets shit done in the manner they want.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. If someone doesn't enjoying mentoring juniors, that's fine. They shouldn't have to. But why would one have to choose between mentoring juniors or babysitting LLM agents? How about neither?

sasmithjr was apparently trying to defend babysitting A.I. by making an analogy with mentoring juniors, whereas I replied by arguing that the two are not alike. Whether or not you enjoy using A.I. is an entirely separate issue, independent of mentoring.
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-04 18:08:13+00:00
You don't give a noob a table saw because he'll never understand why a hand saw is useful. He'll never appreciate that more often than not, the hand saw will easier and quicker.

But hey, what do I know. Im the kind of guy who gets to play with TMA and seriously considers purchasing hydrazine for work. What do I know?
by touisteur | 2025-06-04 18:08:23+00:00
For those who can stomach it, reading aviation accident reports, listening to actual recorded voice footage, you very often read about the cognitive load of a two-person team trying to get through a shitty moment.

Richard de Crespigny, who flew the Quantas A380 that blew one of its engines after a departure from Changi, explains very clearly and in a gripping way the amount of stuff happening while trying to save an aircraft.

Lots of accidents happen today already at the seams of automation, I don't think we're collectively ready for a world with much more automation, especially in the name of more shareholder value of a 4 dollars discount.
by Tycho | 2025-06-04 18:09:53+00:00
I thought this film was pretty good. The writer seems to understand the subculture and the performances brought out a lot of hilarity in the script. It brings some important questions into focus - the sheer scale of the social impact of “product rollouts”, the transactional vs philosophical motivations of tech titans, the obsolescence of government.

Of course, it’s a satire, so take it seriously not literally.
by ffsm8 | 2025-06-04 18:10:02+00:00
You are taking a very different fact from these circumstances then I would.

If he Trump tried once and was forced to backpedal, I'd say you're probably spot on. But considering he tried again quickly after shows, that he ain't gonna take a no. He's just gonna keep trying. At that point: yeah, I'd be worried.

But I'm not American, so I didn't particularly mind
by kherud | 2025-06-04 18:10:16+00:00
Is there a general solution to this problem? I assume you can only start buffering tokens once you see a construct, for which there are continuations, that once completed, would lead to the previous text being rendered differently. Of course you don't want to keep buffering for too long, since this would defeat the purpose of streaming. And you never know if the potential construct will actually be generated. Also, the solution probably has to be more context sensitive. For example, within code blocks, you'll never want to render links for []() constructs.

EDIT: One library I found is https://github.com/thetarnav/streaming-markdown which seems to combine incremental parsing with optimistic rendering, which works good enough in practice, I guess.
by klaussilveira | 2025-06-04 18:11:30+00:00
One thing no 3D AI tool has ever done is to focus on the concept of enhancing or restyling the textures of existing, UV-unwrapped 3D models. I had to build my own pipeline on ComfyUI and Blender scripts, exporting ID maps and black/white masks from the model UV, in order to get a Stable Diffusion to paint within the boundaries of the UV and consider it as means of painting. Using cavity maps also helped with the model create boundaries. But now I am able to quickly apply, let's say, comic-book style art into existing textures of existing models.

Have you considered providing built-in tools for mesh decimation and UV unwrapping? I know it can be quickly done with meshlab, but I imagine not a lot of Adam users would even understand the need for decimation. Any possibility for also automating rigging?
by dathinab | 2025-06-04 18:11:48+00:00
no it's a long term incoming failure

partially due to legacy of science historically being rooted in "it matters more who you (or your parents) are" societies (due to them having had the money in somewhat modern history) (or like some would say the "old white man problem", except it has nothing to do with skin color, or man and only limited to do with old)

partially due to how much more "science (output)" is produced today and ways which once worked to have reasonable QA don't work that well in todays scale anymore

partially due to how many flows

partially due to human nature (as in people tend to care more about "exiting", "visible" things etc.)

People have been pushing for change in a lot of ways like:

- pushing to make full re-poducability a must have (but that is hard, especially for statistics based things only a few companies can even afford to try to run. But also hard due to it requiring a lot of transparency and open data access, and especially the alter is often very much something many owners of data sets are not okay with.

- pushing for more appreciation of null results, or failures. (To be clear I mean both appreciation in form of monetary support and in the traditional sense of the word of people (colleges) appreciating it).

- pushing for more verifying of papers by trying to reproduce it (both as in more money/time resources for it and in changing the mind set from it being a daunting unappreciated task to it being a nice thing to do)

but to little change happened in the end before modern LLM AI hit the scene and now it has made things so much harder as it's now easy to mass produce slob but reasonable looking (non) sience
by tunesmith | 2025-06-04 18:12:15+00:00
Reading this, I'm struck with a familiar feeling. I wonder if other dem-leaning readers can identify. I remember the old joke about how economists have successfully predicted five of the last three recessions. Now it's more intense and political. I feel like there's so much doomsaying amongst those who aren't wired to support Trump. Like they/we are successfully predicting 57 of the last 14 emergencies. Here, Krugman points out some real financial data that might be concerning, but then also devotes equal time to the freaking name of the bill, which, come on. Completely irrelevant to understanding what is really going on. And, I know that that is part of the point/strategy, that some of this branding is trolling to distract people. But where is the actual sober analysis that is better able to tell the difference between the 14 emergencies that are real and the 43 that aren't? That's the familiar feeling; just the sense that I don't really know what is going on, and there are fewer and fewer resources that allow me to make sense of it.
by dimatura | 2025-06-04 18:12:19+00:00
Like the other commenter said, their retail price is $2000. In the used market, they are going for about $1400-1500 based on reverb.com stats. So at least compared to those prices, $1400 new is a decent deal. And for what it's worth, they sold out pretty quickly today (or so their online store says). Of course, $1400 is still a hefty price tag, I won't argue about that (and there's not much anything new to say about that topic, considering it's like 80% of online discourse about TE).
by tsimionescu | 2025-06-04 18:13:10+00:00
I don't understand what you mean by decision. In a textbook CPU, where there is no speculative execution and no pipelining, the hardware runs one instruction at a time, the one from the instruction pointer. If that instruction is a conditional jump, this is a single computation that sets the instruction pointer to a single value (either next instruction or the specified jump point). After the single new value of the instruction pointer is computed, the process begins again - it fetches one instruction from the memory address it finds in the instruction point register, decodes it, and executes it.

Even if you add pipelining, the basic textbook design will stall the pipeline when it encounters a conditional/computed jump instruction. Even if you add basic speculative execution, you still don't get both branches executed at once, necessarily - assuming you had a single ALU, you'd still get only one branch executed at once, and if the wrong one was predicted, you'll revert and execute the other one once the conditional finishes being computed.
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-04 18:13:12+00:00
What's hell about the last chapter? (Other than the writing and the author's transparently obvious sexual preferences?)

Death? Hunger? Pain? That's small stuff. It is not Hell.

Hell is loathing your existence forever. The end point of every human is condemned to in that novel.

Let me ask you a question (my answers in parentheses):

Do you fear death (not Death itself, but yes I do)?

What about it (bring unprepared, the pain of the process, fear of cowardice)?
by the_af | 2025-06-04 18:13:46+00:00
Right! I forgot about his writings on Indians. Not Twain's finest. I wonder why TFA doesn't mention this, instead of going on an irrelevant tangent about the Confederacy?

I have to say I do think Twain's writings about Indians are racist (so yeah, point taken) but always couched in ambivalence; some of it for example looks like exaggeration to ridicule the poetic "Noble Savage" of Fenimore Cooper and others, which is also bullshit (and unfortunately, lives on to modern age, "Dances With Wolves" et al).

But yeah, I admit I forgot about the Indians.
by m463 | 2025-06-04 18:14:15+00:00
this kind of stuff is everywhere.

ios does the same thing. when you install an app, they allow deep linking of their urls.

for example, if you install the amazon app, any amazon link loaded on your phone can be intercepted by it (messages, mail, browser, etc)

I think the same kinds of things can be done with location services. A store app can do fine-grained bluetooth location with ibeacons in their store.

I don't know the state-of-the-art in cross-application tracking. I'm pretty sure sdks added to multiple apps can do the same sort of thing.

At some point a number of years ago, i just stopped installing apps.
by scubbo | 2025-06-04 18:15:26+00:00
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44172285

> [I] was apparently so desensitized to the latter construct that it actually took me ages to debug, because my brain simply did not consider that `if err != nil` was not supposed to be there.

Clearly not different enough.

Tests are just one tool among many that we use to build and evaluate mental models of behaviour. It's equally possible that the parent commenter noticed unusual behaviour _via_ their tests, and took "ages to debug" precisely _because_ they were misreading the code while trying to understand _why_ the tests were failing. A hypothetical syntax highlighter that flagged up to them "hey, you're doing something unusual here - is that intended?" would have helped them in debugging _alongside_ tests.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-06-04 18:15:31+00:00
> especially an uptick in people believing that property crime should not be prosecuted at all if the perpetrator is any less wealthy than a billionaire.

... and a probably-equal uptick in people who advocate for extrajudicial murder of people accused of (or just suspected of) property crime (look at the way people on the right talk about homeless folks, immigrants etc). the loudest online are not representative of the majority opinion.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-04 18:16:23+00:00
i've done that when i forgot to add some necessary files in the initial initial commit. since the adding the forgotten files did not include any changes warranting a different message, it lets me know i was a knucklehead and the commits are meant be considered the same commit. it's much faster than looking up to see if there's a way to amend an existing commit with additional files, and then going through the process of actually doing it. my use of git is add/commit/push/clone/switch/fetch. after that, it's 100% look it up and hope i'm not going to bork my repo by following some SO thread
by stego-tech | 2025-06-04 18:16:25+00:00
> The “trust but verify” approach emerged from practical necessity of maintaining organizational functionality within a workforce increasingly disconnected from traditional concepts of professional duty and self-accountability.

This sticks out in my head as completely divorced from the practical reality of the modern workplace circa the past fifty years. Every single KPI has gone up: productivity, imports, exports, revenues, share price, deliverables, margins, you name it.

The counter-culture cited to justify these sorts of highly invasive spyware deployments is merely the reaction of a workforce to stagnant wages and deteriorating standards of living in the face of an economy that has left them behind, a monied class that loathes their existence, and governments who can’t be bothered to listen to their grievances over the sound of a $25k-per-plate fundraising dinner. Workers aren’t the problem, here, and surveillance does nothing to actually improve things for the majority of society.

To suggest “counter-culture” is the issue is akin to suggesting queer people are responsible for military overspending as opposed to unaccountable defense contractors and PMCs, or that the National Debt is the fault of immigrants as opposed to a government apparatus that fails elementary school maths. There is no “counter-culture” causing a problem in the workplace requiring surveillance, it’s a handful of people at the top of the organization trying to keep as much for themselves as possible demanding said surveillance to protect their own positions and interests - which conveniently happen to be directly opposed to the needs and demands of their workers.
by toomanyrichies | 2025-06-04 18:16:57+00:00
> Make it make sense.

There's a great book called "The One Sentence Persuasion Course - 27 Words to Make the World Do Your Bidding", which I keep thinking about with respect to Trump and his ability to sway his voting bloc. The 27 words are:

"People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies."

Trump ticks a lot of these boxes. He "confirms" their suspicions and justifies their failures when he says their problems are caused by immigration, China, and wokeism. He helps them throw rocks at their enemies every time he invents a new petty nickname for his political opponents ("Sleepy Joe" Biden, "Crooked Hillary" Clinton, "Kamabla" Harris, etc). He encourages their dreams with his "Make America Great Again" slogan and "allays their fears" with his "Only I can solve it" rhetoric. And they eat it up because, as misguided as he is, he speaks to them on an emotional level, not a logical one.

Trump's base is fundamentally fueled by grievance, and he knows it. When we stop bending over backwards to give them some noble rationale and start looking at their actions from this lens, it starts to make a lot more sense.
by rkagerer | 2025-06-04 18:17:28+00:00
Axis locks out certain useful features in their IP cameras unless you install an Axis-branded SD card.

Since Axis doesn't actually manufacture SD cards, they are obviously rebranded high-endurance cards from one of the major fabs (possibly with some minor firmware parameter tweaks). Except, they cost twice as much and aren't as generally available.

Would this law have any bearing on that business practice?
by archagon | 2025-06-04 18:17:43+00:00
I’m also from Russia, and it’s very clear to me that we’re heading straight in that direction. See the executive’s revenge policies against Harvard and Columbia, law firms, media networks, and student activists. If things keep going as they are, it won’t be long before protesters start getting black-bagged and shipped to some desert concentration camp. Putin needed a decade to get to that point.
by Animats | 2025-06-04 18:17:51+00:00
It's possible for a rich country to fail.

- How Venezuela went from the richest country in South America to a disaster area.[1]

- Decline of Argentina.[2]

- Decline of Portugal.[3] Portugal used to be a world power. Yes, Portugal.

- Decline of Roman Empire.[4]

This is a real worry. The US is on that path.

[1] https://www.history.com/articles/venezuela-chavez-maduro-cri...

[2] https://worldhistoryjournal.com/2025/04/02/history-argentina...

[3] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/cross-gold-brazilian-treasure...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi...
by the_af | 2025-06-04 18:17:51+00:00
> I don't think that sentence necessarily implies that he joined the Confederacy because he was racist, although that isn't a very far-fetched claim [...] It is true that he fought for the Confederacy.

I think it does imply it [1], and it's also an unfounded claim. Twain himself seems confused about why he joined, and deserted after two weeks without firing a single shot (his farcical account of it claims his unit killed a single man, but this has been proven false). Hardly the actions of a convinced racist.

> That "bar one" was probably referring to Native Americans, whom he seemed to really really hate

Yeah, I concede this. Twain framed his "Noble Red Man" as ridicule of the "noble savage" stereotype so common in literature, but even then, it's hard to find a positive example of an Indian in his writing. So I concede this point.

Though... why didn't TFA mention this instead of going on a tangent about the Confederacy?

----

[1] Because TFA qualifies this as "earlier in his life", which wouldn't make sense if this was about Twain's opinions on Native Americans. It clearly links his racism "earlier in life" to his joining the army of the Confederacy.
by globie | 2025-06-04 18:18:13+00:00
Were you running certbot multiple times per day?

Looking at the relevant limit, "Consecutive Authorization Failures per Hostname per Account"[0], it looks like there's no way to hit that specific limit if you only run once per day.

Ah, to think how many cronjobs are out there running certbot on * * * * *!

[0]: https://letsencrypt.org/docs/rate-limits/#consecutive-author...
by Herring | 2025-06-04 18:18:27+00:00
The overlap is extensive. Abortion, immigration, racism/DEI/trans, tax cuts, deregulation, judicial appointments, fossil fuel production, skepticism towards green energy and climate change, prioritizing conservative Christian religious preferences, restructuring/downsizing the Federal Government etc etc. Most of what he does is currently and historically very popular in red states, with predictable outcomes. Corruption is non-partisan, but they definitely turn a blind eye to it.
by NotAnOtter | 2025-06-04 18:18:41+00:00
The blameless aspect of post mortem's is paradoxical. I agree with the sentiment but at the end of the day, somewhere in there, the blame is placed on one or two human made oversights or errors. If the conclusion of the PM is "This error was caused when <This PR> was submitted", then everyone's natural instinct is to go look at who authored the PR.

I guess aiming for blameless is as good as it gets sometimes.
by beezlebroxxxxxx | 2025-06-04 18:18:51+00:00
I don't think the syntax is particularly difficult, if slightly archaic; but the real problem is the lack of a paragraph break in the first 2 paragraphs (it felt like reading Henry James) and the way Harper's styled their website. On paper, though, even when the sentences and style are quite out there, I find Harper's to be the most readable of all the major magazines.
by ookblah | 2025-06-04 18:19:11+00:00
i was trying to frame it as something i'm also grappling with, but i digress poor choice of words.

maybe you're responding to the wrong person? because i'm not even disagreeing with you on that. maybe they want both or neither, that's fine.

the person i'm responding to is framing mentoring as some kind must have from a "socialization" standpoint (which i disagreed with, but i get the practical aspect of it where if you don't have people train juniors there won't be seniors).
by burningChrome | 2025-06-04 18:19:37+00:00
Companies also have their executives do things like tell you that they only use data ethically and responsibly, then turn around and sell it to the highest bidder.

A lot of times unless you're on a team or in a department that's doing this stuff for nefarious purposes, you wouldn't know.

Anecdotal evidence:

I worked in RPA (robotic process automation) for a large software company. We were tasked with automating a decision process. The decision process was completely benign. Something like a payments process. Pretty easy. We finished it in a few months start to finish.

We hand it off, it goes into production. A lot of back slapping and high fives happen. I go on with my work, move out of the company a few months later. About a year later, a guy I worked with at the company emails me a news story about a company using the RPA program we built to auto deny insurance claims for their clients. Massive class action lawsuit.

The insurance company had taken our script and just re-purposed it to auto deny a certain percentage of claims. I was shocked and dismayed that someone would use the stuff we built for their own shady business practices. It was a huge wakeup call that even when you're building something completely benign, a company can pay millions for it and reuse it to do bad things to people and you'll never know until its too late.
by derbOac | 2025-06-04 18:19:45+00:00
Something about titles (and tone?) like this bother me — absolutist in time as well as in geography. It's maybe a subtlety that doesn't matter but I see it a lot lately and it's part of a pattern that I see as lazy and obscuring underlying issues.

Things are bad right now, but making stereotyped statements like this, as if the entire country just flipped a permanent switch after Trump was elected and it will be like this forever doesn't do anyone any favors. It doesn't explain what's happening, what happened before Trump was elected, what happened after Trump was elected, it doesn't point to any solutions — it just sweeps all of these issues under the rug and implicitly or explicitly attributes things to some sudden catastrophic change in Americans, like an asteroid the size of North America just collectively hit everyone on the head on Jan 20th.

Absolutist statements have always been around — there's plenty of examples during the pandemic, the online tech boom of the 90s and 2000s, and so forth — and it seems to be happening again. But this time to me it seems irresponsible not just for being so extreme, but also because it shirks away from any attempt to solve any problems. I don't expect Krugman to solve problems all the time — he's allowed to despair — but I at least expect him to have some courage and proactivity in his overall stance toward the situation.