MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by whstl | 2025-07-07 13:24:48+00:00
Having worked in both situations (product person vs no product person), this reads like fiction to me.

Most PMs I worked were nowhere near being able to guide anyone, especially on B2B domains. I had to train a lot of them just to do basic follow up stuff, and honestly the vast majority was below expectation, and mostly just receiving requests from customers and giving opinions on designs.

And even in the best cases, an understanding of the product filtered by a product lead was nowhere near as good as actually having engineers who care, dogfood, talk with customers, read feedback, design solutions and verify them with end users.

IMO the concept of product leads, PMs, etc, is ok, but the implementation is always lacking. It's always a "creative type" that is stifling creativity of engineers while not really adding a lot of value.

I much prefer the concept of "Product Owner" of Scrum: someone that brings the tasks but isn't really dictating taste (except via feedback) or removing the creative part of engineering work.
by peeters | 2025-07-07 13:24:55+00:00
> The moment that people ascribe properties such as "consciousness" or "ethics" or "values" or "morals" to these learnt mappings is where I tend to get lost. We are speaking about a big recurrence equation that produces a new word, and that stops producing words if we don't crank the shaft.

If that's the argument, then in my mind the more pertinent question is should you be anthropomorphizing humans, Larry Ellison or not.
by asoneth | 2025-07-07 13:25:14+00:00
Similar to software developers, there's a difference between meeting a user need with with established patterns and exploring novel ones.

The vast majority of consumer and enterprise products ought to be done with established design patterns. Figma is fine for this.

Whereas exploratory design is about coming up with novel patterns. Most of this work ends up being interesting but not particularly practical, and even when someone comes up with something great it's often not yet clear how and where it should be applied. In my experience only a few companies actually pull this off and the rest would be better off following existing conventions. Also in my experience, people who do exploratory design have a wider skillset and use a much broader and more flexible set of tools like pen and paper, physical prototypes, 3d modeling, computer graphics, video production, software development, etc.

The challenge has been that many designers are hired for the former but would prefer to do the latter.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-07-07 13:25:23+00:00
I think it's a U-shaped utility curve where abstract planning is on one side (your comment) and the chore implementation is on the other.

Your role is between the two: deciding on the architecture, writing the top-level types, deciding on the concrete system design.

And then AI tools help you zoom in and glue things together in an easily verifiable way.

I suspect that people who still haven't figured out how to make use of LLMs, assuming it's not just resentful performative complaining which it probably is, are expecting it to do it all. Which never seemed very engineer-minded.
by tdullien | 2025-07-07 13:25:56+00:00
Author here. What's the difference, in your perception, between an LLM and a large-scale meteorological simulation, if there is any?

If you're willing to ascribe the possibility of consciousness to any complex-enough computation of a recurrence equation (and hence to something like ... "earth"), I'm willing to agree that under that definition LLMs might be conscious. :)
by 0xCE0 | 2025-07-07 13:26:10+00:00
He has recently co-founded NDEA company, so he has to align himself for that. Same kind of vibe change feels for Joscha Bach after having some position in Liquid AI company. Communication is not so relaxed anymore.

That said, I'd still listen these two guys (+ Schmidhuber) more than any other AI-guy.
by higeorge13 | 2025-07-07 13:26:48+00:00
Of course it's not right. Let's be honest, our profession is in the era where software engineer = factory worker, and the worst part is that we have been playing music chairs right for the last couple years. So yeah all these professions have some steady status/wealth/qol progression and upgrade while people gain years of experience, while in software development it doesn't matter how many years of experience we have, which companies we worked on, their sector, whether your company is using the saas we were working on, etc.; we are going to get judged by trivia questions and leetcode.
by vanderZwan | 2025-07-07 13:26:55+00:00
This is from 2018, btw.

Anyway, to repeat the same joke I made when this came out seven years ago: speaking as a physics drop-out who then pursued a four-year bachelor of arts, multiple conflicting interpretations of the same thing being considered valid even if they lead to opposite things being considered true are my bread and butter. So, sorry quantum mechanics, I guess you're part of the humanities now.

Bonus quasi-relevant SMBC https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/humanity
by samrus | 2025-07-07 13:27:07+00:00
Absolutely not past peak gaming. Gaming as a medium hasnt even begun to peak.

The infrastructure aside, creators havent properly used games to make art yet, just toys. In terms of film history, we are currently in the "train approaching stop" era of gaming at the AAA level with all these movie-games just trying to tell a static story with no real user interaction in it, and in the silent film era with indie games, where some games like DDLC and undertale (and mayne the fromsoft titles to a degree) beginning to do interesting things with the interactivity inherent in the medium. There is a long long way to go before the blockbuster fatigue era
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-07 13:27:24+00:00
The LLM is right. That’s the problem. It made good points.

Your super intelligent brain couldn’t come up with a retort so you just used an LLM to reinforce my points, making the genius claim that if an LLM came up with even more points that were as valid as mine then I must be just like an LLM?

Like are you even understanding the LLM generated a superior reply? Your saying I’m no different from ai slop then you proceed to show off a 200 iq level reply from an LLM. Bro… wake up, if you didn’t know it was written by an LLM that reply is so good you wouldn’t even know how to respond. It’s beating you.
by trinix912 | 2025-07-07 13:27:31+00:00
Depending on which country, there still are mechanisms in place to fire people for what's called "culpable reasons" where I live, but there's a mandated layoff period (15 days here) after being fired to leaving the company. You get paid a certain fraction of what you'd otherwise be paid during that period and so on.

So yes, they can fire you if you (maliciously) screw up, but it's not like they just escort you out of the building on the spot.
by sofixa | 2025-07-07 13:27:41+00:00
> You can go to like 60-80% renewable with barely any storage in the system

That depends on the renewable type (e.g. 60% hydro is fine; 60% solar is not, because the sun goes down at night, and there can be extended periods of overcast weather which lower solar production) and what backup sources (like gas peaker plants) are available.
by umanwizard | 2025-07-07 13:27:51+00:00
x is pronounced four different ways in Spanish: like j in México, like the English “sh” in Xcaret, like s in xenofobia and like English “x” in extremo.

The first two are not productive now in normal Spanish words: they are only used in old spellings that have irregularly been retained, and in loanwords from indigenous languages. But they do exist.
by miiiiiike | 2025-07-07 13:28:01+00:00
No, here’s the problem: Figma doesn’t go far enough.

If you need a free form design tool to sketch, use one. There are hundreds of them.

I need to implement my design system inside of a design tool so I can prototype designs with multiple breakpoints, container queries, modes, and variants. Figma isn’t up to the job. Ever tried opening the variables tab on the Material 3 Figma file? Stutter, stutter, stutter, “this tab is unresponsive”. You can barely view a long variable list, forget editing one with multiple modes. And, I hope your variable names aren’t too long, because you’re not going to be able to see them in most parts of the UI.

The problem with Figma isn’t that it’s too engineer-y for designers, the problem is that it’s too designer-y for engineers. I spent a month implementing my design system in Figma before giving up and just doing it in code. With Figma you run into all of the downsides of building the design system in code (deeply nested items breaking when you move/change something) but you get none of the advantages.

Figma is a mound of half-baked (vaguely web-like) ideas, poorly implemented. So many times I’ve had things just stop working with no way to figure out why. 99% of the time it’s just a bug and you have to reload the app.

If there’s something better than Figma out there, please, let me know. For now I’m sketching in Figma and building my design system with extensions to Style Dictionary.
by krisoft | 2025-07-07 13:28:03+00:00
> I think they're all aware the submarine stuff is risky.

Yeah, but that only works if you get feedback back. The problem is not that the submersible sometimes breaks down. The problem is if you only have a gsm modem on it which only sends data back at the end of the run you won’t be able to tell what went wrong, therefore you can’t improve on it.

“Boss, a big wave broke the snorkel and the craft stalled 36% of the way there. Richardo is welding a stronger snorkle on the next one as we speak.” Is what you want to tell your boss. This is the reason why they have telemetry.

The problem with launching the craft into the dark with just a gps sifnal is that it is too binary of a signal. You get one bit of information out of it: made it / didn’t made it. With that your ship can be 99% perfect and still only see the “did not make it” signal because of the last 1% of things not working.
by josephg | 2025-07-07 13:28:08+00:00
"I'm still processing this issue. Ask me some follow up questions to help me think more about this"

"Reflect back what you heard me say, in your own words."

"Use an IFS based approach to guide me through this"

"I want to sit in this emotion to process it. Stop trying to affirm me. Help me stay in what I'm feeling."

... Stuff like that.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-07-07 13:28:16+00:00
I know this conversation is going in a lot of different directions. But therapy could be prioritized, better funded, trained, and staffed... it's entirely possible. Americans could fund the military 5% less, create a scholarship and employment fund for therapists, and it would provide a massive boon to the industry in less than a decade.

We always give this downtrodden "but we can't change society that quickly" but it's a cop out. We are society. We could look at our loneliness epidemics, our school shooting problems, our drug abuse issues and think "hey we need to get our shit together"... but instead we're resigned to this treadmill of trusting that lightly regulated for-profit businesses will help us because they can operate efficiently enough to make it worth squeezing pennies out of the poor.

Ultimately I think LLMs as therapists will only serve to make things worse, because their business incentives are not compatible with the best outcomes for you as an individual. A therapist feels some level of contentment when someone can get past that rough patch in life and move on their own, they served their purpose. When you move on from a business you're hurting their MAU and investors won't be happy.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-07-07 13:28:57+00:00
I find myself in 100% +1000 strong agreement with this article, and I wrote something very short on the same topic a few days ago https://marklwatson.substack.com/p/ai-needs-highly-effective...

I love LLMs, especially smaller local models running on Ollama, but I also think the FOMO investing in massive data centers and super scaling is misplaced.

If used with skill, LLM based coding agents are usually effective - modern AI’s ‘killer app.’

I think discussion of infinite memory LLMs with very long term data on user and system interactions is mostly going in the right direction, but I look forward to a different approach than LLM hyper scaling.
by resurrectedcyb | 2025-07-07 13:30:51+00:00
Is there any tool for Rust that does profiling that detects what part of compilation time is caused by what? Like, a tool that reports:

- Parsing: x ms

- Type checking: y ms

- LLVM IR generation: z ms

And have there been any statistics done on that across open-source projects, like mean, median, percentiles and so on?

I am asking because it should depend a lot on each project what is costly in compile time, making it more difficult to analyse. And I am also curious about how many projects are covered by "edge cases", if it is 1%, 0.1%, 0.01%, and so on.
by heisnotanalien | 2025-07-07 13:31:16+00:00
You don't go to a therapist to learn cognitive knowledge. You go to heal your way of relating with others. It's not easy and can only be done in the messy complicated emotional world of relationship with another human being. You need to feel their eyes on you. You need to feel vulnerable and on the point. You need to be guided to feel into your body.
by rincebrain | 2025-07-07 13:31:17+00:00
My problem with "smart optional" devices is that even in that case, the "smart" parts can have knock-on effects.

For example, the AC unit I bought, resets any settings changes from the front panel if you power cycle it, unless you configure them in the web interface.

My new microwave with a "child safety" lock has a button combination you can use to disable the lock, but it forgets that setting on losing power, so you have to perpetually keep the sequence needed around if you ever have brownouts or blackouts.

And, of course, if you just ignore it, it might be waiting for someone to come by with the right bluetooth or 802.11 network or s/t and use any "optional features" however they like...
by samsolomon | 2025-07-07 13:31:25+00:00
I agree with the general sentiment—over-optimizing for design can both be a poor use of time and lead to less than ideal solutions.

I don't really agree that Figma is forcing designers into a box. The author feels like there's an ideal workflow—a quick sketch that gets translated into code. There's no ideal workflow. It completely depends on the delivery team.

That sketch to code flow probably works well with a small team that is used to working closely together. I've been working with most of the engineers on one of my delivery teams for five years. Frequently, I don't need designs at all! I can just write a JIRA card and because we are so used to working together many times they can pick up on the desired result.

Unfortunately, when the product org gets larger you get a lot of designers and engineers and delivery teams that don't spend a lot of time together. You need the clearest representation of those components—often documented down to the exact props that should be implemented. That is exactly how many enterprise software organizations are using Figma. Design and code components have props (for visual changes) that mirror one another.

Overall, Figma is geared pretty well to how many product orgs are delivering software.
by catapart | 2025-07-07 13:31:37+00:00
Awesome! I don't know how to play the piano, so I built a little midi piano app[0] and then realized I didn't know how to make the app teach me how to play. I've been looking through other "how to play" apps, and got some interesting ideas, but I love how straightforward your approach is. I'm definitely at the level where simply practicing and reinforcing scales would help a lot, so I'd love to add a similar type of functionality to my app. Thanks for putting this together!

[0] https://midi-speaker.com/
by MITSardine | 2025-07-07 13:31:39+00:00
Sorry, I couldn't find the page in English, but what you're talking about is a Hilbert basis: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_de_Hilbert . There is a paragraph on this in the orthonormal basis English page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthonormal_basis

Another example is the eigenvectors of linear operators like the Laplacian. Recall how, in finite dimension, the eigenvectors of a full rank operator (matrix) form an orthonormal basis of the vector space. There is a similar notion in infinite dimension. I can't find an English page that covers this very well, but there's a couple of paragraphs in the Spectral Theorem page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_theorem#Unbounded_sel... ). The article linked here also touches on this.

Regarding your last sentence, one thing to note is that having a basis is not what makes you a Hilbert space, but rather having an inner product! In fact, to get the Fourier coefficients, you need to use that inner product.
by sofixa | 2025-07-07 13:32:22+00:00
> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining

While the biggest peak is around midday, the second biggest is in the evening (most people are home, cooking, watching TV/listening to music/playing video games/etc; or in restaurants, clubs, cinemas, etc) which, depending on location and time of year, can easily be after sunset (e.g. half the year in the Northern hemisphere for sure). You still need enough power to cover that, especially if it has been a cloudy/rainy day, or week, or month.

> Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load

And this is so easy and foolproof to do, just check out the Iberian power outage.
by stevrdjhon | 2025-07-07 13:32:26+00:00
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by rich_sasha | 2025-07-07 13:32:59+00:00
> > and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.

> This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining.

This is kind of true but also not. In Poland, and in a lot of Europe, power usage is by far the highest in winter, day or night, for residential heating. That's also the time with little sun: days are short and the sky tends to be heavily overcast. Sunny weather is rare in winter.
by _bent | 2025-07-07 13:33:05+00:00
It doesn't play to the strengths of designers to have them think in terms of Flex layouts and it doesn't play to the strengths of developers to have them translate a design 100% specified to the layout-algorithm and hierarchy of components into code. Yet this is the workflow Figma encourages.

What the author encourages is that the designers work more free-flowing with sketches and wireframes and that the developers take over earlier to bring that into a workable structure. And that the collaboration between designer and developer doesn't stop at an async hand-off, but that they finalize the design together -- in code.

Some of the commenters here seem to be annoyed at designers that make "hard to implement designs" and therefore think they want designers to constrain everything with auto layout. But this doesn't address the cause of the issue, which is designs being made by designers in isolation, which are then being treated as gospel for developers to 100% match. This is the real problem.

In my opinion the gravest issue with Figma encouraging this workflow is actually the feature gap. Figmas feature set is extremely underpowered in comparison to CSS. Figma doesn't even have grids. If designers are now building stuff only with the tools that Figma allows, all the cool and creative ideas that developers could bring in, because they are actually pretty easy to implement on their platform (the designer just doesn't know about it) will go away.

I can only recommend you this talk by Matthias Ott: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Pq7VqNrtk4
by 6P58r3MXJSLi | 2025-07-07 13:33:17+00:00
that's how "sh" is pronounced, not how "s" is pronounced

same pronunciation of sh in ship is found in

- sugar

- sure

- machine

- Chicago

- mustache

- sheikh

- nation (!!!!)

Can you notice that some of those words do not have any "s" in them?

English doesn't make any sense.
by triceratops | 2025-07-07 13:33:40+00:00
> people in general dislike the idea of lowering their standard of living for environmental reasons.

> Nobody pollutes in a vacuum

I agree, not in a vacuum. If everyone knew the true risks then they might re-think things. They might prioritize tech that could reduce pollution without lowering living standards.

Oil companies have worked very hard at covering up the truth, purely because a transition to cleaner tech would cost them money.
by javcasas | 2025-07-07 13:33:47+00:00
Good luck with that.

I have been exploring local AI tools for coding (ollama + aider) with a small stock market simulator (~200 lines of python).

First I tried making the AI extract the dataclasses representing events to a separated file. It decided to extract some extra classes, leave behind some others, and delete parts of the code.

Then I tried to make it explain one of the actors called LongVol_player_v1, around 15 lines of code. It successfully concluded it does options delta hedging, but it jumped to the conclusion that it calculates the implied volatility. I set it as a constant, because I'm simulating specific interactions between volatility players and option dealers. It hasn't caught yet the bug where the vol player buys 3000 options but accounts only for 2000.

When asking for improvements, it is obsessed with splitting the initialization and the execution.

So far I wasted half of Saturday trying to make the machine do simple refactors. Refactors I could do myself in half of an hour.

I'm yet to see the wonders of AI.
by Lerc | 2025-07-07 13:33:50+00:00
And if someone makes a machine that does all that and another person says

"That's not really AGI because xyz"

What then? The difficulty in coming up with a test for AGI is coming up with something that people will accept a passing grade as AGI.

In many respects I feel like all of the claims that models don't really understand or have internal representation or whatever tend to lean on nebulous or circular definitions of the properties in question. Trying to pin the arguments down usually end up with dualism and/or religion.

Doing what Chollet has done is infinitely better, if a person can easily do something and a model cannot then there is clearly something significant missing

It doesn't matter what the property is or what it is called. Such tests might even help us see what those properties are.

Anyone who wants to claim the fundamental inability of these models should be able to provide a task that it is clearly possible to tell when it has been succeeded, and to show that humans can do it (if that's the bar we are claiming can't be met). If they are right, then no future model should be able to solve that class of problems.
by bdavisx | 2025-07-07 13:33:55+00:00
That's an insane amount - how old is the dryer?

I've replaced two heating elements in my ~9 year old Samsung dryer, I think the heating elements were less than 50 USD. I did the labor myself so I don't know how much that would have been - you do have to take the dryer apart, but it doesn't take very long if you have experience, 15-20 minutes or less.

I would not recommend Samsung - I've had to take that dryer apart more than 10 times to replace/fix things, I can't imagine how much it would have cost me if I couldn't do it myself. The only plus there is now I can literally break it down and put it back together very quickly when I need to fix it.

Luckily the Samsung washer has been fine.