MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mtlynch | 2025-08-04 00:52:56+00:00
>Amazon meetings start with the presenter passing out copies... of a prose document... The meeting starts with everyone sitting in silence, reading the document, and adding notes and questions in the margins with red pen.

I've never worked at Amazon, but I've heard this a lot, and it always strikes me as an odd practice. Odder still is that it apparently works and everyone I hear talk about it seems to love it.

You're squandering precious meeting time by having everyone sit and read a document together. They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings.

And doing it synchronously means everyone either sits idle until the slowest reader is ready or not everyone gets to finish in time. And "slowest reader" isn't even just about reading speed. Presumably, some people can understand the document more quickly because they have more context.

In design reviews at Google, it was obvious that the majority of attendees came unprepared and were reading the docs for the first time while their teammates were discussing the doc. I suspect that the reason was that Google just didn't have a strong docs culture, and leads/managers quietly tolerated people coming unprepared (and sometimes, they themselves were unprepared).

I've never seen it done in practice, but I don't think it would be hard to have the best of both worlds where people review docs ahead of the review meeting, but there are strong cultural norms around reading docs ahead of time so the meeting is just for discussion, not just for reading or pretending that you've read.
by paulryanrogers | 2025-08-04 00:53:07+00:00
Someone from Uzbekistan told me that a girl can only date one man, and must marry him or her reputation is ruined forever. So when her now-husband wanted to date her, he had to take care to avoid making it official before they were sure to marry.

The US has a lot of subcultures, so I too doubt the usefulness of such studies.

Then again, for some leaving the subculture they know carries a very high social cost. Hopefully new generations will break some of these barbarous traditions.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-08-04 00:54:17+00:00
One process that can work:

Step 1. Brain dump into a doc (consider using dictation to get more thoughts down faster)

Step 2. Have an LLM give it structure & progression. You are ordering your thoughts for readability, so you'll probably want to throw it away. You're still refining your thoughts at this stage.

Step 3. Take the LLM output as a starting point, or write an outline from scratch. Flesh it out into a first draft

Step 4. simplify: cut words, swap big words for small words, etc.

Step 5. Repeat step 4.

LLMs bridge the gap from word-vomit to structure. You should be willing to throw away what you get from the LLM.

At least 30% can always be cut. It's amazing how much can be trimmed without losing the intent.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-04 00:55:50+00:00
RL for reasoning definitely introduces hallucinations, and sometimes it introduces a class of hallucinations that feels a lot worse than the classic ones.

I noticed OpenAI's models picked up a tendency to hold strong convictions on completely unknowable things.

"<suggests possible optimization> Implement this change and it will result in a 4.5% uplift in performance"

"<provides code> I ran the updated script 10 times and it completes 30.5 seconds faster than before on average"

It's bad it enough it convinces itself it did things it can't do, but then it goes further and hallucinates insights from the tasks it hallucinated itself doing in the first places!

I feel like lay people aren't ready for that. Normal hallucinations felt passive, like a slip up. To the unprepared, this becomes more like someone actively trying to sell their slip ups.

I'm not sure if it's a form of RL hacking making it through to the final model or what, but even OpenAI seems to have noticed it in testing based on their model cards.
by david422 | 2025-08-04 00:55:54+00:00
> I have the same issue every year with a ride on lawn mower. Do I just pay someone weekly or buy one outright and do it myself? In this case I loathe mowing,

I bought mine, ran great for 4 years, then ran into a bunch of trouble, which made me recognize the other hidden cost of ownership is simply just maintenance. A very expensive mower just sitting there, nearest potential repair shop far away, no idea how I'd even get it there let alone the cost. And if I decide I don't want it, I've got to pay to get rid of it now too.

Luckily I was able to watch a bunch of youtube videos and order myself some parts to get it up and running again, but definitely sunk quite a bit of time and energy into it.
by dasil003 | 2025-08-04 00:56:03+00:00
I agree with the sentiment, but not the conclusion. Sure, numbers can be abused, just like anything else, but they provided specificity which you can then interrogate and call bullshit on. I won't necessarily fault someone for leaving off the numbers and just speaking qualitatively to the large scale system rewrite they did, but it's harder to evaluate whether such an effort was indeed warranted or was just a lateral move post-hoc rationalized by an engineer who didn't understand the original system and needed to rewrite it just to achieve that understanding. Again, if someone is satisfying the business with such efforts, more power to them. As a hiring manager, I don't want to get into a subjective evaluation of the relative engineering value of specific work at an external company that I have no first-hand context on, but I do want to know that candidates understand the highest level goals they are hired to contribute to. Metrics, however flawed, give a good entry point into such conversations.
by VTimofeenko | 2025-08-04 00:56:26+00:00
Inb4: not an expert but I do have some ink.

Tattoos are basically ink being delivered in the lower layers of skin by poking. They look vastly different depending on the healing process. I'd imagine the scientists can distinguish between pre and post mortem punctures pretty well. The amount of ink remaining in the tattoo would probably also be very different.
by AngryData | 2025-08-04 00:58:37+00:00
I would assume the most important feature for doctors for any device UI is that things don't always change. The entire medical field selects for people with great memory, and so even if it is a bit complex at first, as long as they only have to figure it out once they aren't going to easily forget. Even if some other design is more sleek and intuitive for a first time user, the change is only going to mess up the 95% of the established personnel. Any potential tool changes need to provide significant improvements over the old stuff and need to be done sparingly.

To doctors these things are just tools, tools that they want to be able to pick up and put down 100 times a day without having to think about it. A good tool can be operated mostly on muscle memory and needs to remain static 99% of the time. Imagine if the tools a mechanic or carpenter used changed in form and function all the time. Last year they used a right handed circular saw, next year they are forced to use a left handed worm saw. Or imagine a framer picking up his hammer he has used for the last 10+ years and going to give it a swing and missing his mark, only to find out last night his boss took his old hammer and replaced it with one 2 ounces lighter and 2 inches longer and his boss refused to give his old one back. Or a guy digging through his toolbox to pull out a lesser used item like helicoils that he knows is in a medium sized yellow box, wasting tons of time looking and possibly going for a different and less ideal solution, only to find out later the helicoils were at some point put placed into a small sized blue box instead because someone else decided the old box was a bit too big and wasting space.
by sidebute | 2025-08-04 00:59:12+00:00
> Sounds like "I don't know programming, so I will just use AI".

If you were leading Tensorlake, running on early stage VC with only 10 employees (https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/594250-75), you'd focus all your resources on shipping products quickly, iterating over unseen customer needs that could make the business skyrocket, and making your customers so happy that they tell everyone and buy lots more licenses.

Because you're a stellar tech leader and strategist, you wouldn't waste a penny reinventing low-level plumbing that's available off-the-shelf, either cheaply or as free OSS. You'd be thinking about the inevitable opportunity costs: If I build X then I can't build Y, simply because a tiny startup doesn't have enough resources to build X and Y. You'd quickly conclude that building a homegrown, robust PDF parser would be an open-ended tar pit that precludes us from focusing on making our customers happy and growing the business.

And the rest of us would watch in awe, seeing truly great tech leadership at work, making it all look easy.
by pembrook | 2025-08-04 01:01:12+00:00
Metered billing makes sense for B2B infrastructure-as-a-service type products (AWS), where as your company grows both you and the infra provider know the bill will grow manageably over time. Infra is set it and forget it.

But for AI in the context of point-solutions and on-the-job use cases, metered billing is a death blow.

In this context, metered is a massive incentive to not use the product and requires the huge friction of having to do a cost/benefit analysis before every task. And if you're using it at work you may even need management sign-off before you can use it again.

For a tool that's intended to amplify productivity, very few humans want to make a cost/benefit analysis 250 times a day whether it's worth $3 to code up a boilerplate or not. On metered billing, they just wont use it.
by ompogUe | 2025-08-04 01:01:41+00:00
I agree with you, however, to me, the local language has often been what I saw as an important factor in this. Not just he semantic structure of adjectives/nouns/verbs, but what the parts of different words mean that were obviously glued together into neologisms. The German "kindergarten"="child garden" comes immediately to mind. While I don't have any examples, I've talked to several Innu about this aspect of their words, and found it both beautiful and enlightening.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-04 01:02:03+00:00
"is driven by both overuse and drier and warmer weather."

It wasn't that there is a contradiction. If the over use has been happening for decades, and it's at a rate faster than historical replenishment could happen anyways (before "climate change), then this would indicate that over use is the primary cause. Drier weather is a contributing factor in the pace of depletion, but in no way could be the solitary cause nor cure. Even in the article they mention the demands related to a growing population and industrial agriculture (article also mentions potential food scarcity).
by jemmyw | 2025-08-04 01:02:37+00:00
It's been unrealistic for long enough. I was 26 in 2009. I did so happen to own a "luxury" car, but it was $8000 used. I wasn't able to buy a house until I was 36. Part of that was due to moving around, which brought with it different opportunities.

I still can't afford a luxury car. I guess I could finance one but that seems like a serious waste of money. We've got this funny blind spot around cars in general as a status symbol. You can get a fun to drive, older, sports car. If you do a lot of long trips then a larger vehicle might be more comfortable than a luxury model. Not saying anything against them but don't aspire to owning something unless you actually want to be sitting in it.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-04 01:03:04+00:00
> There's a very good chance they'll assume you're (if they're a normie) making coronavirus or meth, and (If they're a biologist or chemist) assume you're not disposing of reagents and cultures properly.

I don’t have a full bio lab but I do have a lot of various lab equipment and do things at home that aren’t typical hobbyist projects. I haven’t found this to be a problem at all.

I also don’t mentally segregate the world into “normies”, which honestly helps a lot. In my experience people who develop a chip on their shoulder about their geek hobbies and start describing other people as “normies” bring a lot of these problems upon themselves. It helps a lot to just talk to people like peers and also know when people just aren’t interested in talking about your certain hobbies.
by throwitaway1123 | 2025-08-04 01:03:50+00:00
Enums and parameter properties can be enabled with the --experimental-transform-types CLI option.

Not being able to import TypeScript files without including the ts extension is definitely annoying. The rewriteRelativeImportExtensions tsconfig option added in TS 5.7 made it much more bearable though. When you enable that option not only does the TS compiler stop complaining when you specify the '.ts' extension in import statements (just like the allowImportingTsExtensions option has always allowed), but it also rewrites the paths if you compile the files, so that the build artifacts have the correct js extension: https://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/handbook/release-notes/t...
by awesome_dude | 2025-08-04 01:04:35+00:00
This argument is fallacious.

I enjoy a lot of things (Software Engineering is one of them) that in NO way determines whether or not AI is coding, nor does it guarantee me a career (just ask all the blacksmiths that disappeared once cars became the mass transport vehicle).

The fact that people are going to (possibly) be able to instruct a computer to do whatever they wish without the need of a four year degree and several years of experience scares you, I get that, but that's not going to have any effect on reality.

Edit: Have a look at all the peoples careers that have ended because software took over.
by Avicebron | 2025-08-04 01:05:08+00:00
This is pretty cool. When I first read the paper I didn't really register what the LUMENX+ was. https://www.cellink.com/bioprinting/lumen-x/ I had no idea these guys were an operation.

As for the paper, the media flow idea and execution is awesome, but I'm curious how long they have been able to maintain proliferation after testing at 7 days.

Also it's "bioink" not "bionk" on page 2.. :)
by 5pl1n73r | 2025-08-04 01:05:35+00:00
My peers and I work on a language centered around "constructive data modeling" (first time I hear it called that). We implement integers, and indeed, things like non empty lists using algebraic data types, for example. You can both have a theory of values that doesn't rely on trapdoors like "int32" or "string", as well as encode invariants, as this article covers.

As I understand it, the primary purpose of newtypes is actually just to work around typeclass issues like in the examples mentioned at the end of the article. They are specifically designed to be zero cost, because you want to not pay when you work around the type class instance already being taken for the type you want to make an instance for. When you make an abstract data type by not exporting the data constructors, that can be done with or without newtype.
by AngryData | 2025-08-04 01:06:14+00:00
Wow it is horrible. I clicked on the link to load it, tabbed back to this comment page and read this comment, went back to the page to see how it was doing and got 99% blank page, scrolled for a solid 10 seconds and just as I was about to come back and say the page is broken for me it popped up a proper scroll bar for a window about 1/3 of my browser size. Scrolled through about 5-6 pages worth of that which still looked broken, then the window finally resized and images started popping in, but it still took another 7 seconds or so for those to load an actual image instead of just a placeholder icon while everything shifted around like mad.
by mturmon | 2025-08-04 01:06:41+00:00
> it is amazing

Indeed!

The GRACE measurement of mass change is one of the more revolutionary advances in Earth science remote sensing in the last few decades. It has provided a unique and completely novel view of groundwater mass change. Grace is the main reason we know so much about the massive groundwater loss in the Oglala aquifer in the US Midwest, in the Central Basin in California, and in northern India. Water well data exists but it is very sparse and idiosyncratic.

It’s also our main window into mass losses in ice sheets in high latitudes (Greenland, Antarctica). We have radar altimetry data from Antarctica, but because of glacial rebound and other effects, it’s not easy to translate height changes into mass changes. Grace measures mass change directly.

Several authors of the cited study are on the science team. It is a JPL instrument.

The original Grace pair used radio to measure separation and velocity, while the follow-up Grace-FO uses a laser. I assume the small wavelength of the laser provides a more accurate measurement. It’s possible that Grace-FO has a slightly higher spatial resolution (I’ve worked with Grace but not Grace-FO); the horizontal resolution of Grace is about 100km or about 1 degree.

From an inference perspective the measurement is very interesting. They pool about a month’s worth of observations of the distance and velocity of a pair of satellites, and do a Bayesian inversion to obtain a parameterized gravitational potential for that month. The map from gravitational potential to observation is known analytically, so it’s readily possible to get a spatial covariance for the gravitational potential, as well as the point estimate.
Am I wrong about SF?
by luicho | 2025-08-04 01:06:57+00:00
I'm the founder of a fintech startup (useditch.com), building the next generation of personal finance. Stats for context: $1.6M raised, $300k ARR, launched 13 months ago, default alive. Currently living in Atlanta, GA. Considering moving to SF and would like locals to validate or contest my assumptions below.

My facts > I'm going to build companies for the rest of my life. > I don't care about cost of living or short term personal liquidity. > I'm not building anything hyperlocal. > I care more about building products for people than businesses. > I'm competitive and work best around high-agency people. > I'm in my mid/late twenties, no kids.

My assumptions > The density of people who want to spend most of their time changing the world is higher in SF than anywhere else. > SF is the epicenter of risk capital for big new ideas. > The best founder-like engineering talent pool are in our around SF. > Investors associate SF founders with ambition, grit, and speed. > The compounding effects of proximity to SF are not available to short term tourists. > Hyper-ambition is normalized and celebrated in SF.

I have no doubt great companies can be build anywhere. I'm trying to soundly conclude wether it will be more enjoyable to do so in SF.

P.S. By SF I mean Bay Area.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-04 01:07:23+00:00
Notion sites aren’t my favorite and this website has some annoying quirks (like scrolling to the top after fully loading)

But if this is what it takes for someone to generously share so much information with us for free then I really don’t care if I have to wait a couple extra seconds for a page load or if a tab takes up 600MB of RAM. I know this thinking makes the web purists angry, but the majority of people who visit these sites to learn aren’t going to be impeded or even bothered. Even on my older iPhone on non-5G cellular it loads in a couple of seconds.
by Uehreka | 2025-08-04 01:07:50+00:00
> They could easily do the same thing ahead of the meeting, and you'd have much shorter meetings.

Amazon’s practice is a reaction to the fact that nobody actually does this. According to the article I read about this years ago, they realized that “creating a strong culture around reading before the meeting” also isn’t possible because many attendees had a meeting before this one, and couldn’t prepare for that meeting because they had a meeting before that, etc.

On paper you could punch a ton of holes in this: Why not reduce the number of meetings people have to attend? Doesn’t the reading reduce the amount of time available in the meeting to actually make decisions? But it would seem that in practice they found that the meetings people were attending did in fact have value, and that even with the reading time a lot of decisions got made.

So this may just be one of those things where you have to look at the results instead of worrying about what could theoretically be done differently. And it sounds like people really like the results and that the benefits of this approach outweigh the drawbacks, at least at Amazon.
by snapplebobapple | 2025-08-04 01:08:10+00:00
I know this is a hot button issue but this kind of thinking drives me nuts in general. The number they quote is 1 in 15000. That is an irrelevantly small number and says nothing about the conclusions for the majority of the population. if this was a different issue that wasnt politically charged you would look at the data and conclude the concersation is very simple and there are a bunch of very rare corner cases one needs to be aware of and that would be the end of it.
by what-the-grump | 2025-08-04 01:10:27+00:00
Because Wi-Fi going down for a minute or two doesn’t matter in most deployments. And when it does… you submit a change ticket and not just Yoo-hoo a change in production.

Reading this thread I’ve been using unifi equipment for over a decade why are people tinkering with their networks on a daily basis?

I have more issues with enterprise equipment than with unifi equipment because it just works, and it’s 1/5th of the price, and I can buy a replacement the same day. My spf modules on junipers cost more than most of the products in the entire unifi catalog and can’t support being downlinked to 1GB on one port without the whole module being set 1gb and the entire core rebooted.

The amount of hate is simply unwarranted, people are afraid to patch enterprise switches because historically that meant driving out and a call with TAC, when did we start pretending that enterprise network equipment works flawlessly?
by kortilla | 2025-08-04 01:10:31+00:00
> NAT requires a stateful firewall too.

Yes, you’re repeating what I’m saying. NAT forced router vendors to implement stateful connection tracking and it increased the security of everything behind them.

> So you don’t actually need anything different nor special to have the same level of security with IPv6 vs IPv4 + NAT.

This isn’t how it played out in practice though. Huge swaths of home routers had no firewall at all when you enabled IPv6 support because it would have taken slightly extra work to enable the v6 conn tracking.
by marc_abonce | 2025-08-04 01:10:36+00:00
Actually, I often find that old Slack conversations can be the most helpful representation of how a program works in real life and how to troubleshoot it and workaround its shortcomings. The official documentation is often too concerned to be concise and "pure" (OP compares it with a mathematical proof) so it only represent an idealized version of a software that didn't ever exist.
by commandersaki | 2025-08-04 01:10:59+00:00
The meeting starts with everyone sitting in silence, reading the document, and adding notes and questions in the margins with red pen. Watching people mark up the document you spent so much time polishing is a strong forcing function to become a better writer.

Hated this about Amazon; I need to be in a certain state of mind when reading technical prose which is hard to arouse on a whim. Happy to make and submit edits prior to meeting and then discuss. I also much prefer token passing when making modification of the document, rather than simultaneous people marking it up.