MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by agos | 2025-08-21 16:28:08+00:00
the difference is subtle, and comes mainly from the fact that at the time the concept of Major Release still existed.

You got everything in the current Major Release and every minor and patch update to it. If it took more than three years to release a new Major it was not a big problem, because you were still covered.

The new model might leave you without bugfixes before a new major version is out.
by freeopinion | 2025-08-21 16:28:31+00:00
The polling place example makes me smile. I was once asked to re-sign six times. None of the six matched the reference. Then I was offered the option to just change the reference.

I asked if they would just accept the testimony of somebody who had known me since kindergarten. The pollsters on either side of the one "helping" me laughed and called me by my childhood nickname to say "no". Half of the people in the room had known me for most or all of my life.

But the lady in front of me didn't think my signature matched enough and wouldn't accept my state-issued tamper-proof photo ID. She did show me the reference signature and asked if I could imitate it. Or I could just change the reference signature.
by dh2022 | 2025-08-21 16:28:48+00:00
My favorite anecdote about Sears is from Starbucks current HQs - the HQs used to be a warehouse for Sears. Before renovation the first floor walls next to the elevators used to have Sears' "commitment to customers" (or something like that).

To me it read like it was written by Amazon decades earlier. Something about how Sears promises that customers will be 100% satisfied with the purchase, and if for whatever reason that is not the case customers can return the purchase back to Sears and Sears will pay for the return transportation charges.
by olalonde | 2025-08-21 16:29:02+00:00
It's extremely simple until it's not. Let's say you bought 100$ worth of BTC back in 2012 with cash at a meetup. Now it’s worth $1M, but you can't prove its origin. You now have a perfectly law-abiding person that risks being accused of "money laundering" just to keep what's rightfully theirs.
by justtinker | 2025-08-21 16:29:04+00:00
Out come the "this is dumb because .." messages in the redit responses. I have experiences dozens of projects where the developer had the wrong view of the end use needs for a myriad of reasons (everything after the because). It doesn't matter why in this case just that they found their solution.

The TL;DR message should be make sure the real needs get serviced.
by rootlyhq | 2025-08-21 16:29:07+00:00
AI SREs are proving they can help engineers narrow down failure domains and speed up root cause hypotheses. In principle, AI can surface anomalies or dependency failures faster than a human operator scanning dashboards.

The challenge, however, comes after diagnosis. Despite better detection, the limiting factor has shifted: once the issue is identified, resolution still depends on human coordination. And given the complexity of the distributed systems that most companies operate, the response coordination is only as effective as it is aligned with the organization’s operating model.
by taylodl | 2025-08-21 16:29:37+00:00
How many times has a chatbot successfully taken care of a customer support problem you had? I have had success, but the success rate is less than 5%. Maybe even way less than 5%.

Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship. They warn against assessing someone when everything is going well for them - the true measure of the person is what they do when things are not going well. It's the same for companies. When your customers are experiencing problems, that's the time to shine! It's not a problem, it's an opportunity.
by estimator7292 | 2025-08-21 16:30:00+00:00
While good handwriting is a skill that can be taught and learned, not everyone can learn it. Like art, some people have an innate ability, and some have no ability and never will.

For me, I have poor motor control in my hands. I physically cannot make the kind of precise motions that good handwriting requires. The act of writing is painful and physically and mentally fatiguing. I can't even do basic geometric engineering drawings. My hands just can't make consistent lines.

On the other hand (heh), anything I write longhand may as well be encrypted to anyone but me. Good for keeping notes private, I guess.

I will say that memory retention through writing does still work for me. It seems to be a truly universal mechanism in the human brain.

This is also partly an autistic thing. Lots of us have poor fine motor control, and thus terrible handwriting. It's also one of those things that doesn't seem terribly important: good handwriting is mostly a performance for the exclusive benefit of others. There's nothing intrinsically good or valuable about it and our time would be better spent learning about trains. That's not an objective thing, just how the autistic mind sorts priorities.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-21 16:30:12+00:00
The difference is probably that I only do green field POC implementations as a solely developer/cloud architect on a project if I am doing hands on keyboard work.

The other part of my job is leading larger projects where I purposefully don’t commit to pulling stories off the board since I’m always in meetings with customers, project managers, sales or helping other engineers.

I might even then do a separate POC as a research project/enablement. But it won’t be modifying existing code that I didn’t design.
by 1123581321 | 2025-08-21 16:30:14+00:00
This was an interesting thread with some history of private train cars/carriages in Europe with links to a few that still exist. https://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?17,2602590,n...

It anppears to be Amtrak’s greater flexibility and uniformity of gauges in North America that allows this. Europe has more of the historical private wealth that would still own and want to operate a private train or carriage.
by bilbo0s | 2025-08-21 16:30:17+00:00
the AI companies are mis-pricing their tools

Sounds like the AI companies are not so much mispricing, as the companies using the tools are simply paying wayyy too much for the privilege.

As long as the companies keep paying, the AI companies are gonna keep the usage charges as high as possible. (Or at least, at a level as profitable to themselves as possible.) It's unreasonable to expect AI companies to unilaterally lower their prices.
by jampa | 2025-08-21 16:30:41+00:00
The biggest mistake people are making is treating AI as a product instead of a feature.

While people are doing their work, they don't think, "Oh man, I am really excited to talk with AI today, and I can't wait to talk with a chatbot."

People want to do their jobs without being too bored and overwhelmed, and that's where AI comes in. But of course, we cannot hype features; we sell products after all, so that's the state we are in.

If you go to Notion, Slack, or Airtable, the headline emphasizes AI first instead of "Text Editor, Corporate Chat etc".

The problem is that AI is not "the thing", it is the "tool that gets you to the thing".
by Johnny555 | 2025-08-21 16:30:48+00:00
>Today, it an inherently vulnerable operating system, and you will need to be a bit careful. Regularly back up your data to cold storage, never use an outdated web browser, and always keep your router's firmware up-to-date.

If my computer is hacked, I'm not really worried about my data being destroyed, I have offline backups for that. The bigger danger is having my data exfiltrated, I don't want my tax return or password manager database to be exfiltrated from my computer.
by awsthrow123456 | 2025-08-21 16:30:57+00:00
Amazon doesn't really work this way.

Bedrock/Q is a great example of how Amazon works. If we throw $XXX at the problem and YYY SDEs at the problem we should be able to build Github Copilot, GPT-3, OpenRouter and Cursor ourselves instead of trying to competitively acquire and attract talent. The fact that Codewhisperer, Q and Titan barely get spoken about on HN or Twitter tells you how successful this is.

But if you have that perspective then the equation is simple. If S3 can make 5 XXL features per year with 20 SDEs then if we adopt “Agentic AI” we should be able to build 10 XXL features with 10 SDEs.

Little care is given to organizational knowledge, experience, vision etc. that is the value (in their mind) of leadership not ICs.
by Festro | 2025-08-21 16:30:57+00:00
Because it's obvious marketing BS to predict exponential growth?

Exponential growth is a rare phenomenon in any area, let alone computing or industry. To predict it will take place without hard data that it's already happening or a perfect analogous reference, is not possible. You've been deceived.

All that's happened is a new tech has reach MVP maturity, been released to the masses, and now it's plateauing in terms of raw power increases, whilst continuing to mature in terms of applications.

AI power output will now proceed at below Moore's Law levels, because it's mostly hardware bound. Applications will jump around as we saturate our lives with more and more AI-enabled devices.

None of that is exponential. How could it ever be?
by adiabatichottub | 2025-08-21 16:31:44+00:00
I worked in the legal cannabis industry in California before the pandemic. The business I worked for had to jump through a lot of hoops, including dividing itself into multiple LLCs, in order to deal with the disparity between state and federal laws, and the business policies of banks and even some of our equipment vendors (I remember specifically that McMaster-Carr would not do business with you if you were a cannabis company). Most cannabis businesses were forced to work in cash, which made a lot of financial transactions difficult, but also made it easier to do business with those still in the "traditional market". In the end, the stricter regulations had the effect of greater concentration of ownership, but questionable efficacy in stopping illegal exports.
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-21 16:31:44+00:00
Is this actually true? I thought Chess.app was, from OSX Lion (prior to Mavericks) yea unto the present, protected from deletion from the Applications folder as somehow intrinsically important to the system. It's apparently load-bearing, not just a holdover from NeXTSTEP but an integral element that the OS must defend at all costs to ensure System Integrity.
by seabrookmx | 2025-08-21 16:32:14+00:00
They both utilize all the linux c-group magic to containerize. So performance is roughly the same.

Incus is an LXD fork, and focuses on "system" containers. You basically get a full distro, complete with systemd, sshd, etc. etc. so it is easy to replace a VM with one of these.

podman and docker are focused on OCI containers which typically run a single application (think webserver, database, etc).

I actually use them together. My host machine runs both docker and incus. Docker runs my home server utilities (syncthing, vaultwarden, etc) and Incus runs a system container with my development environment in it. I have nested c-groups enabled so that incus container actually runs another copy of docker _within itself_ for all my development needs (redis, postgres, etc).

What's nice about this is that the development environment can easily be backed up, or completely nuked without affecting my host. I use VS Code remote SSH to develop in it.

The host typically uses < 10GB RAM with all this stuff running.. about half what it did when I was using KVM instead of Incus.
by davorak | 2025-08-21 16:32:38+00:00
The telephone game is the analogy I use too when explaining the value of having engineers in the custom calls.

Other than mistakes in communication, engineers often know what the hard trade offs are when designing a new feature while sales and PMs do not. They can ask the questions to find out if a customer is on one side of a trade off or the other. Or if a feature is 10x as expensive to implement because the customer needs/wants the benefits on both sides. Finding that out at the start can save a full development cycle of time/effort at times.
by jfengel | 2025-08-21 16:32:53+00:00
What does Netanyahu's version of a two-state solution look like?

I had imagined it as something like creating a country ("Palestine") in the West Bank, along the 1967 borders. But if so, what happens to the settlements that are (as TFA points out) still ongoing?

Is there supposed to be a different border? Exclaves of Israel? Or are those settlers supposed to become part of Palestine?
by tovej | 2025-08-21 16:33:13+00:00
The shovel business is good as long as the gold rush lasts. Once the gold rush is over, you're going to have to deal with a significant decrease in volume, unless you can find other customers.

Crypto's over, gaming isn't a large enough market to fill the hole, the only customers that could fill the demand would be military projects. Considering the arms race with China, and the many military applications of AI, that seems the most likely to me. That's not a pleasant thought, of course.

The alternative is a massive crash of the stock price, and considering the fact that NVIDIA makes up 8% of everyone's favorite index, that's not a very pleasant alternative either.

It seems to me that an ultra-financialized economy has trouble with controlled deceleration, once the hypetrain is on it's full-throttle until you hit a wall.
by xhrpost | 2025-08-21 16:33:30+00:00
As an absolute number, yes. Remember though that a lot of money was printed in the last few years. Comparing against GDP[1] or Currency in Circulation[2] the levels are still elevated but not at records, yet.

[1]: https://www.gurufocus.com/economic_indicators/4266/finra-inv... [2]: https://en.macromicro.me/collections/34/us-stock-relative/89...
by philistine | 2025-08-21 16:33:37+00:00
Both those projects can only go skin deep. The macOS experience is not only how it looks, but the depth of its interactivity and the thoughtful implementations within that depth.

I still shudder when I see the limitations of dragging files in Windows. The fact I can drag a folder to a save dialog to jump to that folder is so natural to me, and Windows and Linux never bothered with those details.
by neogodless | 2025-08-21 16:33:52+00:00
The classification of "comedy" seems to be a bit ambiguous.

Funny People with Adam Sandler is considered a comedy, and has a trailer to match. But the actual content of the movie is that of a drama / tragedy. (69% critics, 48% audience.)

The Bear (TV show) is called a comedy but everything I've read paints it as... drama.

American Fiction, for me, was a thoughtful drama with dark humor. And I think that's what the audience expected so the scores match. I never thought it was a comedy.

Maybe this is a me problem where I don't consider things comedy when others do.

I mean, Wes Anderson movies aren't exactly comedy either. They are whimsical and silly, and can elicit laughter, but the stories are dramatic.
by arp242 | 2025-08-21 16:33:59+00:00
To claim that these letters "cannot be represented" is just outright bizarre. You literally you did so yourself. Expecting Unicode to contain a codepoint for every single rendering variation is not realistic and the line must be drawn somewhere, with other rendering information provided in another way (e.g. lang=de, font-style, whatnot).

You can disagree how Unicode does this (or how other encodings do it, for that matter) but this is just an utterly disingenuous thing to say. I no longer believe you are engaging in good faith. You have either not understood Unicode or you're intentionally misrepresenting it. Good bye.
by stonemetal12 | 2025-08-21 16:34:01+00:00
>How many experiments, prototyopes, iterations go into building a car or a rocket? Many. Engineers do not come up with the final design up front.

No where did anyone claim you need the full final design up front. For cars\rockets how many of those experiments, prototypes, and iterations had designs? All of them. You never see a mechanical engineer walk out to the shop and just start hammering on a pile of slop until it sort of looks like a car.

>The difference it is that this is expensive while in software we can iterate much more, much quicker, and for free to get to the final product.

If you have no design to meet how do you judge the output of an iteration or know you have arrived at the final product?
by dismalaf | 2025-08-21 16:34:05+00:00
> Basically, the entire data and language processing world works in Python.

Dunno, when I started I learned Stata, but it seemed the big open-source thing was R. Python data stuff was in its infancy. R got huge, then Python got huge. Of course all the underlying libraries are C/C++ or Fortran. Everything does exist in Ruby as well.

But hey, I also just hate Python (find it super complicated to set up, their package managers are terrible, plus find the language inconsistent) so I avoid it at all costs. Would much rather Julia become the de-facto standard.
by wedn3sday | 2025-08-21 16:34:25+00:00
One use case I'd love to see an easy plug-and-play solution for is a RAG build around companies vast internal documentation/wikis/codebase to help developers onboard and find information faster. I would love to see less of people trying to replace humans with language models and more of people trying to use language models to make humans jobs less frustrating.
by fwip | 2025-08-21 16:34:28+00:00
Speaking of animations, I used D3 to build my first web video game, a little match-3 game: https://fwip.github.io/colormatch/ The whole game board is a single SVG.

It clearly has some bugs (like the score sometimes being NaN - no idea how I messed that up), but I haven't touched the code in over a decade, so it's a little time capsule.
by no_wizard | 2025-08-21 16:34:41+00:00
The only time a chatbot worked for me is Amazon's, of all things. It auto approved my return after I answered a few questions.

I haven't had any chatbot outside that be useful to me. I always end up getting to the end of all the prompts only to be told I need to speak to a human or the chatbot going in a circle, in which I have to reach out to a different layer of support.
by K0nserv | 2025-08-21 16:34:43+00:00
That's it. The attack is very clever because it abuses how downscaling algorithms work to hide the text from the human operator. Depending on how the system works the "hiding from human operator" step is optional. LLMs fundamentally have no distinction between data and instructions, so as long as you can inject instructions in the data path it's possible to influence their behaviour.

There's an example of this in my bio.
by md3911027514 | 2025-08-21 16:35:10+00:00
It’s interesting how self-reports of productivity can be wrong.

For example a study from METR found that developers felt that AI sped them up by 20%, but it empirically it slowed them down by 19%. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-21 16:35:21+00:00
I don't think this is an example of that. This is just engineers being able to talk directly to customers, which is great in most cases. I absolutely loved my jobs where I could directly talk to the users of our products, especially when they came to me with bugs or problems.

Unfortunately, that's not always possible. I wonder if that's why I always liked building tools for "internal" clients, other users within the org - it was trivial to just Slack someone or ask if I could walk over to their desk.
by xyst | 2025-08-21 16:35:36+00:00
I am not surprised at all. The capabilities of AI have been vastly oversold. The only winners here are the billionaires that have had early equity/investment in genAI.

They got a majority of the country hooked into AI without truly understanding its current limitations. This is just like digital currency bubble/fad that popped a couple of years ago.

What most companies got out of it is a glorified chatbot (ie, something that was possible in 2014…) at 1000X the cost.

What a sad joke. Innovation in this country is based on a lie, fueled by FOMO.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-21 16:35:56+00:00
That often comes with restrictions and risks.

For example, I was invested in China Mobile, but it was delisted from western exchanges after an executive order from the US added it to a blacklist due to Chinese military connections (which Chinese SOEs tend to have...)

I also wouldn't recommend investing in Chinese banks in particular without understanding their credit landscape and the regional/central balance of power related topics. Know what you own and all that. I often have China positions on in the portfolios I manage, but imo it's mandatory to keep track of the communist party meetings and statements and such. It's not a free market, so investing decisions are anchored off of the chinese communist party political machinations to a large degree. When China decides on a new initiative like reigning in the tech space and making an example of the tech magnates (which literally erased some hot public growth sectors to near zero overnight), or engineering the controlled explosion of the housing bubble, you can't be ignorant of the active narratives. Especially difficult is that non-Chinese language news and analysis is often radically off the mark from intra-Chinese messaging.

If you want a fire and forget it approach, this may be one of the few examples of a market where conservative active management with a focus on giving Chinese exposure to western participants may be prudent, as they can sidestep the long and esoteric list of known risks. But even then it's tough if one is in a jurisdiction exposed to, say, US blacklists which can wipe out an investment overnight and wreak havoc in a portfolio.
by streetmeat | 2025-08-21 16:36:04+00:00
If you hit Dive then edit and resubmit with Dump, it forks the note you pulled it doesn't edit or overwrite.

Theres a meta debate about this on the site. Personally I like this more than having a single note which can be edited and resubmitted, it creates a level playing field where everyone is equal which is also aided by not having any user accounts or algorithm.

I just added some more clear details to the site.
by dingosity | 2025-08-21 16:36:07+00:00
There was a joke bumper-sticker in the valley back in the day that said "Windows 95 == Macintosh 89". But the critique of this was "Macintosh 95 == Macintosh 89". In the same way, "NeXTStep 89 == MacOS X 2001 == MacOS X 2015 == MacOS X 2025" except that they hadn't steved everyone from the user experience research group in 2001 and there were vestiges of #a11y features left in Yosemite.

Complaining your current version of MacOS X has a worse user experience than it did 10 years ago is like buying a Tesla and then complaining about its resale value.
by lenerdenator | 2025-08-21 16:36:34+00:00
I also wouldn't be surprised if bean counters were expecting a return in an unreasonable amount of time.

"Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down." - some MBA somewhere, probably, trying and failing yet again to rub his two brain cells together for the first time since high school.

Just agentic coding is a huge change. Like a years-to-grasp change, and the very nature of the changes that need to be made keep changing.
by jawns | 2025-08-21 16:36:46+00:00
Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value.

Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually.

We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls.

We recently switched to using AI to transcribe and write these summaries. Not only are the summaries better than those produced by our human agents, they also free up the human agents to do higher-value work.

It's not sexy. It's not going to replace anyone's job. But it's a huge, measurable efficiency gain.