MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-21 17:04:45+00:00
> can’t think of another career where management continuously does not understand the realities of how something gets built

All engineering. Also all government and a striking amount of finance.

Actually, this might be a hallmark of any specialist field. Specialists interface with outsiders through a management layer necessarily less competent at the specialty than they are. (Since they’re devoting time and energy to non-specialty tasks.)
by tetha | 2025-08-21 17:04:51+00:00
I deal with a few code bases at work and the quality differs a lot between projects and frameworks.

We have 1-2 small python services based on Flask and Pydantic, very structured and a well-written development and extension guide. The newer Copilot models perform very well with this, and improving the dev guidelines keep making it better. Very nice.

We also have a central configuration of applications in the infrastructure and what systems they need. A lot of similarly shaped JSON files, now with a well-documented JSON schema (which is nice to have anyway). Again, very high quality. Someone recently joked we should throw these service requests at a model and let it create PRs to review.

But currently I'm working in Vector and it's Vector remap language... it's enough of a mess that I'm faster working without any copilot "assistance". I think the main issue is that there is very little VRL code out in the open, and the remaps depend on a lot of unseen context, which one would have to work on giving to the LLM. Had similar experiences with OPA and a few more of these DSLs.
by noisy_boy | 2025-08-21 17:04:54+00:00
I was very confused about the term "Debug" view. We just called them views and used them normally. The main challenge was predicate pushdown which, though usually worked, was somewhat dependent on how smart the optimizer was. Also, things could get tricky when you start building views on top of views. Soon you are not certain why a simple looking query selecting from a simple looking view became slow until you see that it is views all the way down. As with most things, balance is the key.
by ricardonunez | 2025-08-21 17:04:59+00:00
I don’t know how it can confuse because input on mic is relatively straight forward to get. I use fathom and others and they are accurate, better than manual taken. Interesting take, that I don’t memorize 100% on the calls anymore since I rely on note takers, I only remember the major points but when I read the notes, everything comes clear.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-21 17:05:14+00:00
Yes, with Windows Forms.

In the beginning, many VB devs were irritated, because VB.NET 1.0 was mostly C# with VB syntax, however eventually Microsoft added back many of the previous capabilities, like the Me object, REPL, and so on.

However nowadays the language is considered done, and they are only updating it to keep up with specific .NET features for interop with C#.
by throwway120385 | 2025-08-21 17:05:22+00:00
Immigration is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. It's not a crime per se to overstay a visa like say shoplifting or killing someone. It's more like there's a proceeding to determine whether you did overstay and then when there's a finding of fact they basically tell you you have to leave or they remove you from the country forcibly. It would be patently ridiculous to jail someone for overstaying or for working on a tourist visa or for any of a number of these things.
by perrygeo | 2025-08-21 17:06:33+00:00
Yep, notice there was no mention at all about why the original software was so ill-designed in the first place. Not even a curiosity as to why. Your conclusion is more valid, though I wouldn't necessarily place the blame on the PM. Agile/Scrum rituals, where blame is diffused and developers are forced to sprint quickly through poorly-designed tickets, yields poorly-designed software. Who could have guessed? Feels like a systematic problem with the "modern" bloated software organization.
by ozgune | 2025-08-21 17:06:43+00:00
Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118

It's also disappointing that MIT requires you to fill out a form (and wait for) access to the report. I read four separate stories based on the report, and they all provide a different perspective.

Here's the original pdf before MIT started gating it: https://web.archive.org/web/20250818145714/https://nanda.med...
by resiros | 2025-08-21 17:06:51+00:00
Here is the report: https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...

The story there is very different than what's in the article.

Some infos:

- 50% of the budgets (the one that fails) went to marketing and sales

- the authors still see that AI would offer automation equaling $2.3 trillion in labor value affecting 39 million positions

- top barriers for failure is Unwillingness to adopt new tools, Lack of executive sponsorship

Lots of people here are jumping to conclusions. AI does not work. I don't think that's what the report says.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-21 17:06:53+00:00
I have no issue with Ellison's colorful language, but the point expressed by LeGuin is quite different. Copyright violation is not theft. It's not even a criminal charge in the US unless done for profit! You know what also deprives authors of royalties? Borrowing books from public libraries, buying used books, and loaning books to friends. So does playing video games instead of reading a book! The fact that an action yields less money to an author does not in-and-of-itself make it theft, or even immoral.

Copyright was chartered to encourage authors to contribute to a large public domain of works. Lobbying (by wealthy corporations) perverted this purpose. Sure it's a nice fringe benefit that some authors were made more comfortable by this. That doesn't stop many authors from taking a "I wrote it, it's mine" attitude as if a monopoly on the use of works you authored is a natural right.

LeGuin has taken a nuanced view on this, with the apparent understanding that copyright is a framework under which she was promised certain things, and the piracy is a violation of that promise.
by svnt | 2025-08-21 17:07:09+00:00
This is interesting, but it seems to be at odds with SaaS models where the idea can be you get high margins because you get low usage generally.

I can see why people buying/using software would want this, but why would any software startup want to use it? What are the markets (other than non-profit), where pay vs success (and not attention/friction) is the limiting factor? The idea is you’re unlocking new markets or models, right?

And when/how is success measured? Otherwise it’s just like API billing, right?
by siliconc0w | 2025-08-21 17:07:18+00:00
The problem is that a lot of friction is intentional. Companies want there to be friction to return an item or cancel a subscription. Insurance companies want there to be friction to evaluate policies or appeal denied claims. Companies create legal friction to make competition harder. The friction is the point so AI isn't a solution. If you were to add AI they'd just find a way to create new friction.
by olalonde | 2025-08-21 17:07:42+00:00
Sure, you can trace the full transaction history of any BTC through the blockchain... but that doesn't prove anything. At minimum, you need all the private keys involved (e.g. not possible if you used an exchange or deposited/withdrew from some online service or lost/deleted an old wallet). Even if you had the full list of private keys involved, going back to 2012, what proves that they were really yours and, like another commenter pointed out, that you didn't just acquire them yesterday?
by doorhammer | 2025-08-21 17:07:44+00:00
I'm curious, have you noticed an impact on agent morale with this?

Specifically: Do they spend more time actually taking calls now? I guess as long as you're not at the burnout point with utilization it's probably fine, but when I was still supporting call centers I can't count the number of projects I saw trying to push utilization up not realizing how real burnout is at call centers.

I assume that's not news to you, of course. At a certain utilization threshold we'd always start to see AHTs creep up as agents got burned out and consciously or not started trying to stay on good calls.

Guess it also partly depends on if you're in more of a cust serv call center or sales.

I hated working as an actual agent on the phones, but call center ops and strategy at scale has always been fascinating.
by rsanek | 2025-08-21 17:08:33+00:00
Always good to see more activity in the language learning space. I wish you luck now that you've moved past Anki.

A piece of feedback: one of the common issues I've found with AI-generated questions & answers based on an article is that they will often hone in on testing values. It looks like incontextlearning.com often suffers from this same issue (over half my comprehension questions were "how many"-style). I can easily answer these types of questions even if I don't know what the content is about.
by xg15 | 2025-08-21 17:08:35+00:00
I can read it by treating it like a cipher and going letter-by-letter with help of the table in the article. The text is straightforward German, so once I memorized some basic shapes, it wasn't that hard.

Could I make any useful guesses on the letters based on modern handwriting? Not at all. Many shapes are completely different, e.g. I knew about the long s, but never saw an e that looks like n or a B that looks like L before.
by qingcharles | 2025-08-21 17:08:39+00:00
The paper stats on 2G would make it seem like it should work in theory, especially if it's using EDGE or something, but it just consistently fails in the field. You'll get partial renders and then it will jam up. It's super, super frustrating to use. Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something and that just cancels all the async downloads and restarts them.

There are probably a host of other telemetry things going on in your standard $20 Android handset in the background too, eating up all that bandwidth and causing all sorts of bottlenecks.

Agree it would be really nice to have some sane minimum speed.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-21 17:08:49+00:00
>> And since every illegal immigrant is already a criminal...

>Not to be pedantic, but by definition it is, isn’t it?

It is not[0].

Being present in the US without legal status is a civil infraction and not a crime. Unlawful entry is a criminal act however.

That said, the vast majority of undocumented folks entered the US legally and overstayed their visas. Which is a civil issue, not a criminal one.

Those who made an (whether valid or not) asylum claim are legally in the United States until their asylum claim can be adjudicated.

[0] https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/is-illeg...
by tovej | 2025-08-21 17:09:39+00:00
Oh there's definitely a market but it's not as big or worth as much the AI market. Gamers don't need GB200s or H100s, and AMD beats Nvidia on price in most segments. Nvidia isn't going to die, but gamers won't fill the demand.

Data centers might, but then they'll need something else to compute, and if AI fails to deliver on the big disruptive promises it seems unlikely that other technologies will fill those shoes.

I'm just saying that something big will have to change, either Nvidias story or share price. And the story is most likely to pivot to military applications.
by reify | 2025-08-21 17:09:43+00:00
The team at theverge have clearly been living under a rock for the past 5 years

Flipper zero has been out for 5 years.

cloning a car key fob's radio has been around for years.

My Brother-in-law had his brand new keyless car stolen off of his drive.

Police said the thieves had most likely intercepted the keyfob signal from the keyfob hanging on his keyhook by the front door.

It was only the week before that he was showing off his wonderful keyless miracle car. He was so proud of his new car. Muppet!

Brother-in-law is a psychologist, read a lot of books but hasn't got a clue.
by PaulKeeble | 2025-08-21 17:10:01+00:00
There are myriad of ways to get this wrong and I have seen them all happen:

- force all the communications with the users through Project Managers or Product Owners. Sometimes they are great and sometimes they are terrible.

- The customers refuse to talk to the developers and so they are forced to interpret the users managers requirements without any further input.

- The developers just want to write code and refuse to meet the customer forcing all communication through their product manager or bug tracker.

- I have seen a couple of times where commercial software platforms were used the technology can get in the way, they are limited in the types of modifications and customisations that can be applied and this can make some workflows really awful.

There is always a disconnect somewhere, someone blocking a conversation happening and it can be the customer, a middle man or the developers causing it, often its all three to get a really dysfunctional system or the solution has been chosen before any developers or users really got into the details and its the wrong choice.

There are a lot of ways to make systems that aren't very good for the users.
by amcgivern | 2025-08-21 17:10:42+00:00
Agreed, I was recently looking through photos from my Pixel 5 and realized that it had "helpfully" modified an image of a bunny, making the fur look wavy and adding a weird faded-out eye on the body. On top of that, it applies skin smoothing to every photo, even with the beauty filter disabled. It irked me enough that I'm looking for a new third-party camera app. Despite using exclusively Pixel/Nexus phones for the last 12 years, I might abandon them entirely once this phone dies.
by empath75 | 2025-08-21 17:10:58+00:00
I think you should assume that your LLM context is poisoned as soon as it touches anything from the outside world, and it has to lose all permissions until a new context is generated from scratch from a clean source under the user's control. I also think the pattern of 'invisible' contexts that aren't user inspectable is bad security practice. The end user needs to be able to see the full context being submitted to the AI at every step if they are giving it permissions to take actions.

You can mitigate jail breaks but you can't prevent them, and since the consequences of an LLM being jail broken with exfiltration are so bad, you pretty much have to assume they will happen eventually.
by qwertox | 2025-08-21 17:11:02+00:00
From https://devoriales.com/post/402/from-free-to-fee-how-broadco... :

Broadcom has officially confirmed major changes to Bitnami's free container catalog, effective August 28, 2025, transitioning millions of developers from free access to paid subscriptions ranging from $50,000-$72,000 annually.
by Spivak | 2025-08-21 17:11:12+00:00
I mean look, if the customer service department is just trying to frustrate you into not contacting them then AI is just a new tool in the belt for that. Sad, but improvement for them is explicitly worse for you.

But if you're actually trying to provide good customer service because people are paying you for it any paying per case then you wouldn't dare put a phone menu or AI chat bot in-between them and the human. The person handles all the interaction with the client and then uses AI where it's useful to speed up the actual work.
by wredcoll | 2025-08-21 17:11:20+00:00
I'm as big a fan of ragging on "america" as anyone else, but it does occasionally have a few relatively unique problems compared to most other countries, such as the distances involved and the (lack of) density of population.

Above ground electric lines vs buried ones are a good example of how quickly your ROI can drop off for infrastructure problems.

Spending 10 million to add cold-weather protection to a powerplant that services 5million people? No brainer. Spending 10 million to bury 100 miles of power line that services 1000 people? Ehh...
by jryio | 2025-08-21 17:11:32+00:00
In the last few months we have worked with startups who have vibe coded themselves into an abyss. Either because they never made the correct hires in the first place or they let technical talent go. [1]

The thinking was that they could iterate faster, ship better code, and have an always on 10x engineer in the form of Claude code.

I've observed perfectly rational founders become addicted to the dopamine hit as they see Claude code output what looks like weeks or years of software engineering work.

It's overgenerous to allow anyone to believe AI can actually "think" or "reason" through complex problems. Perhaps we should be measuring time saved typing rather than cognition.

[1] vibebusters.com
by me551ah | 2025-08-21 17:11:54+00:00
Scaling AI will require an exponential increase in compute and processing power, and even the current LLM models take up a lot of resources. We are already at the limit of how small we can scale chips and Moore’s law is already dead.

So newer chips will not be exponentially better but will be more of incremental improvements, so unless the price of electricity comes down exponentially we might never see AGI at a price point that’s cheaper than hiring a human.

Most companies are already running AI models at a loss, scaling the models to be bigger(like GPT 4.5) only makes them more expensive to run.

The reason why internet, smartphones and computers have seen exponential growth from the 90s is due to underlying increase in computing power. I personally used a 50Mhz 486 in the 90s and now use a 8c/16t 5Ghz CPU. I highly doubt if we will see the same form of increase in the next 40 years
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-21 17:11:58+00:00
That for-loop design is a really interesting way of achieving "executional transparency", which is a good name for something I've found lacking in many reactive frameworks. Trying to work with Svelte, I was annoyed by how much magic was going on behind the scenes, and how it would attempt to automagically dice up code between the client and server, only to end up in arcane errors that were painful just to understand. I've found React a fair bit better on that front, in that component code will always run exactly as written (the main question being when it is run), but it doesn't have the greatest story w.r.t. expensive derived state that you may want to compute lazily, which ends up in useEffect() and careful dependency tracking.

In contrast, this design lets you know precisely what is recomputed on each refresh, even if it comes at the cost of explicitness. Any and all timing errors will be present in the code as written.
by lproven | 2025-08-21 17:12:20+00:00
I agree.

It's not really what you're asking, but I know of two Linux desktops that are based around GNUSTEP.

NEXTSPACE:

https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace

-- primarily targets CentOS

GSDE:

https://onflapp.github.io/gs-desktop/index.html

-- primarily targets Debian
by thwarted | 2025-08-21 17:12:22+00:00
> In such case there is a presumption of innocence and government should need a warrant before requiring client to satisfy AML or KYC documentation.

But since you don't know when the government is going to ask for it, you need to collect it from everyone all the time, otherwise you won't have it to satisfy the request. "What do you mean you don't know who your customers are?" is not a question you want to have to answer in the face of a warrant.
by nroets | 2025-08-21 17:12:43+00:00
No, some financial institutions like Binance only allows clients to get statements for the last year or so. P2P transaction details go back only a couple of months.

Sometimes your employer goes out of business. Employees do not always preserve their payslips.

Then there are countries like Georgia, it's culturally acceptable to buy real estate with cash. If no valuation of the property was made, it becomes very difficult to prove where the money came from.
by pawelduda | 2025-08-21 17:12:47+00:00
I can understand that as soon as you communicate progress, it's hard not to set any expectations, which in turn could end up pressuring them into releasing a slop. See Cyberpunk 2077 for an extreme example, where they fed beefed up trailers which in turn caused both fans and investors to have unrealistic expectations for quality they clearly didn't meet. Though personally I wish Team Cherry communicated at all. Not with any release dates, trailers or details necessarily, but at least let everyone know that they're alive and the game wasn't cancelled. I mean, the "Extra playable character" which turned into this giant game was initially a stretch goal on Kickstarter that people helped fund.

Well, at least we get a happy ending. After all these years and their explanation, I refuse to believe the game will be unfinished or mediocre.
by ericHosick | 2025-08-21 17:12:59+00:00
To help understand why a complex query with many joins comes back empty, I like to provide helper debug functions that builds the query step by step. Each block checks one prerequisite and tells the user what’s missing:

```sql FUNCTION debug_user(user_id):

IF NOT (SELECT FROM user WHERE user.user_id = user_id) THEN -- user doesn’t exist END IF; IF NOT (SELECT FROM user JOIN user_addr ON user_addr.user_id = user.user_id WHERE user.user_id = user_id) THEN -- user has no address END IF; -- keep adding joins until you find the break

```

because when you have a query that involves 6 relations, and you don't get results, it is nice to know why.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-21 17:13:08+00:00
Once you go deep enough into a personal passion project like that, you run a serious risk of flunking out of school. For most people that feels like a big deal. And for those of us with fewer alternatives in life, it's usually enough to keep us on the straight and narrow path.

People from wealthy backgrounds often have less fear of failure, which is a big reason why success disproportionately favors that clique. But frankly, most people in that position are more likely to abuse it or ignore it than to take advantage of it. For people like Zuckerberg and Dell and Gates, the easiest thing to do would have been to slack off, chill out, play their expected role and coast through life... just like most of their peers did.
by qingcharles | 2025-08-21 17:13:22+00:00
I know of a Walmart shelf stacker who ran after someone who grabbed a $5 hat on their way out. They had a run-in with the getaway car and ended up in a coma for two months and Walmart had to spend over $2m in medical bills.

(the offenders were caught by police later that day, so it really wasn't worth the trouble to run after them)
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-21 17:13:24+00:00
Now thinking about it, its so valid point, how would that even work though if I am being honest

like I am pretty sure that the only way that they can do this is via giving it internet access and if that's the case, I wonder how much spying it does on our computer before sending it to unity headquarters in the name of this industry fees

Please, someone create a #usegodot or some twitter thing to just get it trending. We need to use goodot (I tried typing godot but I wrote goodot TWICE which is so funny and ironical so I am keeping it here)

Also I wonder how it might stand in eu / gdpr
by 9rx | 2025-08-21 17:13:30+00:00
> I can not understate how hard it is to get engineers to read a scope document, ...

Ironically, it is hard because it doesn't consider the user. Scope documents likely seem reasonable for the author living in their own little bubble, dismissing it as something "trivial", but if they actually had to use it like those on the receiving end they would soon realize how horrid and ill-conceived it is. Much like was learned in the original link, once you stop with the bad practices, things become much easier.