MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kevstev | 2025-08-21 18:41:58+00:00
Yeah back when margin rates were close to 1% it made a ton of sense to use margin. I was pretty cautious with it but bought a bunch of blue chip dividend stocks- altria, vz, etc at 1% rates and collected 5% dividends. For awhile I could even deduct the margin interest from my income.

At a 6% rate though, this is very risky. Your hurdle rate is just below the average market return rate. There are better ways to gamble on the market if that's what you want to do-UPRO and TQQQ come to mind, as well as options.
by davidhariri | 2025-08-21 18:42:02+00:00
Success rate depends on many factors (risk of failure, your value to the business, complexity of the ask), but it's definitely on average much higher than 5% (I sell this technology and look at the results many times a day).

> Companies need to stop looking at customer support as an expense, but rather as an opportunity to build trust and strengthen your business relationship.

This is bang on. But unfortunately many companies have top down mandates to drive costs down (without backstops for LTV retention) and they look at top line growth as separate from OpEx. It's weird and broken, but it's a side effect of the common organizational structure of most enterprises. There are companies that do not look at themselves divisionally as CX, Sales, Product, Marketing etc. and the ones I can think of do have very high NPS (apple comes to mind).
by throwawayben | 2025-08-21 18:42:11+00:00
I had a joint account with an ex who now lives abroad and I no longer have contact with.

I talked to the bank and there was no way to close the account without both of us present.

Recently they released a chat bot on their app and so I asked it to close the account and the bot did it for me! That's the best success I've had with a CS bot.

Possibly the policy changed in the mean-time or the lack of activity in the account for several years allowed it to happen (though the humans never told me after x years of inactivity I'd be able to close it)
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-21 18:42:12+00:00
> There is also another layer: when SIPS was introduced, there were tons of articles and videos teaching people to turn it off when they shouldn’t.

...see, I actually had the opposite frustration with SIP. So many people were so hesitant to turn it off, even when they had a clear use case.

This is where the argument looses me. I agree that it's good to protect people from screwing up by accident. But if someone has taken the time to reboot their computer into recovery mode, find the Terminal app, and run a very specific command, that is not an accident! That is a user clearly requesting that the training wheels be removed. And sure, maybe the user was following bad advice, but it wasn't an accident!

People are allowed to do stupid things, that's how we learn. Again, it's great to have guardrails for people who want them, and it's great to have those guardrails on by default for people who don't want to think about them or even know they exist. But deciding which users are savvy enough to be worthy of disabling SIP feels Gatekeepy to me.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-08-21 18:42:14+00:00
> I remember the pre-AI Geico chat bot that I liked. I could call it once every six months and pay my entire balance with a few words.

That still sounds like a bot fulfilling a function that should be solved by making the product better. This could have been either 1) an autopay requiring zero interaction, or 2) if you don't want to autopay, a form you can click "pay" on.
by mind-blight | 2025-08-21 18:42:26+00:00
It really depends on what your use case is. E.g. of you're dealing with a lot of legacy integrations, dealing with all the edge cases can require a lot of code that you can't refactor away through cleverness.

Each integration is hopefully only a few thousand lines of code, but if you have 50 integrations you can easily break 100k loc just dealing with those. They just need to be encapsulated well so that the integration cruft is isolated from the core business logic, and they become relatively simple to reason about
by Forgret | 2025-08-21 18:42:48+00:00
Okay, I'll review the answer, and to tell you the truth, I'm improving the code and comments with the help of AI. Well, of course, I did the ideas and other things myself, and I understand that you may not like this. AI is a controversial topic now, but I still have to thank you. I have the feeling that you are more worried about my project than I am.
by Spivak | 2025-08-21 18:43:18+00:00
And yet the topic of conversation is a company that did just that. The AI is just the smoke and mirrors that pushed the business to do it. Staff aren't writing their own call notes anymore. The LLM summary, almost by definition, isn't adding any additional signal to the call audio. If your data engineering pipeline works by processing LLM generated notes then it must work equally well processing the call transcript—they're the exact same data. AI finally got the business to admit that nothing of value was added by call notes and have dropped that work completely. The final step is just dropping the useless use of LLM.

Just the audio transcript is way cheaper and can use existing technology.
by ChrisArchitect | 2025-08-21 18:43:46+00:00
Discussions:

Tech, chip stock sell-off continues as AI bubble fears mount

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965187

Is the A.I. Sell-Off the Start of Something Bigger?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44963715

Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964548
by baggachipz | 2025-08-21 18:44:26+00:00
I don't think you're considering the enshittification route here. I'm sure it will be: Ask ChatGPT a question -> "While I'm thinking, here's something from our sponsor which is tailored to your question" -> lame answer which requires you to ask another question. And on and on. While you're asking these questions, a profile of you is built and sold on the market.
by grishka | 2025-08-21 18:44:51+00:00
I stayed on Mavericks until late 2016, by which time I had to update to then-current system because I got a new job and needed latest Xcode to compile the iOS app. Surprisingly, I didn't hate the flatter design as much as I anticipated. But of course I still miss skeuomorphism.

The worst transition for me was Big Sur (or, more precisely, Mojave -> Monterey when I bought a new MacBook in 2021). The useless margins, the unification of title bars and toolbars that no one asked for, the borderless buttons (I enabled "show borders" in accessibility settings), SF Symbols (no pixel grid alignment whatsoever), and the redesigned alerts, are the worst. From what I've seen of Tahoe, it makes it even worse, both with the touchscreenification and with the wasted screen area.
by aizk | 2025-08-21 18:44:57+00:00
The Japanese immersion language learning rabbit hole goes very very deep, and it super interesting. I'm writing some info about it here because I just don't want it to be lost to the sands of the digital times:

It all started way back when with this guy named Khatzumoto who did his own guerilla academic research, for lack for a better word - and proving it by getting fluent in 18 months. The theories were based in comprehensible input (from Stephen Krashen) and nonstop immersion, which do carry weight and are great ways - if not the only way to learn ANY language. He created AJATT, All Japanese All The Time, and basically created a mini cult that legitimately got people to fluency. It might sound extreme but on the other end I heard of someone who did duolingo (100% slop product btw) for 6 months and didn't know how to say "Thank You" in Japanese. Khatzumoto's ideas were manic, strange, but sometimes truly brilliant. I've never found a blog quite like it ever since - writings that an LLM really can't emulate. The original blog 404'd but it's been revived by a community member here - https://alljapanesealltheti.me/index.html I go back to them every now and then when I want some crazy motivation.

Nobody knows what has happened to Khatzumoto, he basically just dropped off the face of the internet - I wonder if he's doing alright.
by sunrunner | 2025-08-21 18:45:01+00:00
> People here work on all kinds of industries.

Yes, it would be nice to have a lot more context (pun intended) when people post how many LoC they introduced.

B2B SaaS? Then can I assume that a browser is involved and that a big part of that 200k LoC is the verbose styling DSL we all use? On the other hand, Nginx, a production-grade web server, is 250k LoC (251,232 to be exact [1]). These two things are not comparable.

The point being that, as I'm sure we all agree, LoC is not a helpful metric for comparison without more context, and different projects have vastly different amounts of information/feature density per LoC.

[1] https://openhub.net/p/nginx
by sgt | 2025-08-21 18:45:08+00:00
(Relative) older time who got started with FreeBSD and Linux in the mid 90s here.

While I loved Mavericks (and I went through all the versions of OS X since Jaguar to macOS Sonoma), I have to say that in my opinion it just keeps getting better. Yes, a few restrictions came along but nothing that keeps me as a system developer from being productive.

The Apple SDK's, CLI tools, compilers and libraries available are world class, and I still got my Unix prompt, while having a snappy UI. Don't get me started on Apple Silicon; now I never have to wait for anything.

I'm still on Sonoma though, but it's because I take so long to upgrade. It's best practice to wait a few months with new releases of macOS. I've used that strategy for 20 years and it hasn't failed me once.
by eichin | 2025-08-21 18:45:43+00:00
200kloc is what, 4 reams of paper, double sided? So, 10% of that famous Margaret Hamilton picture (which is roughly "two spaceships worth of flight code".) I'm not sure the intuition that gives you is good but at least it slots the raw amount in as "big but not crazy big" (the "9 years work" rather than "weekend project" measurement elsethread also helps with that.)
by mlyle | 2025-08-21 18:45:44+00:00
Yah. Latest thing I wrote was

* Code using sympy to generate math problems testing different skills for students, with difficulty values affecting what kinds of things are selected, and various transforms to problems possible (e.g. having to solve for z+4 of 4a+b instead of x) to test different subskills

(On this part, the LLM did pretty well. The code was correct after a couple of quick iterations, and the base classes and end-use interfaces are correct. There's a few things in the middle that are unnecessarily "superstitious" and check for conditions that can't happen, and so I need to work with the LLM to clean it up.

* Code to use IRT to estimate the probability that students have each skill and to request problems with appropriate combinations of skills and difficulties for each student.

(This was somewhat garbage. Good database & backend, but the interface to use it was not nice and it kind of contaminated things).

* Code to recognize QR codes in the corners of worksheet, find answer boxes, and feed the image to ChatGPT to determine whether the scribble in the box is the answer in the correct form.

(This was 100%, first time. I adjusted the prompt it chose to better clarify my intent in borderline cases).

The output was, overall, pretty similar to what I'd get from a junior engineer under my supervision-- a bit wacky in places that aren't quite worth fixing, a little bit of technical debt, a couple of things more clever that I didn't expect myself, etc. But I did all of this in three hours and $12 expended.

The total time supervising it was probably similar to the amount of time spent supervising the junior engineer... but the LLM turns things around quick enough that I don't need to context switch.
by layer8 | 2025-08-21 18:45:49+00:00
The problem here is not the image containing a prompt, the problem is the robot not being able to distinguish when commands are coming from a clearly non-authoritative source regarding the respective action.

The fundamental problem is that the reasoning done by ML models happens through the very same channel (token stream) that also contains any external input, which means that models by their very mechanism don’t have an effective way to distinguish between their own thinking and external input.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-21 18:46:08+00:00
> The enemy is the static card. It always has the same front, formatting, and font. After enough reps I would latch on to little cues that are irrelevant to the meaning of the card, meaning I would skip the very important step of thinking deeply about the content. A fairly common occurrence was that a word in the sentence would remind me about the meaning of the sentence, giving away the answer to the target word, which is quite different from piecing together the meaning of the target word in a brand new sentence.

Interestingly, that's the "trick" behind a lot of the seemingly magic skill of geo guessers. The best players have played so much, that they now "see" things that a regular person wouldn't even consider to look for, like the camera quality, what year the car was from, and so they narrow down the possible countries by those aspects, before even looking at the "picture".
by feoren | 2025-08-21 18:46:11+00:00
> Which of these is more essential for human life? ... So you do acknowledge the actual definition ...

And you don't acknowledge the actual definition, or you would have been asking about price elasticity, not what is or is not essential for human life. Plenty of people will give up Chinese takeout before they give up GPUs.

> Food, or a luxury car?

The luxury car, because it's grandma's old classic that Tom has kept in good enough shape to drive to his job, and he doesn't know how he'll get there when it finally breaks down, but he doesn't really have a penchant for fancy food and gets by with some cheap staples he prepares at home.

> Basic medicine, or a trip to a casino?

The trip to the casino, because Judy is getting evicted, and doesn't have any friends or family she can stay with, and won't survive the winter on the street, and hitting it big at Blackjack is unlikely, but desperate times call for desperate measures. And although she does sometimes take Tylenol for headaches, she's otherwise in good health and doesn't have any ongoing medicinal needs.

What are we doing? You're deciding what other people need for their lives?

> Rich people also don't behave logically, for the record.

Of course they do, because however they behave, they have an army of op-ed writers, sycophants, and apologists who spew out post-hoc justification for their behavior, and viola, their behavior turns out to have been rational all along.

Meanwhile, if the poor (and we are always talking about the poor when we are talking about "essential") stubbornly show an unwillingness to stop purchasing some good that some economist has decided is "non-essential", they're villainized and called irrational. Many of them even have refrigerators!

> It's almost like this class war you're describing is a figment of your imagination.

You choose now, in 2025, to deny that there's a class war? That's certainly a take.
by matt-attack | 2025-08-21 18:46:41+00:00
You cannot be more wrong.

Entering the United States without proper documentation, such as a passport or visa, is considered a federal crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325. This statute criminalizes unauthorized entry, including entering at unauthorized times or places, evading inspection, or misrepresentation to gain entry.

I would love to understand if you truly believed that no such federal statute exists, or we’re just intentionally spreading misinformation.
by ghaff | 2025-08-21 18:47:05+00:00
Well, at more elite schools at least, the general assumption is that programming is mostly something you pick up on your own. It's not CS. Some folks will disagree of course but I think that's the reality. I took an MIT Intro to Algorithms/CS MOOC course a few years back out of curiosity and there was a Python book associated with the course but you were mostly on your own with it.
by joe_the_user | 2025-08-21 18:47:10+00:00
What lessons have organizations learned about security?

Hire a consultant who can say you're following "industry standards"?

Don't consider secure-by-design applications, keep your full-featured piece of jump but work really hard to plug holes, ideally by paying a third party or better getting your customers to pay ("anti-virus software").

Buy "security as product" software allow with system admin software and when you get a supply chain attack, complain?
by ssl-3 | 2025-08-21 18:47:52+00:00
Lots of tools have lifetime warranties. Harbor Freight's swap process is probably fastest, these days, for folks with one nearby. Tekton's process is also painless, but slower: Send them a photo of the broken tool, and they deliver a new tool to your door.

But I'm not old enough to remember a time when lifetime warranties were unusual. In my lifetimes, a warranty on handtools has always seemed more common than not outside of the bottom-most cheese-grade stuff.

I mean: The Lowes house-brand diagonal cutters I bought for my first real job had a lifetime warranty.

And before my time of being aware of the world, JC Penney sold tools with lifetime warranties.

(I remember being at the mall with my dad when he took a JC Penney-branded screwdriver back to JC Penney -- probably 35 years ago.

He got some pushback from people who insisted that they had never sold tools, and then from people who insisted that they never had warranties, and then he finally found the fellow old person who had worked there long enough to know what to do. Without any hesitation at all, she told us to walk over to Sears, buy a similar Craftsman screwdriver, and come back with a receipt.

So that's what we did.

She took the receipt and gave him his money back.

Good 'nuff.)
by analog31 | 2025-08-21 18:47:59+00:00
Now that the edit window has passed, I realize that I have to add a correction or a caveat. I realized this when I added a drop of oil to my brakes. The car is "unreliable" too, but comes with expectations for periodic maintenance that replaces those parts. All fluids are unreliable. That might even deserve to be a law of engineering.

In fact, when I add up the time and money spent taking care of the periodic maintenance of my car, which involves driving it to the mechanic's, it's way more than what I would consider to be remotely acceptable for maintaining my bike.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-08-21 18:48:00+00:00
xfinity is absolutely lousy for this. at least with a human representative, i can let them know right out of the gate that, yes, i've power cycled my CPE, and yes, i've bypassed my own network to confirm the problem is not with my equipment. every single time i've had to go through this dance, they acknowledge that the problem is on their end and can fix it right away or put in a work order. every time i've had to interact with a chatbot, it wastes 15 minutes of my time before directing me to call (and deal with an audio chatbot until i convince it to let me talk to a person).
by FireBeyond | 2025-08-21 18:49:04+00:00
> I did file it as $2k+ of stolen goods but afaik the cops never pursued it and the thief got away with it.

Hah. I had pretty good evidence when it came to my stolen laptop and iPhone when I was given a lead to the person selling them on eBay (essentially, someone bought the phone on eBay, tried to convince me to unlock it, and when I refused and the seller refused to take it as a return, he said "I know the real owners info and I'm giving him your info").

His eBay page was a treasure trove. Probably 100+ phones for sale, most "without charger". Same, 50+ laptops, "no chargers or accessories".

Contacted the police.

"He probably didn't steal them himself" - Uhh, isn't selling knowingly stolen property still a crime?

"..."

They could not possibly have cared less.
by roscas | 2025-08-21 18:49:11+00:00
Windows and Teams have been a huge problem. Updates in the morning and afternoon. Awful performance and laptop fan always on, trying to save the cpu from burning.

When it works, Outlook is not bad. But Word and Excel are just a pain in the a*. But Windows has too many problems. The virus anti-malware-crap-something is always running and should be removed.

Explorer is just the worst Windows program. It should be removed. I replace it with another Explorer.

It is all too bad. If we had Linux, it would be amazing. We still have email, programs to access even Windows servers, but access all Linux servers it is just amazing.

Linux desktop has it all. All I need, don't have some games and there is specific software for Windows that might not work on Linux, but don't use it. Or have a VM to have that crap.

So not much help from me as the only I think you can use is Zabbix, that is a great tool for Linux and Windows.

Ollama is also great and VirtualBox or Vmware Workstation, but I think VBox is a little slower than VWWorkstation.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-21 18:49:21+00:00
Probably yes, many talk about Carbon without understanding its purpose.

It is an experiment on how to migrate existing C++ code into safer codebases without throwing it away.

Similar in concept as C++ to C, Typescript to JavaScript, Objective-C to C, Swift to Objective-C, Scala and Kotlin to Java, and so on.

With Google themselves as the main customers.

The team themselves are the first to assert that anyone doing greenfield development should rather pick Rust, Go, Swift, Java, Kotlin, C#,... instead.
by samjgorman | 2025-08-21 18:49:28+00:00
Nice work! To share some thoughts on the UX of Graph...

1. The visual design of the app feels largely different from other apps that I use, which is largely good. It's evoking an early internet aesthetic. To what degree were early social communities like MySpace an inspiration? 2. The other side of breaking from more modern UX patterns is that users might stumble or get slowed down. I had a harder time figuring out the UX of the chat inbox, likely because I was bringing iMessage style mental models to more of an AIM UX. 3. Onboarding of inputting ChatGPT derived preferences to quickly personalized was really smart and can imagine this could be the start of a new way to shortcut otherwise tedious onboarding preference collection 4. Did you consider making this an iOS app? I almost only read HN on my phone these days and would likely appreciate these more niche articles tailored towards learning compared to a standard news digest
by cultofmetatron | 2025-08-21 18:49:36+00:00
CL is the Ditto (pokemon) of programming langauges. It commits to nothing and does everything better than you'd expect. The problem is its very much a lone warrior type of language. you can attain great productivity due to macros and just how maleable it is but it makes it near impossible to get a team to work together on it without very extensive styling and conventions strictly adhered to by the team. In a way, you could say its a direct influence to go, in that the go team saw everything common lisp did and decided to do the opposite.
by pqtyw | 2025-08-21 18:49:36+00:00
> something like a 20 cent fee per

They announced it, but based on their actual pricing tables effectively nobody outside of a tiny extremely unlucky proportion of users would have paid that much. The effective fee was several times smaller and they also switched to a per project instead a per company revenue limit for personal tier (which would have resulted in a significant price cut for a quite a few people).

Yet nobody noticed any of that because their announcements were incomprehensible .

Not that I am a fan of the whole pricing model but they were so exceptionally bad at communicating it. Like it's hard to even fathom what sort of incompetent idiots they had running their marketing department (I mean an average intern would have had handled it better). IMHO it would have been hard to bungle it more even if they tried doing it on purpose...