MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crazygringo | 2025-08-30 16:46:02+00:00
> Engineers operate in the same organizational structure as PMs.

I don't know what this means. Engineers are not generally spending half their time talking to management, marketing, sales, customers, and other stakeholders.

> Also, in product feature teams it is up to the debate whether PMs provide any value, if you put engineers closer to customers. For the PM role to work, they need to convey customer requirements to product requirements. I have never seen a PM do a better job at this in comparison to just sending a TL to a video call with a client.

Great, but ten different clients want ten different product requirements, that in fact contradict each other. And it takes ten hours of calls to talk to those ten customers.

Plenty of engineers could certainly do the PM job. Many PM's come from engineering. But the point is that it's far more efficient and effective to have one person doing that, and let engineers do the engineering. That's the value. As an engineer, do you want to spend 20 hours every week talking to customers and writing feature specifications and managing a backlog? Or do you want to do, you know, engineering?

Just because you could do the PM job doesn't mean that's an efficient use of your time, or what you enjoy doing.
by mindslight | 2025-08-30 16:46:05+00:00
At least it's possible to tease out some nuance between those topics. Unlike all the people still simping for the Manchurian candidate's immediately self-defeating policies - let's compete with China through stiff import taxes that directly hurt American businesses, let's be strong by alienating our allies, let's fix the market for manual labor by arresting individual illegal immigrants while giving passes to big businesses employing them at scale, let's fix inflation and government overreach by printing $5T of new money and spending it on unaccountable jackboots. It's perversely amazing how this whole movement continues to run on empty spectacles and identity politics. When it finally burns through its fervor, all of the existing problems are still going to be there, plus a whole host of new problems.
by d4mi3n | 2025-08-30 16:46:10+00:00
Is this really all that surprising? We have a ton of things ongoing now that we either know or suspect are big contributors to this:

- the whole male loneliness epidemic

- a longstanding loss of community and social organizations around the country

- a pretty terrible job market for many Americans

- plenty of things to be stressed or worried about. Geopolitical instability. Erosion of individual rights. The complete failure of political leadership across the US. Rising cancer rates. Take your pick.
by marssaxman | 2025-08-30 16:46:18+00:00
I wrote my own editor, many years ago. I have been using it every day ever since, for all the coding work I do. It is a terminal program, so maintenance has not been burdensome.

https://www.github.com/marssaxman/ozette/

If I did it over again, I might use a rope instead of a line array as the central data structure, but it works well enough that I've never bothered to change it.
by originalvichy | 2025-08-30 16:46:53+00:00
1) In Finland most of the value is given out as dividends. We have a chronic underinvestment problem where large companies don’t have long term strategies so they dole out a comparatively large amount of value as dividends vs. re-investing the money for future profits. As a result, the stock market is skewed towards dividend-companies vs. growers.
by dvno42 | 2025-08-30 16:46:54+00:00
So what was the actual point of compromise? Was it a CALEA supporting software vendor? My guess is a common MD (Mediator device) vendor was targeted that was used by many carriers but that's speculation on my part.

Context for others, there's a small number of software vendors that make these MD devices that handle initiating a capture of a flow (a wiretapping request) and managing the chain of custody for a pcap. MDs usually sends an SNMP poll to a router/switch to start a (r)span port and the MD device slurps up all data and saves it.

Anyway, what I'm curious about is if it's the MDs that were taken over and if it was one manufacturer but I'm not seeing much technical info on all these reports.

Here's some context for "LI" for those interested: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/lan/catalyst9...
by ramesh31 | 2025-08-30 16:47:05+00:00
I do think the alcohol-fueled hookup culture that persisted in the US from the '70s to the '00s will be seen as a historical anomaly in the long run. The idea of empowerment has given way to the understanding that women have almost nothing to gain from the arrangement, and have bore the brunt of most of its' downsides.
by spankalee | 2025-08-30 16:47:07+00:00
The problem is not just what actions the tool can do, but the combination of actions and data it has access to. This is important because we can't guarantee what an LLM is going to do - they need to be untrusted, not trusted as much as the users.

In this example, I might want an LLM instance to be able to talk to booking websites, but not send them my SSN and bank account info.

So there's a data provenance and privilege problem here. The more sensitive data a task has access too, the more restricted its actions need to be, and vice-versa. So data needs to carry permission information with it, and a mediator needs to restrict either data or actions that tasks have as they are spawned.

There's a whole set of things that need to be done at the mediator level to allow for parent tasks to safely spawn different-privileged child tasks - eg, the trip planner task spawns a child task to find tickets (higher network access) but the mediator ensures the child only has access to low-sensitive data like a portion of the itinerary, and not PII.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-30 16:47:26+00:00
> So, put a toggle somewhere. When the toggle is toggled, put up a big fat warning sheet and say if somebody on the phone or mail asks you to do that, 99.9% it's a scammer.

The proverbial grandparents will follow the instructions of the scammers and will click through all of that. We've had decades of empirical evidence: people will keep clicking and tapping on dialogue boxes to achieve their goal.

People have physically driven to cryptocurrency ATMs on the instructions of scammers:

* https://bc-cb.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/ViewPage.action?siteNodeId=2136...

* https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/04/21/bitcoin-atm-...

Warning sheets will do nothing.
by dsego | 2025-08-30 16:48:51+00:00
Not sure why Laravel decided to have that approach to models. In Django I can update the model properties and just generate a migration from that. I can always open the models.py file to see which fields a model class has. In Laravel I need to either look at the migration files or look inside the database table definition. And then also adding fields means writing the migration by hand I guess. There are other confusing things, like marking fields as fillable in the model, and if you fail to add your field in the fillable property, it won't be inserted into the database, and it took me awhile to figure out why my code wasn't working. Not sure what purpose it serves, I understand marking things as read only in serializers, but this is at the data layer, seems like a footgun.
by d4mi3n | 2025-08-30 16:49:37+00:00
You make some good points about attitude around sex in parts of the US today, and the erosion of community is a topic I was was more often discussed.

Sex ed is also something I was more universally supported. Regardless of your views on when someone should have sex, I doubt it serves anyone’s goals to have young adults getting hurt, sick, or traumatized by a natural part of growing up.
by yndoendo | 2025-08-30 16:50:03+00:00
The difference in titles is more or less where most of the time is spent. Developer could be doing front-end, back-end, embedded, high-performance computing, system, game, data analysis, or any other niche work. All of those have different design, tooling, and ways of thinking that you gain through actually doing.

I been in interviews where after reading my resume they say oh your an embedded developer. Another said a front-end, no a back-end, no a system developer, and other desktop developer. Reality, I did all of those to get the job done and create a viable product.
by creer | 2025-08-30 16:50:12+00:00
It's not a question of who to blame exactly. The poster's practice illustrates why sending resumes in response to job postings can't work anymore. From the point of view of the new hiring company or new job applicant, it doesn't matter who created the situation. What matters is what we do about it next. You can spray and pray but you certainly shouldn't expect it to "work".

For the poster: was their method a good use of their time? is the job "found" a good fit really? will they last in this position?

For the hiring company: was their method a good use of their time? is this person in any way a great fit? will they last in this position?

The poster complains that few companies sent him a rejection note! Why in the world would they? The poster was protective of their time, and should rightly expect the hiring companies to do the same.
by ancillary | 2025-08-30 16:51:12+00:00
> Americans: why isn't anyone having sex anymore?? Also Americans: Abstinence only! You'll get pregnant! No abortions! STDs will kill you! Men deserve sex! We're not going to teach you how your body works!

None of that is new in America. If anything, I'd expect that these forces were stronger 20-30 years ago, when sexual activity rates were higher.
by metalman | 2025-08-30 16:51:58+00:00
here is a bit of it

" Even if one doesn’t accept every point made by Hobsbawm, Brenner, or similar Marxist thinkers, their analysis at least has a sturdy basis in political economy and material reality. By contrast, Thiel has a bizarrely cultural analysis of stagnation that doesn’t even pass the laugh test. The Western world, he claims, entered into five decades of anemic growth because of the counterculture of the 1960s. According to Thiel, “in my telling of the history of the 1970s…the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.” Thiel adds that “everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson.”

Because of the hippies, says Thiel, Western powers embraced an ideology of peace and safety that stalled technological growth."
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-30 16:53:27+00:00
On top of the FISA thing, you're already late to this party...?

The current administration believes that non-citizens have no right to due process. If there's no due process, there's no way to prove or disprove citizenship and no court proceeding at all. And SCOTUS ruled that you can ship a non-citizen just... Anywhere you want? Doesn't have to even be on the same continent as their home.

So the Gestapo - sorry, ICE - can kidnap anyone they want, put them in a camp of arbitrarily bad conditions without any form of disclosure or contact to lawyers or family, then send them to a random war-torn country with no belongings.

If you're extra unlucky, they may just send you to a death prison or work camp in a third world dictatorship.

So we are already passed the rubicon of "no court hearing at all". Today we're normalizing deploying the military against US citizens.
by oldslang | 2025-08-30 16:53:28+00:00
As a PM focusing mostly on new product development, my mantra to engineering was "Do the easy, cheap stuff first." The corollary was, "If we are very lucky, we will live in regret because the product has taken off but the architecture is now obviously wrong." This was understandably frustrating to many engineers because they wanted me to have a certainty about the correctness of what we were building that I just never had. Every good idea I had for product emerged over time, often years and countless false steps. I could never figure out how to avoid the false steps so the goal became to keep cost and effort down along the way.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-08-30 16:53:54+00:00
I concur. All my roles have either come from my network or working with recruiters.

As a hiring manager now, I hate, hate, hate the spray and pray applicants. Wastes a vast amount of my time weeding them out. And I'm probably rejecting actually good candidates now, as I just immediately reject anyone who doesn't seem to have thought even a little about the position they're applying for.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-30 16:54:07+00:00
You say that, but my experience has been that product managers love nothing more than feeding entire webpages/specs/slack threads/email exchanges/whatever into ChatGPT and getting the 'summary' of it, and then pasting that into Jira and having the AI "make tickets" from it

The 'more efficient' part is where reasonable people disagree, a lot, and very often, in these threads
by semiinfinitely | 2025-08-30 16:54:09+00:00
The ability to create code that imposes low cognitive load on others not only is a rare and difficult skill to cultivate- it takes active effort and persistence to do even for someone who already has the ability and motivation. I think fundamentally the developer is computing a mental compression of the core ideas - distilling them to their essence - and then making sure that the code exposes only the minimum essential complexity of those ideas. not easy and rare to see in practice
by anon84873628 | 2025-08-30 16:54:12+00:00
Shoving full implicit context into the analogy, it would be more like "are tasers really killing otherwise physically healthy people, or are the recent notable deaths primarily from people with pre-existing risks?"

I can agree that Alexander might appear flippant or even callous about mental health at times (especially compared to modern liberal social media sensibilities), but I chalk that up to the well-earned desensitization of a professional working in the field for decades.
by d4mi3n | 2025-08-30 16:54:23+00:00
Plenty of people isolated and medicated with TV alone. Couch potatoes were a thing.

Plenty of people also find community through technology, so I personally don’t believe technology is the only contributing factor here.

I do agree with in you general about many Americans not having enough social or communal interaction, though. I suspect this is more a symptom of a lot of other social issues than a purely technological problem though.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-30 16:54:51+00:00
Aside from the other examples given I suppose (listed in no particular order, numbers not related to importance of reason)

1. Social movements promoting not having sex. Obviously not that big a thing but it does cut down the available sex partners.

2. reiterating the examples people give of animosity between male and female, straight sex still the bulk of sex and does seem to be a lot more reasons for avoiding each other nowadays.

3. neurodivergence becoming more acceptable, many neurodivergent people have lesser sex drives, in the past you might have just decided to go ahead and have sex because oh well it's what one does isn't it.

4. sex is going down in comparison to previous decades which might have been especially high sex decades. Perhaps the sexual revolution was revolutionary but now it is somewhat old hat and not as interesting.
by 0xffany | 2025-08-30 16:54:56+00:00
This is just plain wrong or a terrible misinterpretation...

> central banks

What are you trying to say here? Each member state has a central bank. They are independent from, coordinated by, the ECB. Each central bank assumes the responsibility of regulating the member state's banks, with the ECB paying close attention to system-critical banks.

The US also has a central bank, singular, the Fed. What's your point?

> no local culture, blur national and ethnic identities

Have you been to Europe? Each country has it's own, completely distinct culture based on the nation's historic identity. Hint: you know when you're crossing borders (the language usually changes).
by Hizonner | 2025-08-30 16:55:00+00:00
So you expect aging parents to actively ask their children to put controls on their devices, and not to reverse that decision when it matters most?

Many, probably most, of the people most at risk aren't going to do that.

When you're (somewhat) drunk, you know that you're drunk, and you're still able to comprehend how that will slow down your reactions while driving. When you're being scammed, you think you're right... and if you begin to doubt that, you may tend to push the thought out of your mind rather than follow it through, and to evade things that might bring it back. And it's very hard to admit to yourself that you're permanently impaired in that sort of way... especially when you're impaired in that sort of way.
by bitcuration | 2025-08-30 16:55:43+00:00
It's not about using LLM for calculation, it's about automation and agentic. The integration and deployment in enterprise will be a matter of time. Hiring fresh out of school used to be labor and training, but knowing in 5 years the industry will shrink while the senior staff will keep the boat floating aided by AI, the cutoff time is now. There is no need to keep sending young generation to industries that're bound to be automated enmass. And these are in the immediate near term.

Other industries are yet to see how AI will impact, it may or may not ever. But in some science fields, new graduated PhDs are seen the same hiring freeze. The complete outsourcing of school knowledge to LLM is coming to our life real soon, the only factor not making it faster is the data center and energy, which are being worked on to resolve in a couple years. These are the reason AI is not yet as cheap as search and ready for consumer market. But it's cheap or will be cheaper enough in two years for enterprise at a cost lower than human resource. The answer is obvious when looking at it on a 5 year horizon.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-30 16:55:49+00:00
hmm. Using a term from formal science literature to loosely argue or back questionable arguments withe the ruse of scientific basis is a common issue. I pointed out that this article does not use the formal definition of the term, which you point out is itself an issue. Put that way i agree.

I think the article could have used a different term, or made a more clear declaration of what they specifically meant with the term to resolve this issue. Though i don't think it was done intentionally to deceive since the article makes no mention of the formal literature or theory of "cognitive load" to back its arguments.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-08-30 16:55:55+00:00
Agreed they are thinking about it backwards.

The model is simple and LLM agent js a user. Another user on the machine. And given the context it is working it, it is given permissions. Ex. It has read/write permissions under this folder of source code, but read only permissions for this other.

Those permissions vary by context. The LLM Agent working on one coding project would be given different permissions than if it were working on a different project on the same machine.

The permissions are an intersection or subset of the user's permissions that is is running on behalf of. Permissions fall into 3 categories. Allow, Deny and Ask - where it will ask an accountable user if it is allowed to do something. (Ie ask the user on who's behalf it is running if it can perform action x).

The problem is that OSes (and apps and data) generally aren't fine grained enough in their permissions, and will need to become so. It's not that an LLM can or can't use git, it should only be allowed to use specific git commands. Git needs to be designed this way, along with many more things.

As a result we get apps trying to re-create this model in user land and using a hodge-podge of regexes and things to do so.

The workflow is: similar to sudo I launch and app as my LLM Agent user. It inherits its default permissions. I give it a context to work in, it is granted and/or denied permissions due to being in that context.

I make requests and it works on my behalf doing what I permit it to do, and it never can do more than what I'm allowed to do.

Instead now every agentic app needs to rebuild this workflow or risk rogue agents. It needs to be an OS service.

The hacky stepping stone in betwern is to create a temporary user per agent context/usage. Grant that user perms and communicate only over IPC / network to the local LLM running as this user. Though you'll be spinning up and deleting a lot of user accounts in the process.
by zachlatta | 2025-08-30 16:56:13+00:00
You should see if there's a Daydream game jam near you! It's a game jam for teens ages 13-18 happening in 100 cities simultaneously worldwide on September 27th and 28th, 2025.

There'll be workshops to help people get started and everyone else will be her age: https://daydream.hackclub.com/

Here are some videos of recent hackathons like Daydream. All for ages 13-18.

- Hackathon on an Island (August 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXWMr0gdLJA

- Largest Hardware Hackathon (July 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaEFv7e49mo

- Scrapyard: Build Silly Projects (March 2025): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iM1W8kXrQA

(I run Hack Club, the nonprofit hosting this event)
by mrandish | 2025-08-30 16:56:47+00:00
> I wish I could drop (so many of) my old internal posts publicly, since I don’t really have the incentive to relitigate the arguments today – they were carefully considered and prescient. They also got me reported to HR by the manager of the XROS effort for supposedly making his team members feel bad

Carmack being Carmack, I'm sure the HR report came to nothing but it's just another reminder of the annoyances I don't miss about working at a BigCo. In the end, it doesn't matter that it went nowhere, that he was right or that it was an over-reaction and likely a defensive move in inter-group politics Carmack wasn't even playing - it just slowly saps your emotional energy to care about doing the right things in the right ways.
by bckr | 2025-08-30 16:57:34+00:00
I’m having a hard time not being sarcastic here.

The most recent news about chatbots is that ChatGPT coached a kid on how to commit suicide.

Two arguments come to mind. 1) it’s the sycophancy! Nous and its ilk should be considered safer. 2) it’s the poor alignment. A better trained model like Claude wouldn’t have done that.

I lean #2
Fed up with macOS – it downloaded 47 GB of 4K 240FPS screensavers. Asahi FTW
by notdian | 2025-08-30 16:57:54+00:00
I was troubleshooting why my storage was so low, found this folder: `/Library/Application Support/com.apple.idleassetsd/Customer/4KSDR240FPS` about 47 GB of 4K/240FPS movies macOS had downloaded for the screensaver.

Enough was enough, so I switched to Asahi Linux. Running Sway now my whole session (Firefox open) uses around 2 GB of RAM. I can recognize all the processes running — there are quirks, but they’re worth it for the control and freed-up space.

[Screenshot] https://imgur.com/a/I7PPXuy

Edit: Add Screenshot
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-30 16:57:58+00:00
What difference do you see from a Mort ?

If there is no inherent complexity, a Mort will come up with the simplest solution. If it's a complex problem needing trade-offs the Mort will come up with the fastest and most business centric solution.

Or would you see that Amanda refactoring a whole system to keep it simple above all whatever the deadlines and stakes ?
by whatevertrevor | 2025-08-30 16:58:29+00:00
MBTI is absolutely bullshit, it's like one level above horoscopes and astrology, but very similar type of BS. There's also the Gallup crap that many corps were doing to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each employee so they could fit them into neat buckets such as "Leader" vs "Follower", as if these aren't skills people develop over time but actual personality traits.