MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by svnt | 2025-08-21 16:57:57+00:00
What do you mean, “Amazon doesn’t really work that way”?

Parent is talking about how C-Suite doesn’t want to trumpet something that implies their entire corporate structure is extremely disadvantaged vs new entrants and your response is “Amazon wants to build everything themselves”?

Amazon isn’t some behaviorally deterministic entity, and it could (and should?) want to both preserve goodwill and build more internally vs pay multiples to acquire.

I guess it could be that people inside are not people they have to compete with, but it doesn’t seem like that’s what you're saying.
by turnsout | 2025-08-21 16:58:05+00:00
The AI wave is so reminiscent of the early days of the internet. Right now we're in about 1999, a time of tremendous hype. Business that weren't even in tech were wondering how much they need to know about the HTTP spec. People from the marketing team were being pulled off their print ad campaigns, given a copy of Dreamweaver, and told to make the company website. We hadn't even figured out the roles.

It 100% turned out to be a bubble and yet, if anything, the internet was under-hyped. The problem in 1999 was that no one really knew how it was going to play out. Which investments would be shrewd in retrospect, and which ones would be a money pit?

When an innovation hits, it takes time to figure out whether you're selling buggy whips, or employing drivers who can drive any vehicle.

Plenty of companies sunk way too much money into custom websites back in 99, but would we say they were wrong to do it? They may have overspent at a time when a website couldn't justify the ROI within 12 months, but how could they know? A few short years later, a website was virtually required for every business.

So are companies really seeing "zero return" on their AI spend, or are they paying for valuable lessons about how AI applies to their businesses? There may be zero ROI today, but all you need to do is look at the behavior of normal people to see that AI is not going anywhere. Smart companies are experimenting.
by nulbyte | 2025-08-21 16:58:07+00:00
As a customer of many companies who has also worked in call centers, I can't tell you how frustrating it is when I, as a customer, have to call back and the person I speak with has no record or an insufficient record of my last call. This has required me to repeat myself, resend emails, and wait all over again.

It was equally frustrating when I, as a call center worker, had to ask the custmer to tell me what should already have been noted. This has required me to apologize and to do someone else's work in addition to my own.

Summarizing calls is not a waste, it's just good business.
by foxfired | 2025-08-21 16:58:15+00:00
Atlassian added this new AI feature to create audio summaries of Confluence documents. It's really impressive. No one reads documentation. I know it because I'll send someone a documentation, then they'll ask me a question that is answered in the second paragraph, meaning they didn't read it.

So their feature is not just text to speech, but a reading of a summarized version of the articles. But here is the problem. The documentation has no fluff. You don't want a summary, you want the actual details. When you are reading the document that describes how the recovery fee is calculated, you want to know exactly how it is calculated.

I've ran it on multiple documents and it misses key information. An unsuspecting user might take it at face value. So this feature looks impressive, but it misses the entire point of documentation. Which is *preserving the details*.
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-08-21 16:58:22+00:00
This issue arises only when permission settings are loose. But the trend is toward more agentic systems that often require looser permissions to function.

For example, imagine a humanoid robot whose job is to bring in packages from your front door. Vision functionality is required to gather the package. If someone leaves a package with an image taped to it containing a prompt injection, the robot could be tricked into gathering valuables from inside the house and throwing them out the window.

Good post. Securing these systems against prompt injections is something we urgently need to solve.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-21 16:58:29+00:00
>But how is it worth for meta, since they won't really monetize it.

Meta needs growth as there main platform is slowing down. To move forward they need to gamble on potential growth. VR was a gamble. They bombed that one. This is another gamble.

They're not stupid. Like all the risks you're aware of, they're also aware of. They were aware of the risks for VR too. They need to find a new high growth niche. Gambling on something with even a 40% chance of exploding into success is a good bet for them given there massive resources.
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-21 16:58:30+00:00
Most engineers turn up at meetings with product managers with two major problems:

1. They assume they know more than everyone else. Got a guy who has had a problem for 5 years and tried 20 different solutions? The engineers will spend 10 minutes thinking about it, come up with a solution (that won't work, but they insist it will) and dismiss the problem as "trivial", and think the guy is an idiot. I've done it myself (which I'm embarrassed to admit), and I've seen it at every level from junior to Staff/Principal in companies large and small. The lack of modesty in software engineering teams is perhaps my #1 peeve with the industry. As a result, they often end up designing terrible solutions.

2. Once they understand a problem and a solution, they are frequently awful at thinking through the solution from the user perspective unless they themselves have experienced the problem. This isn't unusual, it's hard to build detailed empathy for how something should work unless you try it yourself. It can be very challenging to get buy-in for a UX or a UI from engineers without it, so sometimes it's useful to get them sat in the chair trying to do the work themselves.

I'm a TPM (former engineer and engineering manager), who has to regularly wear the "product manager" hat. I can not understate how hard it is to get engineers to read a scope document, understand it, accept that the thing needs to be built, that it needs to be built a certain way from a functional perspective, and while they have free reign on architecture and how it's built, it is not their job to rip each detail to shreds assuming the users, PMs and everyone else involved up to that point isn't a completely brainless moron.

This solution is relatively elegant. He got them to talk to users about the software they built and made them realise they were focusing on the wrong details. That's good. It doesn't mean the engineers can become product managers though.

You still need the PM to own the product long-term, and to deal with the customer relationships as the thing gets built. I will also guarantee that those engineers proposed changes the PM had to push back on because of constraints outside of the engineering team's heads (legal, compliance, needed by customer X, and so on).

Edit: read down into the thread, and this company doesn't have product managers. So he's just hoping engineers can figure it out. Fair enough, the only way to develop that muscle though is to get them in front of customers regularly.
by jbg100 | 2025-08-21 16:58:46+00:00
hey, thank you! we have also thought about that! in "find" aka search, you'll see a button called "tumble" which just throws in a randomized search word, to help stumble upon something you wouldn't have otherwise.

ha I went into a rabbit hole on IMF yesterday, having not known a lot about it going in. thanks for checking this out!
by wat10000 | 2025-08-21 16:59:10+00:00
I bet chatbots are very successful when measuring how much the interaction costs, which seems to be what most companies are measuring when it comes to customer support. The problem is that it's very easy to measure cost (how many person-minutes did it take and what's your hourly cost for support agents, or how much API usage did it take for the bot?) and very hard to measure any outcome the customer actually cares about. Fix this misaligned incentive and the rest will follow naturally, but that requires treating support as a facilitator for the rest of the business rather than as a pure cost center that needs to be minimized.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-21 16:59:14+00:00
> why down-vote? Baffling

It’s a silly side discussion in which nothing new is being said. Complaining that America generally refers to the country is a hobby for some folks, and that’s fine, but it’s only entertaining for them.

If someone needs the America you’re talking about specified, i.e. they can’t figure it out from context, the discussion is sort of moot. (Same way one can use the word Europe despite it being incredibly ambiguous. Overspecificity comes at the cost of conciseness.)
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-21 17:00:06+00:00
Cash parked in money markets (which is just a click away) hasn't done that badly. Getting 4-5% has kept pace with inflation for the most part. Especially now, with economic risks to the downside/slower growth arguably growing, cash doesn't look that bad (until rates are lowered, which will put investors in a pickle, and probably force them modestly out the bond duration curve). Obviously inflation (or more specifically stagflation) risks are clear grey swans as well though, so some exposure to gold (or CTA trend following, which performs well in stagflation) is probably a prudent addition to a diversified asset mix looking to protect against the known risks. And as a benefit, gold and CTA are fairly decent black swan hedges as well (but it's a bit pointless to try and protect against black swans, which are unpredictable by definition).
by dghlsakjg | 2025-08-21 17:00:26+00:00
> engineers often know what the hard trade offs are when designing a new feature while sales and PMs do not.

I frequently run into the issue of PMs spending more time discussing and trying to slot a feature into the roadmap than it would take to just implement it. Most recently it was with trying to scope out how long it would take to ingest encrypted files. I wrote the feature and had a pull request up before the end of the meeting where they were trying to figure out if we could implement it this quarter or next.

The inverse is when a feature is assumed to be technically easy to implement (just change that setting), and you have to gently explain why that will take a week.

Having people who are technically competent in the meeting often allows a short circuit to getting tot the solution along a pathway that a PM didn't know esited ro was possible through no fault of their own.
by throw0101a | 2025-08-21 17:00:49+00:00
> Index funds won't necessarily save you.

So first off, picking individual winning stocks is hard because new information that determines pricing comes in randomly, so good luck getting information edge on your counter-party:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street

Further, <5% of stocks actually make up the vast majority of earnings:

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3710251

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2900447

* https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4541122

Those winning stocks also change over time: what used to be a winning choice can become a losing choice, so it's not like you can really set and forget things.

So index funds, buying all companies (especially if you go for more total market, like US Russell 3000), allow you to sidestep all of these risks. You are basically buying companies that service the entire economy, so as long as the economy is doing reasonably well the earnings of the companies will do reasonably well.

So yes, the S&P 500 is highly concentrated, but that is not the only index. Diversification is generally not a bad idea:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/do-you-need-to-own-internationa...

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FXuMs6YRCY
by weinzierl | 2025-08-21 17:01:05+00:00
"To claim that these letters "cannot be represented" is just outright bizarre. You literally you did so yourself."

I did not. In every book printed before 1950 and every quality book printed now the different characters would actually look differently. This is not about rendering variations but about different characters (linguistically and functionally, e.g. wrt collation) that coincidentally look similar and Unicode confuses.

Here is a source from DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung) with more background:

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2003/03215-n2593-umlaut-trema.pd...

If you think its just crazy Germans arguing a moot point Yannis Haralambous has a paragraph specifically about the umlaut/trema issue in his O'Reilly book "Fonts & Encodings".
by wredcoll | 2025-08-21 17:01:08+00:00
You're being downvoted, I suspect for being a tad hyperbolic, but I think you are raising a really important point, which is just the ever more gradual of removing a human's ability to disobey the computer system running everything. And the lack of responsibility for following computer instructions.

It's a tad far-fetched in this specific scenario, but an AI summary that says something like "cancel the subscription for user xyz" and then someone else takes action on that, and XYZ is the wrong ID, what happens?
by flatline | 2025-08-21 17:01:37+00:00
If it passes the unit tests I make it write and works for my sample manual cases I absolutely will not spend time reading the implementation details unless and until something comes up. Sometimes garbage makes its way into git but working code is better than no code and the mess can be cleaned up later. If you have correctness at the interface and function level you can get a lot done quickly. Technical debt is going to come out somewhere no matter what you do.
by phyzome | 2025-08-21 17:01:41+00:00
This is hilarious:

https://old.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1mw5yfg/force...

> Sounds like you have no product managers or your PMs suck. The platform must also be dead simple if it can be rewritten in two weeks.

And the OP's response:

> we pride ourselves in not hiring any product folks until after we raised our series A. this helped us stay super lean, move fast, and build exactly what our customers want.

...which then gets called out as pretty much in direct conflict with what came before.
by linguae | 2025-08-21 17:02:24+00:00
I agree. There have long been macOS-style skins for KDE, GNOME, and other desktop environments, and some of them do a good job at capturing the look of macOS. However, it’s the feel of macOS that makes macOS special. Additionally, it’s the Apple Human Interface Guidelines and the ecosystem of conformant apps on macOS that also contributes to the overall experience.

That’s the core challenge with efforts like ElementaryOS, helloSystem, and ravynOS; it’s not enough to provide a polished desktop if we still have to deal with non-compliant apps.

Of course, this is a challenge even for macOS in an era of Electron apps, and in the Windows ecosystem there’s much less of an emphasis on conformance to UI/UX guidelines.
by jwilber | 2025-08-21 17:02:36+00:00
Love all D3 content, but I'd add that the data binding just to create svg is not the real reason - after all, you can do this declaratively using most modern frameworks by directly iterating over the data and returning a positioned element (fwiw this is how I prefer to use it today). The reason is because of the complexity within d3 selection, namely the enter/update/exit + transition capabilities: https://www.d3indepth.com/enterexit/

Another thing worth mentioning that newcomers seem to take for granted - the margin boilerplate required for correct positioning (see https://observablehq.com/@d3/margin-convention).
by duxup | 2025-08-21 17:02:38+00:00
The nature of AI being a black box that, and fails in the face of "yeah those are some guys hiding in boxes" scenarios is something I struggle with.

I'm working on some AI projects at work and there's no magic code I can see to know what it is going to do ... or even sometimes why it did it. Letting it loose in an organization like that seems unwise at best.

Sure they could tell the AI to watch out for boxes, but now every time some poor guy moves some boxes they're going to set off something.
by shantara | 2025-08-21 17:02:55+00:00
>#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs

I mostly disagree. Every gaming AI character demo I've seen so far is just adds more irrelevant filler dialogue between the player and the game they want to play. It's the same problem that some of the older RPG games had, thinking that 4 paragraphs of text is always better than 1.
by latexr | 2025-08-21 17:03:03+00:00
> There is no contradiction.

Neither have I claimed there is one. I understood the point perfectly, I simply found it humorous. Things can be funny without being contradictions, my point was about the tradeoffs inherent to different types of OS lockdown.

> You can indeed delete System Preferences and nothing will break, ditto for utilities, it just makes life difficult if you do.

And—surprise!—most people don’t want to make their own lives difficult.

> Also reversing the problem isn't hard, you can just copy in the apps from elsewhere.

It is hard for most people. Most of us don’t just have something else at hand to copy from at all times, including the younger OP.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44973333

> For a locked down system for say a child though it might make sense.

I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing, but most of the time I see a variation on that comment it is attached to a fair bit of condescension. Like with calling something a “toy OS” when it’s used by millions of adults worldwide for productive work. Locked down systems don’t just make sense for children. On the contrary, children might benefit the most from operating systems which are not locked down, because they have the free time and willingness to experiment and won’t yet have a lot of important data. Or maybe you have kids who don’t really enjoy computers and just want to play an occasional game or need to write a school report. That’s OK too.

Both can also be true of your elderly relative, or your partner, or your cousin, or your friend who doesn’t want to fiddle with the damn machine, they just want to get their shit done without having to worry about screwing up anything. Your other friend will want the freedom to do everything and ask you for help.

There is no right approach for everyone, and there is no age at which one approach is definitely superior to another.
by tguvot | 2025-08-21 17:03:36+00:00
same as was negotiated in all rounds, including clinton parameters. big settlement blocks go to israel, in land swaps (iirc like 3% or 5% of west bank). remote settlements are evacuated. PA demilitarized (as uk, france, canada, australia, etc say should be). school should stop teaching hate (unrwa teaching that one day they will come and will liberate entire israel since 50s. take a look at this the atlantic article from 1961 https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/archives/1961/10/208-4/132... )

bibi in fact froze settlement construction once for 6 months (such freeze as precondition to negotiation never happened before. it was mess that obama created. construction inside limits of existing settlements) in order to get palestinians to negotiations table. they refused to negotiate and came to table only in last week, made no progress and left when construction was unfrozen.

this is lovely article that shows how obama killed all negotiations between israel and palestinians https://www.meforum.org/israeli-settlements-american-pressur...
by doorhammer | 2025-08-21 17:03:50+00:00
Sentiment analysis, nuanced categorization by issue, detecting new issues, tracking trends, etc, are the bread and butter of any data team at a f500 call center.

I'm not going to say every project born out of that data makes good business sense (big enough companies have fluff everywhere), but ime anyway, projects grounded to that kind of data are typically some of the most straight-forward to concretely tie to a dollar value outcome.
by nujabe | 2025-08-21 17:04:02+00:00
You folks being disingenuous as usual. Israel did not facilitate the payments to Hamas because of some humanitarian concern for Gazans(lol), they did it specifically for the purpose of undermining the PA so Netanyahu could point to Hamas and say “see we have no partner for peace” which is exactly what he’s done. [1]

He is directly quoted by many sources saying “ anyone who wants to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas” which wholly contradicts your claims. [2]

It’s amazing to see how flat Israeli hasbara falls these days, it doesn’t hit like it used to, most people are now well informed to be gaslighted with lies.

[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up...

[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-border-troops-women-h...
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-21 17:04:02+00:00
Yes, it's a false dichotomy. There are two requirements for a pair of choices to form a dichotomy, which are that they must be "mutually exclusive" and "jointly exhaustive". The former meaning that there must be no instances which are shared by both choices and the latter meaning that they must encompass all possible instances.

There are some people who would say yes for a different reason than what is given and same for people who would say no. Additionally, it's possible someone could think both things and still meaningfully answer one or the other (while ignoring the prescribed motive).
by feoren | 2025-08-21 17:04:07+00:00
The word "essential" is lifting your entire argument for you. If "essential" means whatever bdauvergne on Hacker News decides humans deserve to have in their lives, and nothing else, then sure, GPUs are non-essential. But that's not up to you. You don't get to pick and choose what other humans deserve, what they want, and what they are allowed to have. That's all "essential" has ever meant: whatever I, the author, whose Word is obviously Divine, think Other People deserve to have. Why even bother using that word when talking about the economy? It's meaningless. Get rid of it and your argument collapses. People want GPUs.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-21 17:04:18+00:00
In all the companies I have worked at and have looked at such docs, unfortunately this doesn't really work because those internal documentation sites are statistically never up to date or even close. They are hilariously unclearly written or out of date.

As for relying on the code base, that is good for code, although not for onboarding/deployment/operations/monitoring/troubleshooting that have manual steps.
by sharpy | 2025-08-21 17:04:22+00:00
100% agree with this take. I work in observability space. We use our own product to monitor our services, and being a daily user of the product helps us make it better. Our customers also agree. We get opportunity to talk to our customers doing product demos at conferences, etc, and all the feedback I have gotten is that they love the product! But wish it was cheaper.
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-21 17:04:23+00:00
Security theater. Intimidation. Calling the cops. Insurance requirements.

Neither stores nor the guard want to escalate a situation to a violent situation. The stores don't want bad press or liability for collateral damage. The security guard isn't trying to put their body on the line for some merchandise. Yeah, maybe you have a cowboy looking for trouble, but based on my experience talking/working with some guards, I'd be surprised if they are instructed to get physically involved.
by arahman4710 | 2025-08-21 17:04:33+00:00
Check out https://asksolo.ai/

We connect with slack/notion/code/etc so that you can do the following:

1. Ask questions about how your code/product works 2. Generate release notes instantly 3. Auto update your documentation when your code changes

We primarily rely on the codebase since it is never out of date