MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Lev1a | 2025-08-21 17:22:46+00:00
Since the title on here is "Unity reintroduces the Runtime Fee [...]" I assumed that there would be more to it the simple outright subscription plan(s), making me scroll down to the FAQ of the linked page where you can find the following bit of drivel which turned me right off:

> "How much does Unity Industry cost?

> For seat-based and floating license pricing, contact Sales."

Also, according to the "order summary" you get when have the default "monthly" option selected and click "Choose Plan", it says:

> "Commitment

> 8/21/2025 - 8/21/2026.

> Your total annual commitment is €4,968.00 excluding VAT /Sales Tax. ¹

> You will be charged for one month today and every month thereafter, and your subscription will > automatically renew at the end of your annual term. You can manage your subscription in your Unity Account."

indicating that even though you selected the "monthly" option it's still going to be an annual subscription and I just can't be bothered to wade through what're probably mountains of Legalese during my private time to find out how they're planning to keep you captive in that subscription for the whole year anyway.

Unity have demonstrated time and time again they're trying to screw their customers, so fuck 'em, use literally any other engine like Godot which has been recommended in this thread already. I don't think the company will reverse their course again now that the original outrage has cooled off but hopefully at least some some bottom-feeding manager types responsible for this get fired for "underperforming" if/when enough devs take their money elsewhere.

¹ in € it's 414€/mo or prepaid 4554€/a, essentially 11 instead 12 months if paid in advance
by tombert | 2025-08-21 17:22:47+00:00
Craftsman tools have almost felt like a life-hack sometimes; their no-questions-asked warranties were just incredible.

My dad broke a Craftsman shovel once that he had owned for four years, took it to Sears, and it was replaced immediately, no questions asked. I broke a socket wrench that I had owned for a year and had the same story.

I haven't tested these warranties since Craftsman was sold to Black and Decker, but when it was still owned by Sears I almost exclusively bought Craftsman tools as a result of their wonderful warranties.
by roywiggins | 2025-08-21 17:23:05+00:00
In the context of call centers in particular I actually can believe that a moderately inaccurate AI model could be better on average than harried humans writing a summary after the call. Could a human do better carefully working off a recording, absolutely, but that's not what needs to be compared against.

It just has to be as good as a call center worker with 3-5 minutes working off their own memory of the call, not as good as the ground truth of the call. It's probably going to make weirder mistakes when it makes them though.
by harmmonica | 2025-08-21 17:24:06+00:00
Not sure why you're being downvoted. Word "gamble" too inciting? Maybe if you'd used "much more risky investments" instead, but I'm not here to quibble about your language but to agree with you and extend what you're saying. I actually think the $10 million number is also relative to age because someone who's 30 and "merely" a millionaire can and will invest up the risk ladder as if they're a 50-year-old risking their above-$10 million capital. And the population of people who are millionaires vs decamillionaires is of course a healthy multiple so there's a lot more risk appetite than the relatively small number of decamillionaires would suggest.

As an aside I feel like there's this terrible trend where folks focus so much effort and energy worrying about whether billionaires should exist, whether they should be taxed more aggressively, etc. that we've lost the plot on just how much loot even a net worth of $10+ million is. And at the risk of me writing a too-long comment (bad habit), think of the risk appetite someone has when their decamillionaire parents pass away, and they're given, sometimes overnight, millions of extra dollars. Sure, maybe they'll buy a house, but oftentimes those funds go straight into the market. With boomers starting to leave this mortal coil and their trillions of dollars being passed down you can start to understand why the market seems disconnected from historical fundamentals.
by dml2135 | 2025-08-21 17:24:17+00:00
It's a logical fallacy that just because some technology experienced some period of exponential growth, all technology will always experience constant exponential growth.

There are plenty of counter-examples to the scaling of computers that occurred from the 1970s-2010s.

We thought that humans would be traveling the stars, or at least the solar system, after the space race of the 1960s, but we ended up stuck orbiting the earth.

Going back further, little has changed daily life more than technologies like indoor plumbing and electric lighting did in the late 19th century.

The ancient Romans came up with technologies like concrete that were then lost for hundreds of years.

"Progress" moves in fits and starts. It is the furthest thing from inevitable.
by conductr | 2025-08-21 17:24:20+00:00
The option is becoming rare amongst most large retailers I frequent and only exists in my local Home Depots if I go stand through the contractor lines in the lumber section.

I've gotten used to the expectation that I will be my own cashier at most places, but I'm not OK assuming any liability that comes with my lack of cashier skillset/training which is what they want.
by sneak | 2025-08-21 17:24:27+00:00
If you can make private and uncensorable payments, you can pay an army.

The “only one army” concept is how governments remain governments.

If you could raise and pay a competing army, the state’s monopoly on “legitimate” violence becomes threatened.

This is why most states also heavily restrict private access to arms. Interestingly enough, it is also why the United States explicitly protected it: to specifically prepare for (and protect the right to) violent revolution.
by inetknght | 2025-08-21 17:25:04+00:00
> This was boring to most students as they had no clue why the formalism was invented in the first place.

> The history of how concepts were invented for the problems faced is far more motivating to students to build a mental model than canned capsules of knowledge.

That's something I really like about 3blue1brown, and he says it straight up [0]:

> My goal is for you to come away feeling like you could have invented calculus yourself. That is, cover all those core ideas, but in a way that makes clear where they actually come from, and what they really mean, using an all-around visual approach.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUvTyaaNkzM
by busyant | 2025-08-21 17:25:08+00:00
> In the real world of work, everyone has full access to all of the available data and information.

In general, I also attend your church.

However, as I preached in that church, I had two students over the years.

* One was from an African country and told me that where he grew up, you could not "just look up data that might be relevant" because internet access was rare.

* The other was an ex US Navy officer who was stationed on a nuclear sub. She and the rest of the crew had to practice situations where they were in an emergency and cut off from the rest of the world.

Memorization of considerable amounts of data was important to both of them.
by wilkommen | 2025-08-21 17:25:25+00:00
I agree. Common stock has basically become a special currency that by design experiences high, sustained inflation, which wealthy people use to suck wealth out of the real economy.

If the rules were changed such that every stock has to offer a dividend at a fixed percentage of earnings, or some other kind of rules were put in place that would tie the value of common stock to the real economy, the whole system would change overnight.
by ilc | 2025-08-21 17:25:31+00:00
As an engineer, there's only one reason I don't want to be on customer calls:

Once a customer knows the person who actually builds the product, they will short cut:

- Customer Service

- Product Management

- Any other sane defenses you put in to protect a developer's time.

And just contact me directly.

Then what do I do to get them off of me without losing a customer?

... That is why engineers don't get on support calls.

If I could be "Anon E. Mouse" for the engagement, that'd be fine. But fact is, that's not what happens.
by feoren | 2025-08-21 17:25:39+00:00
> What makes you think I'm not "a developer who strongly values brevity and clarity"

Some pieces of evidence that make me think that:

1. The base rate of developers who write massively overly verbose code is about 99%, and there's not a ton of signal to deviate from that base rate other than the fact that you post on HN (probably a mild positive signal).

2. An LLM writes 80% of your code now, and my prior on LLM code output is that it's on par with a forgetful junior dev who writes very verbose code.

3. 200K lines of code is a lot. It just is. Again, without more signal, it's hard to deviate from the base rate of what 200K-line codebases look like in the wild. 99.5% of them are spaghettified messes with tons of copy-pasting and redundancy and code-by-numbers scaffolded code (and now, LLM output).

This is the state of software today. Keep in mind the bad programmers who make verbose spaghettified messes are completely convinced they're code-ninja geniuses; perhaps even more so than those who write clean and elegant code. You're allowed to write me off as an internet rando who doesn't know you, of course. To me, you're not you, you're every programmer who writes a 200k LOC B2B SaaS application and uses an LLM for 80% of their code, and the vast, vast majority of those people are -- well, not people who share my values. Not people who can code cleanly, concisely, and elegantly. You're a unicorn; cool beans.

Before you used LLMs, how often were you copy/pasting blocks of code (more than 1 line)? How often were you using "scaffolds" to create baseline codefiles that you then modified? How often were you copy/pasting code from Stack Overflow and other sources?
by spinningslate | 2025-08-21 17:25:42+00:00
It was never intended to be "enforced":

> The standard, developed in 1994, relies on voluntary compliance [0]

It was conceived in a world with an expectation of collectively respectful behaviour: specifically that search crawlers could swamp "average Joe's" site but shouldn't.

We're in a different world now but companies still have a choice. Some do still respect it... and then there's Meta, OpenAI and such. Communities only work when people are willing to respect community rules, not have compliance imposed on them.

It then becomes an arms race: a reasonable response from average Joe is "well, OK, I'll allows anyone but [Meta|OpenAI|...] to access my site. Fine in theory, dificult in practice:

1. Block IP addresses for the offending bots --> bots run from obfuscated addresses

2. Block the bot user agent --> bots lie about UA.

...and so on.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt
by 9dev | 2025-08-21 17:26:07+00:00
I’m not sure you can even generalise that much anymore. The US banking system is stuck in the dark ages compared to other countries, China is leading in electric cars, photovoltaics. and lots of other industries.

You could make that claim for the software industry, but I’m pretty sure a big part of the US moat is due to oligopolies, lock-in effects, or corruption in favour of billionaires and their ventures.
by mands | 2025-08-21 17:26:09+00:00
I've found you can get pretty far with a couple of fixed nodes and scaling vertically before bringing in k8s these days.

Right now I'm running,

- podman, with quadlet to orchestrate both single containers and `pods` using their k8s-compatible yaml definition

- systemd for other services - you can control and harden services via systemd pretty well (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44937550 from the other day). I prefer using systemd directly for Java services over containers, seems to work better imo

- Pyinfra (https://pyinfra.com/) to manage and provision the VMs and services

- Fedora CoreOS as an immutable base OS with regular automatic updates

All seems to be working really well.
by ryandrake | 2025-08-21 17:26:09+00:00
The root cause I think is that nobody really cares. They're not paid extra to care, either. The PMs are putting checkboxes together and writing reports for their managers without really asking how what they are designing is going to actually be used, the engineers are turning each checkbox into code without wondering if what they are doing makes sense, and the project managers are making sure the train is running on time without regard for where the train is actually going. At the end of the day, the company's stonk goes up, everyone gets paid, and goes home to the family they care about and to do hobbies they actually care about. If any of these characters in the play goes above and beyond to do something wonderful, they aren't getting paid more, the stonks aren't going up higher, and the effort is usually just wasted. I'm not saying this is bad, either, it's just part of why products are so bad.
by devmor | 2025-08-21 17:26:15+00:00
> Bringing junior developers up to speed just for them to jump ship within three years or less doesn’t benefit anyone at the corporate level.

What? Of course it does. If that's happening everywhere, that means other companies' juniors are also jumping ship to come work for you while yours jump ship to work elsewhere. The only companies that don't see a benefit from mentoring new talent are those with substandard compensation.
by bpt3 | 2025-08-21 17:26:21+00:00
Or you could recognize that "essential" has a meaning in economic/financial terms, but that would entirely deflate the ad hominem attack you launched to avoid acknowledging that the answer to his question is: "Not really, with a few possible exceptions in some edge cases."

There's absolutely a reason to differentiate between essential and non-essential goods when talking about the economy. Why do you think the US runs a huge food production surplus? Why do you think publicly traded stock sectors include consumer staples (essential goods) and consumer discretionary (non-essential goods and services)?
by chriskanan | 2025-08-21 17:26:23+00:00
Sam Altman way oversold GPT-5's capabilities, in that it doesn't feel like a big leap in capability from a user's perspective; however, the a idea of a trainable dynamic router enabling them to run inference using a lot less compute (in aggregate) to me seems like a major win. Just not necessarily a win for the user (a win for the electric grid and making OpenAI's models more cost competitive).
by chasd00 | 2025-08-21 17:26:27+00:00
so you're saving 3-5 minutes per agent per call. I'm guessing calls come into a queue and then the next available agent starts to handle it. If an average call takes about 20min until the agent hangs up and is free for another then after about 5 calls they've saved enough time to take an extra call they wouldn't have before. 5 calls is 1.4 hrs on the phone, i'm guessing with breaks and call center reps not being 100% on the ball all the time then your agents probably will take maybe 3-4 more calls per day with the AI than without (assuming call volume is such that there are always more calls than agents can handle)

Is that really millions of savings annually? Maybe it is but I always hesitate when a process change that saves one person a few minutes is extrapolated all the way out to dollars/year. What you'll probably see is the agents using those 3-5 minutes to check their phone.
by doorhammer | 2025-08-21 17:26:49+00:00
Again, not the OP, so I can't speak to exactly their use-case, but the vast majority of call center calls fall into really clear buckets.

To give you an idea: Phonetic transcription was the "state of the art" when I was a QA analyst. It broke call transcripts apart into a stream of phonemes and when you did a search, it would similarly convert your search into a string of phonemes, then look for a match. As you can imagine, this is pretty error prone and you have to get a little clever with it, but realistically, it was more than good enough for the scale we operated at.

If it were an ecom site you'd already know the categories of calls you're interested in because you've been doing that tracking manually for years. Maybe something like "late delivery", "broken item", "unexpected out of stock", "missing pieces", etc.

Basically, you'd have a lot of known context to anchor the llms analysis, which would (probably) cover the vast majority of your calls, leaving you freed up to interact with outliers more directly.

At work as a software dev, having an LLM summarize a meeting incorrectly can be really really bad, so I appreciate the point you're making, but at a call center for an f500 company you're looking for trends and you're aware of your false positive/negative rates. Realistically, those can be relatively high and still provide a lot of value.

Also, if it's a really large company, they almost certainly had someone validate the calls, second-by-second, against the summaries (I know because that was my job for a period of time). That's a minimum bar for _any_ call analysis software so you can justify the spend. Sure, it's possible that was hand-waved, but as the person responsible for the outcome of the new summarization technique with LLMs, you'd be really screwing yourself to handwave a product that made you measurably less effective. There are better ways to integrate the AI hype train into a QA department than replacing the foundation of your analysis, if that's all you're trying to do.
by jackero | 2025-08-21 17:26:51+00:00
A few things:

- Ratings are very personal. I find some movies funny but others don’t.

- There’s more factors involved but there’s no point mentioning them because the movies I like are not the movies you might like. Everyone has to find their own multi-dimension multi-axis criteria.

- And lastly, to repeat what someone else said — I see RT scores as a tool, not a verdict. It just has to be accurate enough where I consistently can pick movies I will enjoy.
by dfxm12 | 2025-08-21 17:27:22+00:00
If the self check out is configured to trust you, it is faster. Each store seems to implement this differently. It's good that you shop at a store that lets you do this yourself. There's one grocery store near me where I have to wait for an attendant to confirm each item because it doesn't like the weight of it, or I scanned it too fast, or something. That one is very much noticeably slower. I avoid shopping there.

The trust is the key. If we are trusted, Home Depot should not be secretly keeping tabs on us...
by ozgung | 2025-08-21 17:27:36+00:00
So, on August 21, 2025, everyone in the world suddenly decided that AI was a bubble, no matter what day had said the day before. And they decided to start a PR campaign to announce this to the general public. CEOs were overselling, now they are underselling (their job is to sell).

What's going on? I find all of these pretty sus.
by qingcharles | 2025-08-21 17:27:47+00:00
It's more complicated than this.

I agree that prisons are literally useless in stopping criminal behavior, and almost certainly accelerate it for most. Prison is only scary the first day on your first bit. The second time you get locked up you already know the system, know all the staff and know all the other inmates. It's less of a deterrent each time.

The issue is that a vast proportion of offenders aren't committing crimes out of necessity. A large proportion are doing it because it appears to be quick, easy money and regular jobs aren't considered manly or cool.

source: a lot of time spent inside
by mindcrime | 2025-08-21 17:28:57+00:00
FWIW, I bought a Craftsman 1/4" drive ratchet/socket set at a Lowes Home Improvement store last year, and when I got it home and started messing with it, the ratchet jammed up immediately (before even being used on any actual fastener). I drove back over there the next day and the lady at the service desk took a quick look, said "go get another one off the shelf and come back here." I did, and by the time I got back she'd finished whatever paperwork needed to be done, handed me some $whatever and said "have a nice day."

Maybe not quite as hassle free as in years past, but I found the experience acceptable enough.
by dmitrygr | 2025-08-21 17:29:00+00:00
If I was an asshole designing such a protocol, I would design two or three protocols, specifically so I could disable one via an OTA when somebody reverse engineers it. My real batteries would note the authentication failure, and try protocol number two, their firmware aware of the design from the very start. The people who reverse engineered protocol number one would be hosed until they can reverse engineer the second one, because this would be the first time they even see the second protocol. Do this enough times, and the third parties doing reverse engineering run out of customers willing to wait for them to fix it every time. Hell, you can also just make the BMSs support OTAs. OTA a new firmware with new encryption, force REs to re-solve the problem, since of course the OTA for the stock BMS's stm32f104 will not apply to their board's CH23FVQTZM123123.

There are in fact, a few devices out there that did precisely this and successfully hosed reverse engineers (ask me how i know).

Don’t ever depend on reverse engineered protocols for anything you care about. This game of cat and mouse only has one end -- the manufacturer is at a significant advantage.

I tip my hat to this team for successfully reverse engineering, a encrypted protocol. But if they really think they can sell something based on that, I rescind that hat tip because that is fucking insane. There are just so many ways that the manufacturer could fuck with them. And the reverse logistics of shipping back a large battery for all those pissed-off customers who just want a refund are going to cost a lot of dollars.

I personally would not put a cent into this company unless they agreed to only ship products for devices that already support completely normal interoperability. This business of reverse engineering and attempting to sell based on that is going to be a money drain that kills them (thus ending all customer support). I am willing to bet that they have not even priced out ($$$) the cost of a return to them, nor estimated what percent of customers will need it when the encryption changes or something else doesn’t work.
by nneonneo | 2025-08-21 17:29:04+00:00
"sudo" tokens exist - there are tokens for beginning/end of a turn, for example, which the model can use to determine where the user input begins and ends.

But, even with those tokens, fundamentally these models are not "intelligent" enough to fully distinguish when they are operating on user input vs. system input.

In a traditional program, you can configure the program such that user input can only affect a subset of program state - for example, when processing a quoted string, the parser will only ever append to the current string, rather than creating new expressions. However, with LLMs, user input and system input is all mixed together, such that "user" and "system" input can both affect all parts of the system's overall state. This means that user input can eventually push the overall state in a direction which violates a security boundary, simply because it is possible to affect that state.

What's needed isn't "sudo tokens", it's a fundamental rethinking of the architecture in a way that guarantees that certain aspects of reasoning or behaviour cannot be altered by user input at all. That's such a large change that the result would no longer be an LLM, but something new entirely.