MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mbb70 | 2025-08-21 18:23:13+00:00
In healthcare, notes are directly correlated with $$$ for the hospital, because everything that is billed for must be documented with a mix of metrics (O2%, temp, lab results), events (orders, prescriptions, procedures) and notes (consultation notes, imaging interpretations, discharge summaries).

Billions get spent annually in administrative overhead focused on squeezing the most money out of these notes as possible. A tremendous expense can be justified to increase note quality (aka revenue, though 'accuracy/efficiency' is the trojan horse used to slip by regulators).

GenAI has a ton of potential there. Likewise on the insurance side, which has to wade through these notes and produce a very labor intensive paper trail of their own.

Eventually the AIs will just sling em-dashes at each other while we sit by pool.
by ec109685 | 2025-08-21 18:24:33+00:00
Actually call volumes increased:

“ The union took CBA to the workplace relations tribunal earlier this month as the company wasn’t being transparent about call volumes, according to a statement Thursday from the Finance Sector Union. The nation’s largest lender had said that the voice bot reduced call volumes by 2,000 a week, when union members said volumes were in fact rising and CBA had to offer staff overtime and direct team leaders to answer calls, the union said.”
by corysama | 2025-08-21 18:24:39+00:00
Ideally, folks would practice mob programming that includes rotating customers into the room in addition to a designer and a product manager. But, so many engineers have had bad experiences with pair programming that they allergically jump to making strawman arguments against even considering mob programming.

Ex: It doesn't require you to be forced into doing it 24/7 for everything. You can still do the vast majority of your work alone in your cave.
by Bender | 2025-08-21 18:24:46+00:00
Packet loss over ICMP can be artificial based on the backplane load of routers, ACL's and artificial rate limits. They will de-prioritize responding to ICMP and fail to respond if CPU load is high but that does not mean the packets are not being forwarded 100%. Linux and BSD also have knobs for this behavior as well. HN is BSD.

Are you seeing TCP retransmits to port 443?

for i in $(seq 69);do nc -vz -w1 news.ycombinator.com 443;sleep 2;done

Do that at the same time as watching

watch -d -n4 --no-title 'nstat -a|grep -Ei "ret|los"'

It would be most useful to do this from your location and also from VM's on a few different providers in different locations to find which thing is not like the other. The 'nc' I am using is part of the nmap distribution. To force IPv6 replace the name with the IPv6 address.
by rapind | 2025-08-21 18:24:56+00:00
I consider myself to be something of a cynic. That’s not to say I couldn’t be bamboozled in some circumstances.. . but I think it unlikely is this case, because I am simply OK with AI being a complete failure if indeed it is. I don’t have an irrational need for this to work. If anything I was very skeptical to start with and was pleasantly surprised to find it useful.

I’m not pushing Amway, I don’t own any crypto, and I’m bearish on the S&P right now due the market cap concentration at the top. And yet I swear that claude code is working for me quite well.

> Now, you did say "benefit", that's more broad, and you implied things like polish, I've seen others mention it just makes the work easier, that could be a win in itself (for the workers). Maybe it's about accessibility. Etc.

Yes exactly, and this is the (ambiguous) metric that I actually care about. I suspect this study will go down in history as useless and flawed, not to be overly harsh :)
by runarberg | 2025-08-21 18:25:37+00:00
It very much is a fringe and very hateful viewpoint. There is a difference between disagreeing with how a technical and a legal term is used to describe atrocities, and flat out denying and justifying said atrocities. Most people who don‘t describe the Gaza Genocide as a genocide are doing the former. Shaun Maguire is doing the latter. When he publicly shares the Pallywood conspiracy theory he is engaging in and spreading a hateful genocidal rhetoric. This is hatespeech and is illegal in many countries (though enforcement is very lax).
Ask HN: Is Kubernetes still a big no-no for early stages in 2025?
by herval | 2025-08-21 18:25:42+00:00
It's a commonly-repeated comment that early stage startups should avoid K8s at all cost. As someone who had to manage it on a baremetal infrastructure in the past, I get where that comes from - Kubernetes has been historically hard to setup, you'd need to spend a lot of time learning the concepts and how to write the YAML configs, etc.

However, hosted K8s options have improved significantly in recent years (all cloud providers have Kubernetes options that are pretty much self-managed), and I feel like with LLMs, it's become extremely easy to read & write deployment configs.

What's your thoughts about adopting K8s as infrastructure early on (say, when you have initial customer fit and a team of 5+ engineers) and standardizing around it? How early is too early? What pitfalls do you think still exist today?
by mprovost | 2025-08-21 18:25:49+00:00
This reminds me of coding with AI where slightly changing the prompt gives you different code and you don't really understand why but you use it anyway. In this case it's not even the compiler that's adding the incorrect instructions - it's the linker. Someday we'll just trust the AI to spit out working code the same way we assume that the C toolchain produces reasonable assembler. And when it doesn't it's remarkable enough to warrant a blog post and HN discussion.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-08-21 18:25:59+00:00
Wow! Do you have a sense why it's not a profitable business for them? Just on the face of it, they have they have what is arguably the dominant product in this category, and they charge a reasonable license fee to use it.

I find it worrying if "make good software and sell it to people" isn't sufficient to have a profitable business.

And of course, Unity doesn't merely sell licenses, they also run an asset store and take a cut from every transaction, a business model that has been gold for other technology companies. Of course the market for Unity assets is smaller than mobile apps, but this is in addition to actual Unity licenses.
by kokanee | 2025-08-21 18:28:06+00:00
I'm not convinced that the immaturity of the tech is what's holding back the profits. The impact and adoption of the tech are through the roof. It has shaken the job market across sectors like I've never seen before. My thinking is that if the bubble bursts, it won't be because the technology failed to deliver functionally; it will be because the technology simply does not become as profitable to operate as everyone is betting right now.

What will it mean if the cutting edge models are open source, and being OpenAI effectively boils down to running those models in your data center? Your business model is suddenly not that different from any cloud service provider; you might as well be Digital Ocean.
by e40 | 2025-08-21 18:28:16+00:00
Well, sometimes they really gum up the works. I have developers in Ukraine and several times in the last year a wire transfer to them to pay them their monthly salary was held up for more than a month in transit. It was stuck at a bank in NYC and no amount of me pushing on my rep at Wells Fargo could get it unstuck OR returned. Last one ended up taking almost 2 months to get there! And, they told us it was going to be returned, so we paid the person via other means (BTC). Very frustrating.
by zamadatix | 2025-08-21 18:28:34+00:00
I'd say it's about as likely as LLMs actually replacing the engineers in implementing the code in the next couple of years. I think it's more likely LLMs end up being like every other tech advancement: a way to increase the total amount of stuff being done, but not actually lower the need for people to use them.

Or maybe the next thing after LLMs arrives in 2026 and it's actually better than everyone at everything and can feed itself in a loop, but I doubt it.
by glenstein | 2025-08-21 18:28:38+00:00
You keep insisting that you understand, but the upshot of understanding would have been acknowledging the specifics which you haven't done despite clearly having plenty of time and energy to reply.

Instead you've tried everything from saying I need to "get a sense of humor", to character attacks, to insisting without specific explanation that I "don't understand", to declaring that you "don't care", to declaring that no amount of information will make you acknowledge the inaccuracy of your own comments.

So you haven't succeeded in changing the subject of the conversation, except in the sense of turning it into a tutorial about why you can't make wrong into right with character attacks or declarations about how much you don't care.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-08-21 18:28:44+00:00
Yes but it's undeniable that the industry has changed recently. It used to be, someone would make a game to express themselves, it would be picked up by a major studio, it would be expanded and polished until it had mass appeal, and became the next "blockbuster" game. Now, it's, someone makes a game to express themselves, and they eke by on a trickly of income, they fight for placement among the sea of shovelware on the game store sites, and they never get picked up by a big publisher. Meanwhile, the big 3 game companies are creating the same formulaic game over and over and, through massive advertising campaigns, have captured all of the customers.
by tombert | 2025-08-21 18:28:54+00:00
Sure, I don't disagree with that. If you have a PhD in theoretical physics, you're probably in a good enough position to talk about different types of calculus, and maybe some other forms of physics depending on if there's overlap. But I think a lot of people will see "Dr." in front of the name and assume that these people are like the professor from Gilligan's Island and understand everything about everything.

It's entirely possible that a PhD theoretical physicist does know a lot about biology (maybe they got a job in a biophysics or something) but I'm saying it's definitely not implied, and it might even suggest that they don't have expertise in that field.
by Deestan | 2025-08-21 18:28:58+00:00
I am now making an emotional reaction based on zero knowledge of the B2B codebase's environment, but to be honest I think it is relevant to the discussion on why people are "worlds apart".

200k lines of code is a failure state. At this point you have lost control and can only make changes to the codebase through immense effort, and not at a tolerable pace.

Agentic code writers are good at giving you this size of mess and at helping to shovel stuff around to make changes that are hard for humans due to the unusable state of the codebase.

If overgrown barely manageble codebases are all a person's ever known and they think it's normal that changes are hard and time-consuming and needing reams of code, I understand that they believe AI agents are useful as code writers. I think they do not have the foundation to tell mediocre from good code.

I am extremely aware of the judgemental hubris of this comment. I'd not normally huff my own farts in public this obnoxiously, but I honestly feel it is useful for the "AI hater vs AI sucker" discussion to be honest about this type of emotion.
by LPisGood | 2025-08-21 18:29:13+00:00
This style of attack has been discussed for a while https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec20-quiring.pdf - it’s scary because a scaled image can appear to be an _entirely_ different image.

One method for this would be if you want to have a certain group arrested for having illegal images, you could use this sort of scaling trick to transform those images into memes, political messages, whatever that the target group might download.
by latexr | 2025-08-21 18:29:21+00:00
> Websites aren't people. They don't have desires.

Obviously I’m talking about the people behind them, and I very much doubt you lack the minimal mental acuity to understand that when I used “website owners” in the preceding sentence. If you don’t want to engage in a good faith discussion you can just say so, no need to waste our time with fake pedantry. But alright, I edited that section.

> You can set your machine to blackhole the traffic or TCP RST or whatever you want. It's just network traffic.

And then you spend all your time in a game of cat and mouse, while these scrappers bring your website down and cost you huge amounts of money. Are you incapable of understanding how that is a problem?

> People send me spam. I don't whine about it. I block it.

Is the amount of spam you get so overwhelming that it swamps your inbox every day to a level you’re unable to find the real messages? Do those spammers routinely circumvent your rules and filters after you’ve blocked them? Is every spam message you get costing you money? Are they increasing every day? No? Then it’s not the same thing at all.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-21 18:29:32+00:00
I do think that we have a moral obligation though. And we can discuss about that too.

Basically, I think that this person who has this "stupid" thought had it because they were wrong in their reason and nothing wrong with that and they just showed the world that they have it.

Now here's what I think, if I mock them, they would hate even more and they would actually convince themselves that they were even more right

And if I say nothing, then they are just living in their own bubble and the algorithms serving them are either ragebaits or their own echo chambers.

But even then, if they are truly "stupid" (i don't think they are, they just have a wrong take), then worst case they don't change and even then I had fun writing the comment. but yeah I did get ragebaited in the beginning, they were so punchable as a face when I first read it but I mean, I don't know man, we need to burst echo chambers or atleast have good discussions around it instead of just making them live in their bubbles with wrong takes imo.

But I also understand that we have no moral obligation to, but I really try (I think) in this world to not make myself an echo chamber by helping others who are in so.

Not that we have to do it, but I got complimented once in some sense for it and I kinda aligned with it ever since.

Small things like compliments / actually listening to others can actually have the potential to compound so much for the other person that honestly its worth it in my opinion. But I think that I wish to get such reciprocity back, someone actually discussing things / helping others but the world just feels so mixed man idk. I just don't want to be shining hero but uh I genuinely wish that I can be the change that I want in this world
by xp84 | 2025-08-21 18:30:15+00:00
> Removing stock apps from the Applications folder is completely safe—nothing will break—and this is your computer, so you should make it your own

This is the part that hits home the most for me.

I get the benefits of the hardened pc-as-appliance that Apple has shoved down all our throats as "for our own good" but using a modern Mac compared to even Mavericks, or Windows XP, feels to me like if someone came into my house and confined me to a coat closet which they've padded and sealed off. This isn't my house anymore, someone else controls everything and only they can give me permission (revocable at any time) to do literally anything. They promise me that I'll never hit my head now, but I never had that problem in the first place.
by albrewer | 2025-08-21 18:30:36+00:00
> Because in the software engineering world there is very little engineering involved.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've been given the time to do a planning period for something less than a "major" feature in the past few years. Oddly, the only time I was able to push good QA, testing, and development practices was at an engineering firm.
by aranelsurion | 2025-08-21 18:30:41+00:00
Not sure if VSCodium and others can use all the extensions, especially Microsoft ones like Copilot. I remember setting up something like that once and had to do a lot of fiddling to be able to use all the extensions I wanted. Gave up on it at some point.

As for people in general, safe bet in almost any topic is that most people won’t care. :) So yes most people use VSCode.
by arduanika | 2025-08-21 18:31:01+00:00
Is nis0s your real name? Why not?

Anons criticize published research all day long on X and other social media. Should they be banned? Or just the ones you don't like?

Btw, there's nothing in this article about an anon criticizing research that was "published" in the academic sense. There's the critique that Tim and his anonymous co-author did of a YouTube video. Is that the "published research" you're referring to? Is the 95% of a YouTube comment section that is anonymous operating in bad faith?

> this field is poorly understood by 98% of the commenters, so it’s impossible to decide who is wrong or right based on the science alone

Which is why you need trustworthy proxies. To quote TFA:

> Scientific disagreements are intricate matters that require the attention of highly trained experts. However, for laypersons to be able to make up their own minds on such issues, they have to rely on proxies for credibility such as persuasiveness and conviction. This is the vulnerability that contrarians exploit, as they are often skilled in crafting the optics and rhetoric to support their case. Indeed, Weinstein and Hossenfelder’s strong personalities and their sowing of distrust in institutions enable them to persuade others of the correctness of their views when they deviate from those of experts. Thus, I include this section to show that even if one were to rely on social cues alone, there is in fact no controversy about the illegitimacy of Geometric Unity among those who are close to Weinstein or who are qualified to judge. The success of physics grifters has relied on the fact that they make more noise than those who have quietly moved on.

Now as to your defense of Hossenfelder...in that process of filtering out the noise, we rely on intermediaries. When the intermediaries get it wrong, or waffle about matters that should be clear, their reputation rightly suffers. You can call this "comeuppance" if you like, but it's simply a natural part of the sensemaking process.
by bob1029 | 2025-08-21 18:31:17+00:00
> But I was very surprised to learn that until 2021, most Texans had never had a power interruption in decades

And now in 2025 you will find the highest density of generac installs in Texas. I'm in a neighborhood where at least 80% of the homes have a standby unit. The substation is less than a mile away but the lines have to go through Narnia to reach us. Outages are half a day at a minimum.
by doorhammer | 2025-08-21 18:31:38+00:00
They might not be, and their use-case might not be one I agree with. I can just imagine a plausible reality where they made a reasonable decision given the incentives and constraints, and I default to that.

I'm basically inferring how this would go down in the context I worked under, not the GP, because I don't know the details of their real context.

I think I'm seeing where I'm not being as clear as I could, though.

I'm talking about the lifecycle of a methodology for categorizing calls, regardless of whether or not it's a human categorizing them or a machine.

If your call center agent is writing summaries and categorizing their own calls, you still typically have a QA department of humans that listen to a random sample of full calls for any given agent on a schedule to verify that your human classifiers are accurately tagging calls. The QA agents will typically listen to them at like 4x speed or more, but mostly they're just sampling and validating the sample.

The same goes for _any_ automated process you want to apply at scale. You run it in parallel to your existing methodology and you randomly sample classified calls, verifying that the results were correct and you _also_ compare the overall results of the new method to the existing one, because you know how accurate the existing method is.

But you don't do that for _every_ call.

You find a new methodology you think is worth trying and you trial it to validate the results. You compare the cost and accuracy of that method against the cost and accuracy of the old one. And you absolutely would often have a real human listen to full calls, just not _all_ of them.

In that respect, LLMs aren't particularly special. They're just a function that takes a call and returns some categories and metadata. You compare that to the output of your existing function.

But it's all part of the: New tech consideration? -> Set up conditions to validate quantitatively -> run trials -> measure -> compare -> decide

Then on a schedule you go back and do another analysis to make sure your methodology is still providing the accuracy you need it to, even if you haven't change anything
by ninalanyon | 2025-08-21 18:31:39+00:00
This will make no difference at all to the reading skills of Danish 15 year olds. My three children are older than that and never read books. The do however read a lot of text and are perfectly competent at it. But the text they read is on a computer screen or a mobile and is rarely anything paid for, a lot of it is fan fiction related to a major online game.

The idea that you can convince a teenager who has grown up with the internet at their fingertips to buy books by reducing the price by 20% is laughable. And they won't read books provided at no cost either.

The 24% who cannot read well have simply been failed by the schools they attended and it is there that the politicians must look for the reasons and also the solutions.
by sillywalk | 2025-08-21 18:32:09+00:00
> For some inexplicable reason, Apple's website does not offer a Mavericks download link. Their official list skips straight from Mountain Lion (10.8) to Yosemite (10.10).

Does anybody have an idea why Mavericks isn't available from Apple?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102662#browser
by hinkley | 2025-08-21 18:32:13+00:00
There’s a really old trick with HDDs where you buy a big disc and then allocate less than half of it. There’s more throughput on the first half of the disk, more tracks per cylinder so fewer seeks, and never having to read half the disk reduces the worst case seek time. All increase IOPs.

But then what do you do with the other half of the disk? If you access it when the machine isn’t dormant you lose most of these benefits.

For deep storage you have two problems. Time to access the files, and resources to locate the files. In a distributed file store there’s the potential for chatty access or large memory footprints for directory structures. You might need an elaborate system to locate file 54325 if you’re doing some consistent hashing thing, but the customer has no clue what 54325 is. They want the birthday party video. So they still need a directory structure even if you can avoid it.
by kasey_junk | 2025-08-21 18:32:40+00:00
Reserve ratios have not been the major capital constraint for a very long time. Loan to deposit ratios have been. And those have stayed in normal bounds since the great financial crisis. Both bank regulators and importantly bank investors keep on top of this because they are the ones to lose the most if it gets out of wack.

The reserve requirement had to be loosened because banks became too conservative, largely because their investors were skittish about ldr.