MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: AyeWatch – Your Personal AI Internet Monitor – To Monitor the Situation
by srx9 | 2025-08-30 15:54:52+00:00
Monitor topics, sources, and pages with AI. Get instant alerts only when your rules match or something new happens , less noise, more signal. Most monitoring tools are glorified Google Alerts. They dump everything on you. “Here’s 200 mentions of your keyword today. Good luck.”

The internet moves too fast. By the time you check Twitter, Reddit, HackerNews, industry blogs, career pages, research papers etc…, something important already happened three hours ago. Or three days ago.

For example: Every morning: check 15 tabs. Every lunch: scan social feeds. Every evening: catch up on industry news. Still missed that competitor’s funding announcement. Still found out about that viral ai announcements two days late. Still discovered that game-changing research paper after everyone else.

AyeWatch monitors the entire internet for you — anything like news sites, blogs, social media, documents, research papers etc... But here’s the kicker: it only bothers you when something actually matters.

Not “someone mentioned your keyword in passing.” Not “here’s the same news story from 47 different sources.” Just the real stuff. The signal.

Download App Today and start using with free limited Quota to experience. AyeWatch watches everything so you can focus on what matters. No more tab sprawl. No more FOMO. No more finding out late.
by theptip | 2025-08-30 15:55:01+00:00
I would endorse this position at very least directionally. The job is going to move up the abstraction stack; one person will do what a 5-person startup did, which means a founder must own more product and sales stuff.

If you like working in software because you enjoy writing code, I predict you’re gonna find it harder to make this pay. (Though leisure coding will likely get more fun, and there will always be niche CS-type roles that require inventing new technical systems.)

If you like software because you enjoy making things that people find valuable or entertaining, then I think you’ll do just fine.
by lr4444lr | 2025-08-30 15:55:38+00:00
I am sorry you've had only negative experiences. Most of mine with PMs were negative as well, but a good one is a dragon slayer and bottleneck unclogger. They feel not like your manager, but like your servant, listening to exactly what you need, relaying messages accurately from other teams of what they need from you, and with the big picture perspective required for you not just to fulfill the task, but do it in a long-term strategically productive way.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-30 15:55:41+00:00
> Co-ops seem like they should out perform from a worker incentive point of view. , why are co-ops basically non-existent in Big Tech. WinCo, groceries, and REI, expensive outdoor stuff, in the US are both big co-ops but are retailers.

REI is a consumer coop, not a labor co-op (and WinCo, while employee-owned through an ESOP, is not a co-op at all.)

Cooperative Home Care Associates, a home health care agency HQ’d in the Bronx, appears to be the largest US labor cooperatives (and labor intensive service industries are probably the most common places to find labor coops in the US.)

> Maybe VC money warps the economics so that every company needs to be winner takes all lotto tickets for the investors. Having it be worker owned gets rid of the extreme ROÍ VCs expect.

Right. VC goals and labor coop goals are almost never aligned, and instead are almost diametrically opposed. Labor coops tend to favor conservative expansion and risk mitigation and stability. VC’s want to swing for the fences on scale—a succesful steady-state business that will pay its founding employees good pay forever but not expand much is a massive failure for VCs, but a win for a labor coop.
by dahart | 2025-08-30 15:55:47+00:00
> It’s so different, convoluted, mostly relying on tricks, clean code will slow you down

There’s a seed of truth here, but at the same time, I’ve heard this mostly from people who learned certain programming patterns in school or in enterprise application development, and never learned embedded systems engineering, or just plain didn’t start with game development.

You might be referring to issues with specific game engines, or you might be referring to writing only scripts and plugins for an existing game engine, as opposed to writing a game engine, I don’t know, but generally speaking game coding absolutely can and should be clean. It’s just a different kind of clean than you might expect, if you’re used to thinking in terms of C++ inheritance or functional programming or design patterns you learned elsewhere.
by yndoendo | 2025-08-30 15:56:43+00:00
I used SQLite in an embedded life safety system for years. It was storing settings and history events on an industrial MicroSD card. Failure happens for the most common reasons it happens across all other products.

1) MicroSD card started producing bad sectors. 2) Power failure during write. 3) Fraudulent MicroSD being used.

Settings section of the database where written so few times that they could be recovered. It was the journaling of events for analysis that where the ones to be lost. Most of the time it was a page or two that was corrupted and the database worked just fine until detailed reporters where created.

Settings where also mirrored to a backup location. Unless the client wanted to pay more for history backup it was only retained locally.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-30 15:57:10+00:00
Technically not. But not having a working phone number will quickly become a problem when you need to interact with authorities, banks, insurance companies, the legal system etc. I remember when cell phones were becoming affordable and I thought I was clever by ditching my land line. That got me no end of trouble, then bit by bit it became more normalized to the point that if you have a landline now people look at you a little funny. Not having a phone number today would be the same as not having a landline would have been in the early 90's, and probably much worse than not having a phone was back then.
by microtonal | 2025-08-30 15:57:20+00:00
Aren’t they? I ask my partner for investment opinions all the time.

Obviously, the probability of it being a scammer reduces with the amount of time. In the end it's a function of time vs. effort. Scamming billionaires by marrying them and waiting until they die happens frequently enough. A 5 year scam for a few thousand bucks, unlikely.

As usual, use common sense, which you would have to do anyway if you do investments.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-30 15:57:20+00:00
I believe in some conspiracy that no one is actually benefitting. I don't want to blame marketing, it's genuinely very cool that I can give Cursor a description of what I'm trying to do and get a result that's like 80% correct. But I've repeatedly found that going from 80% to 100% takes just as much time and effort as it would have to do it myself from the start.

I've shadowed people who believe AI is helping them, and it seems to me that some of them don't notice how much effort they're spending while others don't bother to correct the 80% version once tests are passing.
by hopelite | 2025-08-30 15:57:42+00:00
I suspect what you are really lamenting is the effects of poor leadership that does not grant a "product manager" (which is really a misnomer) the authority and autonomy to be a "product manager".

As you imply, that role is really more a director role, not a manager role. A manager managers, a director directs, including the vision and product market fit. Most Product Managers I see do not have that authority at all, and at best are constantly having to convince "leadership" like some door-to-door salesman, rather than simply updating leadership in an advise and consent format.
by soulofmischief | 2025-08-30 15:59:17+00:00
These abstractions become a toolset for creating a program that naturally evolves as new goals and constraints are introduced. It also allows other engineers to understand your code at a high level without reading it from top to bottom.

If your code ever has the possibility of changing, your early wins by having no abstraction are quickly paid for, with interest, as you immediately find yourself refactoring to a higher abstraction in order to reason about higher-order concepts.

In this case, the abstraction is the simplicity, for the same reason that when I submit this comment, I don't have to include a dictionary or a definition of every single word I use. There is a reason that experienced programmers reach for abstractions from the beginning, experience has taught them the benefits of doing so.

The mark of an expert is knowing the appropriate level of abstraction for each task, and when to apply specific abstractions. This is also why abstractions can sometimes feel clumsy and indirect to less experienced engineers.
by tzs | 2025-08-30 15:59:17+00:00
I don't think pillefitz is asking if the author's racist arguments in general are sound. I think he was asking if the arguments in this particular article are sound.

Many racists are actually quite competent outside of when they are trying to argue for racism, and this particular article doesn't seem to be making a racist argument.

It does talk about the possibility of an over performing ethnic group, and suggests Jews as a candidate, but that's not inherently a racist argument. There are in fact ethnic groups in many countries that do over or under perform as a whole, but this is almost always due to cultural factors.

In particular ethnic groups where education and scholarship are a big part of their culture unsurprising tend to over perform in general society unless their culture also is big on minimizing interacting outside their group.

Jewish culture is such a culture and they have long been over represented in intellectual fields unless they are in a country that has high social or legal barriers to keep Jews out of those fields. Heck, this is probably why so many stupid conspiracy theories have them as the people secretly running the world.

It's similar with many Asian cultures nowadays. Just take a stroll through the campus of Caltech or MIT if you want to see that those groups over perform. At both those schools around 48% of undergraduates are Asian. That's way above the 7% of Asians in the general US population. Even if we take into account that Caltech has a disproportionate number of students from California (if you can get into a top STEM school and are from California, are you really want to go deal with Boston weather?) and California has a high Asian population (about 16%) the 48% at Caltech is way higher.

That said, I don't think the arguments in this article are really all that good. He is emphasizing the IMO since 2020 and talking about how 2022-2024 stand out. But when you look farther back instead of starting at 2020 then 2022-2024 are still good years, but not really remarkable years for Romania. Over the period it has been good it has had some major changes in their education system which I think limits what you can infer from recent IMO success. I've got another comment that goes into more detail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45071972
by quotemstr | 2025-08-30 15:59:39+00:00
I see they've also caught the RFC2119 bug. This "MUST", "SHALL", "MAY" thing is a linguistic blight on our standards landscape and should be eradicated. HTML5 is written without this unnecessary level of linguistic pretense and works fine.

If your proposed spec is full of "SHALL", "MUST", and "MAY", I'm going to dock you ten points of credibility from the outset. It's a signal you've set out to imitate the vibes of seminal RFC specs without independently considering the substance.
by ayende | 2025-08-30 15:59:41+00:00
That is the wrong abstraction to think at. The problem is not _which_ tools you give the LLM, the problem is what action it can do.

For example, in the book-a-ticket scenario - I want it to be able to check a few websites to compare prices, and I want it to be able to pay for me.

I don't want it to decide to send me to a 37 hour trip with three stops because it is 3$ cheaper.

Alternatively, I want to be able to lookup my benefits status, but the LLM should physically not be able to provide me any details about the benefits status of my coworkers.

That is the _same_ tool cool, but in a different scope.

For that matter, if I'm in HR - I _should_ be able to look at the benefits status of employees that I am responsible for, of course, but that creates an audit log, etc.

In other words, it isn't the action that matters, but what is the intent.

LLM should be placed in the same box as the user it is acting on-behalf-of.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-30 16:00:04+00:00
I like to call that a leaky abstraction. The author used "UNIX I/O" as a great example. It perfectly hides the complexity and abstraction is such a way that the programmer never needs to know the internals. It has sealed all the juicy complexity in a watertight container that the user of the abstraction never needs to peak inside of.

The auth example may not be. You may need to do validatePassword(user) for passwordCorrect(user) to be true, which then forces you to open up a hole in the abstraction that is userAuthorized(request) and peak inside. userAuthorized() has leaked out its logic, it has failed as an abstraction. Its a box with 3 walls and no roof that blocks visibility to important logic rather than hides away the complexity.
by sokka_h2otribe | 2025-08-30 16:00:10+00:00
I admit you encouraged me to think a little more about how the person (like myself, in many ways), might feel to be called abrasive, difficult, or any other negative thing.

It makes me want to reframe this a little with your statement 'understand the person and adapt accordingly.' As someone who has learned their social skills later, I think it's usually more of a responsibility of the abrasive person to adapt their communication style and know when it is best used.

Specifically, I think abrasive and direct works great in high trust environments. It has served me well as well. It does sometimes relate to autism for me, ymmv.

Anyway the reason why it doesn't work outside of high trust environments is that people have feelings, and their feelings matter. Ultimately you do have a responsibility to try and be considerate. So like, for me I try to separate the high trust and low trust environments in my life, and keep the part of me that's direct and abrasive (often among peers in technical context) less vocal in the low trust environment.

When I intentionally want to push back in a low trust environment, I try to check in more with the person, look to where they seem uncomfortable, and double check I understand what their insecurities might be in a certain context as that often increases defensiveness.

Sometimes in low trust environments I might not notice, or I might identify it as low trust and just not care. In those contexts yeah I'll be the disgruntled aspie ;) but in other contexts I want to connect to people and really think through the impact of my words not the righteousness.
by throwawayq3423 | 2025-08-30 16:00:19+00:00
Instead, it was sponsored by taxpayers, and was run by people with clear political goals for the suppression of what they considered "disinformation" "misinformation" and "malinformation"

Not a word of that is accurate.

1. The US government has never had the authority to remove content. They merely flag what they find of foreign and malign origin for platforms, which then take the decisions themselves.

2. The U.S. government worked to uncover foreign influence operations. If those influence operations, aside from promoting chaos, supported one candidate over another, that's not a get-out-of-jail-free card to ignore them.

What it should be is a moment of introspection for conservatives as to why unambiguous enemies of America want the candidate that you want to run the country.

But that introspection has not and probably will never come.
by rayiner | 2025-08-30 16:00:54+00:00
> you get the choice of leaving her in a room for a couple of days with Trump, Biden or Harris which would you pick?

I don’t know how this is relevant to what we were discussing, but yes, I have a daughter. And one of my principal fears was how much social pressure she would feel to relate to Harris, a shallow mediocrity who might have been greater if everyone didn’t have the lowest possible expectations for her on account of identity politics.
by dahart | 2025-08-30 16:03:00+00:00
I suspect you’re referring to a gameplay programmer as opposed to a game engine programmer, even though your claim includes engine devs. There are more gameplay devs than engine devs, and gameplay devs will think about perf less and use a profiler less often.

I worked at the intersection of engine and gameplay for a decade, and I’ve personally never seen an engine dev who doesn’t use a profiler nearly every day, and I certainly did. If you watch game dev presentations at conferences (Siggraph, GDC, etc.) you will generally see profile-driven development for new engine tech, they use profilers heavily and monitor performance rigorously.
by perlgeek | 2025-08-30 16:04:04+00:00
I think the origin of the "four chunks in short-term memory" comes from giving people tasks to calculate some numbers, and seeing after how many digits they became noticeably slower.

A fact that you need to remember about code might use up more or less short-term memory in a human brain compared to a digit or a number, so don't be ashamed if your number is 3 instead of 4.

I also think that my working memory was better when I was 20ish, now at 41 I already feel less fits in and I forget it faster.
by finaard | 2025-08-30 16:04:36+00:00
At a customer I ended up having to help one department running two Synology boxes as a side project. I came in with low expectations, and still was thoroughly disappointed.

- one device died, was EOL at that point, and newer ones no longer can read the disks - stupid limits for array size. Depending on your setup adding disks can mean "copy everything off, delete arrays, and then create new ones". Also, want one 200TB array with your disks? Depending on model size you'll have to do multiple arrays instead with a bit to way lower capacity - syncing a share to another instance is broken, with pretty much no useful debug information. Already the setup is stupid (doesn't let you select which array it goes on the target machine), and then seems to change access permissions of the sync user on the target box (i.e., you can do one sync, after that you'll need to reset the access permissions). I wanted to avoid doing my own sync script, but seems I'll have to do that in the end - stupid disk compatibility warnings (which currently you can disable when you have SSH access) - wireguard only via third party addons. It's 2025. I didn't even check before if those things can do wireguard - it didn't occur to me that a device sold nowadays might not be able to do that.

While debugging I also noticed that pretty much every software component is from the stone age.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-08-30 16:04:40+00:00
There's no choice to be had, it doesn't substantially exist in tech. It takes organizing and coordinating various resources to make a new reality, not passively evaluating current options at hand. So it's not productive to evaluate their viability based on what currently exists as if it's already a choice unorganized workers have evaluated and made. But it is an idea that is appealing even to some founders (there are upsides to working alongside people with a stake in outcomes) and some are working toward making this possible for workers to choose.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
by sitkack | 2025-08-30 16:05:18+00:00
Exactly. The lock analogy is flawed and a distraction. I made a local universe of how I think the world should be. I gave those people the respect I think we all deserve, and hopefully they stand up and do the same. Maybe they are in HR, or become a C-level and institute the same things.

When you comply in advance, you not only let "them" win, there isn't even a them here, just an idea of a possible threat. Fuck that. Anyone can sue for anything, you can't "do stuff so you won't get sued". Frankly, this is cowards take that lets an nebulous idea pollute your world.

We don't have to Joan of Arc or Don Quixote, we can just do the little stuff that changes culture in the direction we'd like to see it changed.

Humans are incredibly valuable across many many dimensions, not letting them know how they can improve is a massive waste and harmful to both parties.
by wenc | 2025-08-30 16:05:20+00:00
> There is always something for a large class of intelligent achievers to do. The failure to put them to work is more of a societal failure than it is an indictment of the education system.

This doesn’t quite resonate with me, because I’ve lived through it and seen it happen over and over again even in the most functional of societies.

Oversimplifying a bit, let’s call intelligent achievers elites. There is often a mismatch between elite supply and elite slots, and by definition elite slots are scarce — no matter how well your society is functioning.

Elite slots scale with the maturity and breadth of the economy. The U.S., with its size and diversity, has a much larger pool of elite slots than most countries. That’s one reason I moved here.

By contrast, in Canada (a country I love deeply), most Ph.D.s end up underemployed or they leave, because their skills simply aren’t needed at the level of specialization they were trained for. Some jobs only make sense when you have enough scale to support them — and without that scale, those elite positions just don’t exist.

Can intelligent achievers pivot to something else, like entrepreneurship? Sure, but in a smaller economy, the options are much more limited, even if they do a startup and invent new categories. They can also accept underemployment. There are inherent constraints in an economy due to natural factors like scale, geography, etc.

(My understanding is that Taiwan is in this situation -- highly educated people, limited industries that can employ them. Some move abroad, but many just curb their ambitions and try to get by with low pay and accept their lot in life, striving only for "little joys" they can afford like bubble tea and inexpensive street food)
by raphlinus | 2025-08-30 16:05:25+00:00
I have very high hopes for this board, and have been playing with RP2350 with DVI out for a while (I have one of these on order but it hasn't arrived yet, but other boards[1] exist).

Emulation is a sweet spot because if you race the beam, there is no compositor latency. Basically every retro computer with less than a quarter meg of VRAM is fair game (whether a framebuffer or not).

I have a bit of time off this fall and intend to do some fun things.

[1]: https://github.com/DusterTheFirst/pico-dvi-rs/wiki/RP2350-DV...