MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elzbardico | 2025-08-21 17:29:19+00:00
Well. Then you should fire your project owners, product manager and marketing folks, as two things emerge clearly:

1 - Those people were not able either to capture what the customers really wanted, or to translate this into requirements for the developers, or both things at the same time.

2 - Due to the fact that their minds are trained to see things systematically, maybe you should remove all those layers between customers and developers.
by 0x457 | 2025-08-21 17:29:23+00:00
Also waiting music being interrupted every minute to tell:

1) my call is very important to them (it's not)

2) listen carefully because options changed (when? 5 years ago?)

3) they have a website where I can do things (you can't, otherwise why would I call?)

4) please stay at the end of call to give them feedback (sure, I will waste more of my time)
by herval | 2025-08-21 17:29:26+00:00
This is such a huge repeat of the early 2000s. All the bust startups spent billions in infrastructure. Everyone built their own datacenters, no matter what your business is.

We'll either see a new class of "AWS of AI" companies that'll survive and be used by everyone (that's part of the play Anthropic & OpenAI are making, despite API generating a fraction of their current revenue), or Amazon + Google + Microsoft will remain as the undisputed leaders.
by jmkni | 2025-08-21 17:29:29+00:00
Yep.

The thing is, you aren't contacting customer services because everything is going well, you are contacting them because you have a problem.

The last thing you need is to be gaslit by an AI.

The worst ones are the ones where you don't realise right away you aren't talking to a person, you get that initial hope that you've actually gotten through to someone who can help you (and really quickly too) only to have it dawn on you that you are talking to a ChatGPT wrapper who can't help you at all.
by Karawebnetwork | 2025-08-21 17:29:32+00:00
> Also, what is up with that camera module? This doesn't look like it can physically slide into jeans pockets.

Pixel phones have been that way for a while now. Phone cases usually add the missing part to make it flat, e.g. https://www.spigen.com/products/pixel-10-series-case-tough-a...
by marssaxman | 2025-08-21 17:29:56+00:00
I used to love having a job where I had regular interaction with customers. It really made a difference in my ability to improve the features we had, and to design new systems which would be more likely to succeed. I miss that, and I wish more companies found a way to put engineers in contact with actual users...

...but if you tried to make me do even one sales call, at all, ever, for any reason, that would instantly terminate my interest in working for you.
by davidfischer | 2025-08-21 17:30:30+00:00
My employer, Read the Docs, has a blog on the subject (https://about.readthedocs.com/blog/2024/07/ai-crawlers-abuse...) of how we got pounded by these bots to the tune of thousands of dollars. To be fair though, the AI company that hit us the hardest did end up compensating us for our bandwidth bill.

We've done a few things since then:

- We already had very generous rate limiting rules by IP (~4 hits/second sustained) but some of the crawlers used thousands of IPs. Cloudflare has a list that they update of AI crawler bots (https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/additional-configurat...). We're using this list to block these bots and any new bots that get added to the list.

- We have more aggressive rate limiting rules by ASN on common hosting providers (eg. AWS, GCP, Azure) which also hits a lot of these bots.

- We are considering using the AI crawler list to rate limit by user agent in addition to rate limiting by IP. This will allow well behaved AI crawlers while blocking the badly behaved ones. We aren't against the crawlers generally.

- We now have alert rules that alert us when we get a certain amount of traffic (~50k uncached reqs/min sustained). This is basically always some new bot cranked to the max and usually an AI crawler. We get this ~monthly or so and we just ban them.

Auto-scaling made our infra good enough where we don't even notice big traffic spikes. However, the downside of that is that the AI crawlers were hammering us without causing anything noticeable. Being smart with rate limiting helps a lot.
by rpcope1 | 2025-08-21 17:30:57+00:00
All true, but then there goes your stratospheric valuations and all the crazy hype. This come to jesus moment may very well deflate one of the few remaining hot areas around software engineering..I could see people being reluctant to stop the hype train as then we'd really have to come to terms with the fact that the "industry" as a whole is kind of in the shitter and it's a less good time to be a software engineer across the board than 5 or 10 years ago.
by tadfisher | 2025-08-21 17:31:03+00:00
It is similar in the US, except we call it a currency transaction report [0]. Because the amount — $10,000 — is not indexed to inflation, these reports are extremely numerous, mostly automated, and are almost entirely useless — beyond conveying the ability to charge ordinary people with structuring [1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_transaction_report

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuring
by dml2135 | 2025-08-21 17:31:04+00:00
What is your definition of "evidence" here? The evidence, in my view, are physical (as in, available computing power) and algorithmic limitations.

We don't expect steel to suddenly have new properties, and we don't expect bubble sort to suddenly run in O(n) time. You could ask -- well what is the evidence they won't, but it's a silly question -- the evidence is our knowledge of how things work.

Saying that improvement in AI is inevitable depends on the assumption of new discoveries and new algorithms beyond the current corpus of machine learning. They may happen, or they may not, but I think the burden of proof is higher on those spending money in a way that assumes it will happen.
by graemep | 2025-08-21 17:31:04+00:00
I think the comment you are referring to is employing hyperbole to make a point. It is not accurate to say the British Empire "ruled the world" (just large chunk of it) nor that Britain is a small island no one cares about now. The point is that it has gone from being an economic and military super power to being a second tier power.

The point is these things change over the long term. In a hundred years from now it is likely the super powers will be different - most likely China and India, simply because of their size.
by MisterTea | 2025-08-21 17:31:19+00:00
> There are plenty of reliable young men who enjoy engaging in violence and will take low-paid jobs in store security.

Bit of an assumption there.

There is no easy answer for this breakdown. The cat is out of the bag and these losers aren't going to stop unless they are stopped and face real consequences. Though as you said, the stores do not want the liability of guards taking action so they are left with locking everything behind glass and deploying privacy invading surveillance. Of course that doesn't stop anything and quality of life goes down.
by throwaway63467 | 2025-08-21 17:31:25+00:00
I mean I used Copilot / JetBrains etc. to work on my code base but for large scale changes it did so much damage that it took me days to fix it and actually slowed me down. These systems are just like juniors in their capabilities, actually worse because junior developers are still people and able to think and interact with you coherently over days or weeks or months, these models aren’t even at that level I think.
by chriskanan | 2025-08-21 17:31:40+00:00
Where is the actual paper that makes these claims? I'm seeing this story repeated all over today, but the link doesn't actually seem to go to the study.

I am not going to trust it without actually going over the paper.

Even then, if it isn't peer-reviewed and properly vetted, I still wouldn't necessarily trust it. The MIT study on AI's impact on scientific discovery that made a big splash a year ago was fraudulent even though it was peer reviewed (so I'd really like to know about the veracity of the data): https://www.ndtv.com/science/mit-retracts-popular-study-clai...
by autoexec | 2025-08-21 17:32:03+00:00
> This isn't AI damaging anything. This is corporations damaging things.

This is corporations damaging things because of AI. Corporations will damage things for other reasons too but the only reason they are breaking the internet in this way, at this time, is because of AI.

I think the "AI doesn't kill websites, corporations kill websites" argument is as flawed as the "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument.
by benjsm | 2025-08-21 17:32:06+00:00
Thanks! Definitely see where you’re coming from. Software startups with really good products are generating massive amounts of business value for their customers right now. Subscriptions and usage models really constrain them in how much they can capture of that. Incentives are also constantly misaligned, especially with usage as buyers will always try to minimize usage as much as possible. Charging on outcomes changes that.

The entire AI customer support industry has pretty much already converged into this model. Tickets closed without being escalated to humans are usually what’s defined as an outcome. We think this model makes the most sense for any vertical AI company where agents are actually completing tasks end to end.

Success is defined by the buyer and seller before they use us. We just facilitate the parameters they agreed upon, so it’s pretty variable. A successful outcome can be anything from sourcing a real estate property that ends up closing to finding $X in cost savings for a dental clinic, using research agents. The biggest difference is you’re not just charging for tokens, but assigning a dollar figure to what a job well done looks like, no matter how many tokens it takes to get there.
by j-conn | 2025-08-21 17:32:06+00:00
I was really surprised this is technically possible on iOS, so I watched the demo video again and noticed the hardware plugged in and a “screen broadcast” going on. The dongle is mentioned [here](https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/blue):

‘On iPhone, a tiny USB-C plug-in (“Bud”) provides precise input control’

Really cool they got this to work and it seems great for accessibility. I wonder how Apple feels about it
by renecito | 2025-08-21 17:32:22+00:00
Mission accomplished: who'd tell disrupting your competition poaching their talent and erasing value (giving it away for free) would make people realize there is no long term value in the core technology itself.

Don't get me wrong, we are moving to commoditization, as any new tech it'd be transparent to our lifestyle and a lot of money will be done as an industry, but it'd be hard to compete as a core business competence w/o cheating (and by cheating I mean your FANG company already has a competitive advantage)
by cwoolfe | 2025-08-21 17:32:39+00:00
I'm a technical co-founder rapidly building a software product. I've been coding since 2006. We have every incentive to have AI just build our product. But it can't. I keep trying to get it to...but it can't. Oh, it tries, but the code it writes is often overly complex and overly-verbose. I started out being amazed at the way it could solve problems, but that's because I gave it small, bounded, well-defined problems. But as expectations with agentic coding rose, I gave it more abstract problems and it quickly hit the ceiling. As was said, the engineering task is identifying the problem and decomposing it. I'd love to hear from someone who's used agentic coding with more success. So far I've tried Co-pilot, Windsurf, and Alex sidebar for Xcode projects. The most success I have is via a direct question with details to Gemini in the browser, usually a variant of "write a function to do X"
by fanatic2pope | 2025-08-21 17:32:48+00:00
I have a home server that is on 24x7 protected by a UPS. The UPS monitoring daemon (nut) provides a hook for calling a script when its status changes, so I have it push a high priority notification to my phone via ntfy whenever it goes on battery or off battery. I also have it broadcast on mqtt so that in the future I can have a dedicated daemon that will collect stats and take other actions that aren't really appropriate for a hook script.
by doorhammer | 2025-08-21 17:32:49+00:00
So, I wouldn't be surprised if someone in charge of a QA/ops department chose LLMs over similarly effective existing ML models in part because the AI hype is hitting so hard right now.

Two things _would_ surprise me, though:

- That they'd integrate it into any meaningful process without having done actual analysis of the LLM based perf vs their existing tech

- That they'd integrate the LLM into a core process their department is judged on knowing it was substantially worse when they could find a less impactful place to sneak it in

I'm not saying those are impossible realities. I've certainly known call center senior management to make more hairbrained decisions than that, but barring more insight I personally default to assuming OP isn't among the hairbrained.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-21 17:33:02+00:00
New local and/or urban last mile electrical distribution infra is typically buried, but to your point, lots of legacy above ground infra at risk until someone finds the funds to bury/harden it.

https://www.fema.gov/case-study/overhead-underground-it-pays...

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/21/burying-power-lines-for-wild...

https://research.ufl.edu/should-power-lines-go-underground.h...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220101210439/https://www.eei.o...

(have an electrical journeyman friend who will spend the rest of his life upgrading California electrical infra, we speak frequently on this topic)
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-21 17:33:07+00:00
I don't know how to explain something that is plainly true but plainly insensitive.

The guys who clean the stadium and sweep the court are needed for the games to happen. They are called the backbone of the stadium because they provide support. But the economic backbone of the stadium, the ones making the whole thing worthwhile, are the players, and unsurprisingly they are paid the most. It's not nice to say that, but I doubt you ever paid $80 to buy overpriced beer and snacks to sit in a seat to watch someone mop a basketball court.

The bedrock of the US economy are high skilled high compensated workers. The US is an advanced economy. Hits to it's cashier, shelf stocker, screw turner, or retail worker are not really meaningful hits. If they were, the economy would have collapsed in 2020. Instead it became clear that the "players" weren't taking a hit, they were just working at home, and the economy ripped as uneeded stimulus for them poured in.
by t0md4n | 2025-08-21 17:33:19+00:00
Just not true though is it?

Touch ID had a ton of downsides. It didn’t work with wet or dirty fingers, didn’t work with gloves, if you have clammy hands it would constantly fail. Plus it has a higher false positive rate than Face ID and has less features. Not to mention the speed and UX of Face ID is significantly better for MOST people than Touch ID.

I also meant landscape Face ID recognition, obviously not landscape device orientation.
by sillyfluke | 2025-08-21 17:33:21+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

You're free to believe that of course, but you're assuming the point that has to be proven. Not all fuck ups are equal. Missing information is one thing, but writing literally opposite of what is said is way higher on the fuck up list. A human agent would be achieving an impressive level of incompetence if they kept on repeating such a mistake, and would definately have been jettisoned from the task after at most three strikes (assuming someone notices). But firing a specific AI agent that repeats such mistakes is out of the question for some reason.

Feel free to expand on why no amount of mistakes in AI summaries will outweigh the benefits in call centers.
by xlbuttplug2 | 2025-08-21 17:33:33+00:00
It does not prevent a bot from using your ID. But a) the repercussions for getting caught are much more tangible when you can't hide behind anonymity - you risk getting blanket banned from the internet and b) the scale is significantly reduced - how many people are willing to rent/sell their IDs, i.e., their right to access the internet?

Edit: ok I see the argument that the feedback mechanism could be difficult when all the website can report is "hey, you don't know me but this dude from request xyz you just authenticated fucked all my shit up". But at the end of the day, privacy preservation is an implementation detail I don't see governments guaranteeing.
by omnicognate | 2025-08-21 17:34:07+00:00
> Just agentic coding is a huge change

I've been programming professionally for > 20 years and I intend to do it for another > 20 years. The tools available have evolved continually, and will continue to do so. Keeping abreast of that evolution is an important part of the job. But the essential nature of the role has not changed and I don't expect it to do so. Gen AI is a tool, one that so far to me feels very much like IDE tooling (autocomplete, live diagnostics, source navigation): something that's nice to have, that's probably worth the time, and maybe worth the money, to set up, but which I can easily get by without and experience very little disadvantage.

I can't see the future any more than anyone else, but I don't expect the capabilities and limitations of LLMs to change materially and I don't expect to be left in the dust by people who've learned to wrangle wonders from them by dark magics. I certainly don't think they've "torched decades of best practice in my field". I expect them to improve as tools and, as they do, I may find myself using them more as I go about my job, continuing to apply all of the other skills I've learned over the years.

And yes, I do have an eye-wateringly expensive Claude subscription and have beheld the wonders of Opus 4. I've used Claude Code and worked around its shitty error handling [1]. I've seen it one-shot useful programs from brief prompts, programs I've subsequently used for real. It has saved me non-zero amounts of time - actual, measurable time, which I've spent doodling, making tea and thinking. It's extremely impressive, it's genuinely useful, it's something I would have thought impossible a few years ago and it changes none of the above.

[1] https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/473
by sys13 | 2025-08-21 17:34:23+00:00
SaaS vendors do these business value assessments, which are useful to the executive buyer and the vendor. The issue I find with them is customers don't want to do them in collaboration with the vendor since the vendor will use that to justify higher prices. 'Outcome' and 'business value' seem somewhat synonymous - so maybe need to focus on the business value more closely (and all the modelling that goes into that). I don't know if all of the billing needs to go through this, but perhaps discounts or bonuses could - at the very least helping with retention.
by dwaite | 2025-08-21 17:34:30+00:00
> As the botmakers circumvent, new methods of proof-of-notbot will be made available.

Yes, but the fundamental problem is that the AI crawler does the same amount of work as a legitimate user, not more.

So if you design the work such that it takes five seconds on a five year old smartphone, it could inconvenience a large portion of your user base. But once that scheme is understood by the crawler, it will delay the start of their aggressive crawling by... well-under five seconds.

An open source javascript challenge as a crawler blocker may work until it gets large enough for crawlers to care, but then they just have an engineer subscribe to changes on GitHub and have new challenge algorithms implemented before the majority of the deployment base migrates.
by reactordev | 2025-08-21 17:34:35+00:00
if I were a bitcoin whale...

OpenBSD on the Desktop can be a thing if someone were just to make a good experience with it, from the ground up, like Steve Jobs did with NeXT. Just don't choose Objective-C.

The issue is money. Developers are expensive, AI isn't anywhere near ready for this task, and we have a lot of learnings from good UI design and developer patterns (both pro, and anti). ElementaryOS was supposed to be that thing but quickly devolved into yet another distro.

These older machines deserve some love too. Not everything needs to be <2 years old. Not everything needs to be shiny. This is why you're broke. Stop spending :D
by mjr00 | 2025-08-21 17:34:36+00:00
> Kalshi's Jack Such declined to disclose Accetturo's fee for creating the ad. But, he added, "the actual cost of prompting the AI — what is being used in lieu of studios, directors, actors, etc. — was under $2,000."

So in other words, if you ignore the costs of paying people to create the ad, it barely costs anything. A true accounting miracle!
by sumtechguy | 2025-08-21 17:34:40+00:00
is there an http code for 'hey I gave you this already 10 times. This is a you problem not a me problem I refuse to give you another copy'.

It also sounds like there is an opportunity to sell scraped data to these companies. Instead of 10 crawlers we get one crawler and they just resell/give it away. More honey pots doesnt really fix the root cause (which is greed).
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-21 17:35:10+00:00
Lets discuss. I genuinely hate memecoins with a passion but not indie games

Honestly, memecoins are just ponzi schemes. They are created on hype and people buy memecoins with the idea that it would trade higher and so on.

Noone in their goddamn right minds would just pay for an app showing some image of something. No, it is the idea that you can sell it for higher price, or if you can't, then why not just donate to them in the first place??

like if you think pepe is cool, just mail matt fury (I think he's the creator, just searched) some money and email him thanks on why pepe matters to you.

But nope people buy these shitty ass things just so that they can sell it to some other person believing the same dream as them.

And no, every cryptocoin is like this unless stablecoin in this sense but some coins have some utility that I can understand but still, if they have utility, just buy them when you want the utility man, but memecoins are the worst of the worst, just leeches on gullible people.

Indie devs are more like clippy (louis rossman, lets go, I am doing my deal spreading clippy) Once you bought them, 99% don't want anything else from you. They don't want you to sell it to an higher fool. they want you to play. they want you to give them feedback (both critisicm and praise) they want you to recognize the work they put in and they are proud of what they created which is why they created it.

Indie devs making games usually also take a lot more time and effort and that can only happen 90% of the time when you love the project than memecoins

But also I will admit that there are games that are not like that (think mobile ad games) and yes they are as much an evil/scummy as memecoins. Maybe a little less since trading factor and selling to others is gone but still some apps target little kids so they are worse in that. Maybe those apps take some time to develop but that's it. In my opinion yes shitty mobile games are comparable to memecoins, they are both (scams?), one might take more effort than other but honestly that varies but yeah even then they both are scams.

But doing the disservice of even comparing every indie game to memecoin might make you A) completely wrong, doing a great disservice while basically spreading lies that basically ragebaited me man B) the most downvoted person

You kinda ragebaited me no offense and I know you might be a good person. And its okay, misunderstandings happen. I may be wrong too, I usually am and that's why lets discuss if you think there is something wrong with what I said