MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by echelon | 2025-08-21 23:06:39+00:00
> Fundamentally this is the corporation saying it doesn't have a market-beating way to reinvest this capital, and it's giving the money back to its owners to more productively invest.

Before tech companies demonstrated the principle of infinite growth, the purpose of a company was to generate revenue (paid as dividends) for its shareholders.

So much growth hasn't really been possible before.

If a company can keep growing and investing infinitely, one might argue that it's time for the DOJ / FTC to step in and stop them from eating the entire business sector. That's the sign of a monopoly pushing into every market like an invasive species and making the existing businesses in those markets go extinct. Kind of like how tech companies are now movie companies, music companies, game companies, pharmaceuticals, grocery stores...
by heelix | 2025-08-21 23:06:52+00:00
I've been really happy gaming on Linux. My main workstation had the good GPU, which ended up not needing to dual boot for games. Most of what I play, played really really well. Mind you, likely not a fair comparison to consider a high end 4090/7960x Linux gaming vs an older RX580/1950x running windows.

I'm now in the pickle where the older threadripper that was dual boot won't make the jump to Windows 11 - so that might be the end of windows for me.
by flatline | 2025-08-21 23:07:02+00:00
How much of the code do you review in a third party package installed through npm, pip, etc.? How many eyes other than the author’s have ever even looked at that code? I bet the answers have been “none” and “zero” for many HN readers at some point. I’m certainly not saying this is a great practice or the only way to productively use LLMs, just pointing out that we treat many things as a black box that “just works” till it doesn’t, and life somehow continues. LLM output doesn’t need to be an exception.
by ryukoposting | 2025-08-21 23:07:20+00:00
Sounds like the problem is that we aren't hiring enough cashiers.

Using a Kroger self-checkout is tantamount to waterboarding. Hesitate for a quarter of a second before placing your item on the scale? Angry prompt. Put an item on the scanner (which itself is another scale) but it doesn't scan within half a second? Angry prompt. Get three angry prompts? Now you get a fourth angry prompt, except this one can only be dismissed by a staff member, and we've already established that they're few and far between.

I've given up on actually bagging my items while checking out. I can't rearrange anything in the bags, or move the bags, without the checkout machine throwing a hissy fit. So no, it's not actually faster, because I have to bag everything after paying for it. It totally breaks the pipeline of the checkout.
by tiagod | 2025-08-21 23:07:39+00:00
I've worked a lot with dataviz over the years, and after fighting so many libraries, I've finally stabilised at plain d3. Even in React projects, I'll just use the d3 primitives and build SVG from that (ignoring all the d3 DOM stuff)

All other libraries will just have a pile of abstractions that will leak everywhere as soon as you deviate from the happy path.

If you just want a bunch of auxillary charts and don't need a ton of control, just use something like ECharts. When you want real creative control over your visualisations, don't bother with anything high level.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-21 23:07:56+00:00
>And if the technology isn't the cause, then what is it

From what I understand, important factors to happiness are family, friends, sense of belonging, sense of purpose, and then more immediate factors such as stress and work/life balance.

Technology is arguably a negative influence on some of these factors like meaningful in person relationships. Also, much of this has more to do with society as a whole (having kids, having close extended families, being in meaningful long term partnerships) than technology in particular.

Let's look at the obvious, social media, which is some of the most impactful technology used everyday by real people. It's been discussed to exhaustion, but these arguably aren't tools that contribute to factors that promote happiness. They optimize for engagement and ad revenue, not happiness. Dopamine hacking =/ happiness boosting.
by whatisthiseven | 2025-08-21 23:07:57+00:00
Are there studies that show a causal relationship between higher CEO pay and profits?

Do buybacks cause profits to increase? Maybe from what I can see? But long-term? If all we care about is short-term then that will lead to the continued financial cannibalization of the US economy. Where private equity firms buy companies and destroy them for short-term profit while loading them with the debt used to buy them.

I think the obvious answer to both these questions is: no. CEO pay and buybacks don't focus on profits. At best short-term. Which isn't good.

I think companies should focus on making good products that positively serve the countries they sell in, while secondly still aiming for a profit.
by gamesluxx | 2025-08-21 23:08:01+00:00
It seems like what happens is the more choice - not less - is what makes being unhappy more probable, at least for some people. Maybe it is a sense of being overwhelmed with all the opportunities that the world provides.

The connectedness then also made it easier to see what others leverage the opportunities for, which constantly forces one to compare. It is of course, well-documented that these comparisons, almost by design, make it seem like one falls behind.

It is notable that poorer countries score pretty high usually on metrics trying to quanity happiness.
by mullingitover | 2025-08-21 23:08:05+00:00
> buybacks raise the stock price and those gains aren't taxable until you sell

They temporarily raise the stock price for the people who are the counterparties to the stock purchase, but isn't that also creating a taxable event for them?

Once the buyback is done, what's keeping that share price from sliding right back down to earth? The shareholders who support the company and hold watch a group who bet against the company by selling shares reap a profit, in a tax advantaged way, while their own dividends are effectively stolen. The buybacks are actually a crap deal for anyone who is a responsible buy and hold investor.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-21 23:08:17+00:00
Yes, affluent people will pretty much always own cars. But with a pedestrian/cycle/transit friendly design, they'll use them much less.

I know affluent people in Copenhagen. They own cars. They are basically only used on the weekend, for travel outside of Copenhagen.

Amsterdam has 0.45 cars per household. So lots of households own cars, even in Amsterdam. But the miles driven per household per day is less than a quarter of what it is in the States.
by stillpointlab | 2025-08-21 23:08:23+00:00
My experience is: AI written prompts are overly long and overly specific. I prefer to write the instructions myself and then direct the LLM to ask clarifying questions or provide an implementation plan. Depending on the size of change I go 1-3 rounds of clarifications until Claude indicates it is ready and provides a plan that I can review.

I do this in a task_descrtiption.md file and I include the clarifications in its own section (the files follow a task.template.md format).
by Aunche | 2025-08-21 23:09:25+00:00
I'd likely be progressive if American progressivism wasn't so economically illiterate (as opposed to say Piketty). The vindictive themes make me think that it's motivated more by envy than a genuine desire to improve society.

The CEO to worker compensation ratio is a useless metric. There is absolutely no reason why Starbucks should be punished for hiring more workers over a company like Nvidia that hires relatively few very well paid workers. If you want raise taxes, just increase taxes across the board.

If you really think that stock buybacks are meant to "pump up short term share prices", you should test your theory in the market and you'll be a billionaire in no time.
by sunscream89 | 2025-08-21 23:09:31+00:00
I would like to point out that technology is driven by a market of consumer apatites, not for the purpose of well being.

This is a tricky one, because the answer is so simple you may refuse to accept it, or it is made meaningless by its banality.

People are their own problem. Before we had to take more time to ourselves, we had to work out our problems and have some patience. That didn’t work for everyone either, though you can see life has been abstracted away from living somehow. It affects our self satisfaction.

Take more time for yourself. Make your own meals, keep in shape, spend time on that hobby that keeps you developing your talents. Walk more.

Technology is only an extension of ourselves.
by christophilus | 2025-08-21 23:09:43+00:00
I’ve done something similar recently. AI is really useful at helping me learn the Hare programming language, and some related UNIX stuff I was unfamiliar with. It’s wrong maybe 20% of the time, but that’s often quickly apparent to me (I’m pretty experienced— 25 years in the industry). It also helps me bounce ideas around and consider alternative approaches. I don’t want to go back to a pre-Claude world.
by titzer | 2025-08-21 23:09:48+00:00
This is why science communicators need to master the art of to-scale visualizations, animated diagrams, and put working code into slides and presentations. Shit shovellevers are marked by a smokescreen of words and hand waving and pictures of real phenomena help separate the wheat from the chaff. It takes real balls to spend time faking graphs, while horseshit sentences are cheap and deniable. Fake data and fake graphs are real offenses with a real record. Talk talk is always weasely.

The only thing that will fix the mess is accountability. That accountability is the exact opposite of pretty much all algorithmic boosts today: you should get your knob turned down to zero for being a goddamned liar.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-21 23:09:56+00:00
The dividends aren't stolen. A company with 1m shares outstanding buys back 100k of them. Now there are 900k shares outstanding. All long term shareholders who support the company own an extra 10% of the firm with nothing out of pocket. Imagine steady buybacks at reasonable prices over a long period of time... this has an incredible effect.

Warren Buffett bought a couple percent of American Express, and now owns 22% of the company despite not buying a share in decades. It really becomes apparent over time. American Express just carefully repurchased shares over the years and Buffett's stake became greater and greater.
by 9rx | 2025-08-21 23:10:11+00:00
> I actually wouldn’t have a problem with pulling engineers into those discovery exercises directly, except when I have, they’ve just refused to engage.

I know not everything comes across in a short HN comment, but that truly sounds like a "Why don't you just...?" solution. What does the user of your work actually need?

> It’s like engineers just think it’s all beneath them

Well, are they wrong? You seem to recognize — and I wholeheartedly agree — that when an engineer throws a "I just did..." solution in front a customer and the customer finds it to beneath them to use, it is the engineer who has failed. The customer is completely justified in pushing back on something that isn't right. They shouldn't have to accept slop just because that's what you delivered. But it seems you aren't willing to hold yourself to the same standard?
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-21 23:11:06+00:00
> engineers and power users generally have a much higher “pain threshold” when it comes to poor or complex UI/UX

I don't think that's entirely accurate. We tolerate steep learning curves if the result is an increase to our power. That's why we are power users.

Vim, for example. Some of us put effort into learning it because it's a powerful and efficient editing language that will enable us to easily accomplish hard things.

Caring about the system itself and being willing to put effort into it are what separates power users from normal users. We don't do this because of masochism, we do it because we want to increase our power.

Normal users want the system to just do what they want without any thinking or effort at all, as though it was a highly specialized tool for their exact task rather than a powerful programmable general purpose computer.

Personally I don't care at all about how "less experienced users will tolerate or adapt". This unceasing focus on the wants and needs of normal users frequently hinders us. Developers typically reduce the complexity and feature set of a piece of software in order to turn it into something a normal user can deal with. We want more power, not less.

Normal users don't really matter unless they are directly paying our salary. We should all favor ourselves unless we're getting paid to focus on someone else.
by Symbiote | 2025-08-21 23:11:07+00:00
I don't think the gauges were much of an issue for passenger trains, after all there were many running across Europe (Orient Express etc).

It's probably more that distances were shorter, the crazy rich could afford an entire train, and the less-rich would use private luxury carriages owned by the railway companies.

Since the 1950s or so, the flexibility has been gradually lost as trains become mostly fixed formations for speed, safety etc, so that certainly explains why it doesn't exist now in Europe.
by barnas2 | 2025-08-21 23:11:11+00:00
Strangely enough, Florida, of all places seems to be having really good success with their Brightline rail network. The initial system runs from Miami to Orlando, with a few stops in between. They're planning on expanding up north and east into the panhandle. Financially things are a bit dicey, but it got built, and it's reliable. Ridership is increasing, which takes cars of the road, and property values in the areas it stops are going up. Meanwhile California doesn't even have their tiny "initial operating segment" built, and is projecting to be up to 3-4x their original budget of 33 billion dollars.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-21 23:11:39+00:00
Well there was that whole genocide of Native Americans thing. And that Civil War thing where half the country was killing the other half. Black people were slaves, women couldn't vote (or own property, or a bank account, etc), being gay was illegal, the Irish were the immigrant whipping boys. Then there was the Jim Crow era, WWI, the Depression, Prohibition, WW2, McCarthyism, the Korean War, Vietnam (when the last Jim Crow laws were repealed).

But, sure, right now is the most depressing time in US history.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-08-21 23:11:48+00:00
Minimum wage is supposed to represent the minimum wage necessary for a worker to meet their basic human needs.

If you don't have a minimum wage, some people get paid below this level, and they somehow struggle along in poverty. But there is no real incentive for the state to help them.

Establish a minimum wage. Now these people are unemployed. Which contributes to the unemployment percentage. Causes the government to lose votes. The state has to pay out unemployment benefits to these people. The govt+state now have real incentives to change the structure of economy to ensure jobs are created for these people that are productive enough to justify the minimum wage.
by timr | 2025-08-21 23:12:30+00:00
> Last year I dug into this and found it's not unusual. Many software companies hire smart people as CPO, Product Director, or Head of Product because they have leadership skills, people skills, and some knowledge of the industry. But most have little to no background in business, marketing, economics, or product development. Some companies go even further and promote an engineer with project management experience to Head of Product.

I was right with you until the last sentence of this. As an engineer-turned-PM who is still very much technical, I can count on one hand the number of technically competent PMs I've known in my life, and have plenty of fingers left over. Having experience developing products can easily be a liability, because while delivering software is important, you're mostly expected to be an advocate for the business, which means that you live in the world of corporate politics and can't be perceived as too in the tank for the tech staff.

What I see is the exact opposite of what you've described: the PM that gets ahead is invariably someone with a background in business or marketing, and the technical background is deemed almost irrelevant. If you spend too much time focusing on technical issues, someone swoops in with the theater of "data-driven decisions" and "rapid iteration" -- you can justify virtually anything by cherry-picking statistics, and it's always possible to criticize the development speed of a team when you don't involve yourself in the details -- the role quickly becomes about spinning a compelling story to upper management.

Basically, a huge percentage of PMs understand little more than the first few chapters of The Lean Startup.
by armada651 | 2025-08-21 23:13:19+00:00
Yes, it still gives people headaches because the convergence-accommodation conflict remains unsolved. We have a few different technologies to address that, but they're expensive, don't fully address the issue, and none of them have moved beyond the prototype stage.

Motion sickness can be mostly addressed with game design, but some people will still get sick regardless of what you try. Mind you, some people also get motion sick by watching a first-person shooter on a flat screen, so I'm not sure we'll ever get to a point where no one ever gets motion sick in VR.
by seanalltogether | 2025-08-21 23:13:30+00:00
I remember doing the calculations on the Nestle plant that caused a big storm a few years ago. The plant sat on several acres of land, which if converted into an alfalfa farm, would have consumed the same amount of water. The surrounding area was littered with alfalfa farms so it wasn't an unfair comparison. Meanwhile that bottling plant employs dozens of people, far more then a farm would have.
by stevage | 2025-08-21 23:14:14+00:00
I tried D3 a few times, with some success, but eventually abandoned it. The mental model it requires is so different from other charting libraries it seems too difficult for my brain to grasp for any period of time.

Also, I've come to really dislike libraries that use this kind of `a.b().c()` chained form:

boxplotContainer .append("line") .attr("x1", xScale(gender) - boxplotWidth/2) .attr("x2", xScale(gender) + boxplotWidth/2)

I find it hard to reason about. What is the return value of boxplotContainer.append("line")? How do I debug it? What values can I inspect?

That, and I really never got comfortable with the `.enter()` and `.exit()` and `.join()` concepts. It's so abstract.
by godelski | 2025-08-21 23:14:27+00:00
FWIW, Nvidia's moat isn't hardware and they know this (they even talk about it). Hardware wise AMD is neck and neck with them, but AMD still doesn't have a CUDA equivalent. CUDA is the moat. As painful as it is to use, there's a long way to go for companies like AMD to compete here. Their software is still pretty far behind, despite their rapid and impressive advancements. It will also take time to get developer experience to saturate within the market, and that will likely mean AMD needs some good edge over Nvidia, like adding things Nvidia can't do or being much more cost competitive. And that's not something like adding more VRAM or just taking smaller profit margins because Nvidia can respond to those fairly easily.

That said, I still suggested the parent sell. Real money is better than potential money. Classic gambler's fallacy, right? FOMO is letting hindsight get in the way of foresight.
by layman51 | 2025-08-21 23:15:17+00:00
Yes, but this is the nature of heroic figures in politics: “I’m from the elite and I’m here to save you from these other elites.” Who gets to determine whether it’s called a “revolution” versus a “civil war”? Is it based on whether there’s a concerted effort of manipulation? Even the popular figures who we think of as grassroots leaders are elite in some sense.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-21 23:15:44+00:00
Performance pay that requires you to hit multiple metrics over a number of years, metrics you may or may not hit, due to unpredictable factors within and outside of your control, is not comparable to guaranteed wage income in a single year.

That's my point. Their CEO has a W-2 salary and cash bonus. It is about $5m a year. They should use that. We all know the reason they pull forward the next 3 years of maybe money and compare it against a part-time barista's single year pay. Because it juices the ratio and makes for a more outrageous headline. But it's dishonest. Starbucks CEO is not paid $98m per annum.
by sarthaksingh99 | 2025-08-21 23:15:47+00:00
We are limited by both compute and available training data.

If all we wanted was to train bigger and bigger models we have more than enough compute to last us for years.

Where we lack compute is in scaling the AI to consumers. Current models take too much power and specialized hardware to be be profitable. If AI was able to improve your productivity by 20-30% percent but it costed you even 10% of your monthly salary, none would use it. I have used up $10 worth of credits using claude code in an hour multiple times. Assuming I use it continuously for 8 hours every day in a month, 10 * 8 * 24 = $1920. So its not that far off the current costs or running the models. If the size of the models scales faster than the speed of the inference hardware, the problem is only going to get worse.

I too believe that we will eventually discover an algorithm that gives us AGI. The problem is that we cannot will a breakthrough. We can make one more likely by investing more and more into AI but breakthroughs and research in general by their nature are unpredictable.

I think investing in new individual ideas is very important and gives us lot of good returns. Investing in a field in general hoping to see a breakthrough is a fool's errand in my opinion.
by dgfitz | 2025-08-21 23:15:55+00:00
> Engineer, knowing how you're supposed to use the ice cream cone, objects. PM, knowing what the customer needs, insists.

That’s the kicker. They know what the customer _wants_ not what they _need_

The number of times a Jr engineer has asked me “how do I accomplish task X in technology Y, it’s really important!”

I always, always ask “what problem are you trying to solve. Not once in over 15 YoE has the solution been to use X.

A good PM doesn’t say “this is what the customer needs” because most of the time the fucking customer doesn’t actually understand what they need.

The engineer knows that holding the ice cream cone upside down means they’re trying to use the product in a way it was never intended, so they push back.

A good PM would ask “why do you want to hold the ice cream cone upside down, customer?”

“Oh well we don’t actually want to hold it upside down, we just get frustrated that sometimes when we put too much ice cream on/in the cone it falls out. So if you can make the cone hold the ice cream while upside down, the problem is solved!”

“Oh, so what you actually need is a bigger cone that can hold more ice cream?”

“Oh, yeah that would work too”

meme about Spider-Man facepalming, where Spider-Man is the engineer
by hinkley | 2025-08-21 23:17:19+00:00
Every degree of global warming raises the amount of water the air can hold by 7%. That's what's going on in California recently. We only need to put our finger on the scale to really fuck things up. We don't have to stand on it.

Also heat island effect. We don't have to move the needle in Yosemite to make downtown LA into a death trap.

What's your tidy "Me worry?" explanation for aquifer depletion?
by raihankr | 2025-08-21 23:17:36+00:00
I think for AI-generated websites, they tend to use a lot of emojis for almost everything. Also, they use colorful and bright colors. Other indication is using a single HTML file for a page, with embedded CSS and JS. In my opinion, most developers who wrotes the codes themselves most likely wouldn't heavily embed their CSS and JS into the HTML file because of readability.