MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dca2 | 2025-09-01 23:10:24+00:00
Location: Austin, TX

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Swift, iOS, Rust, Apple platforms

Résumé/CV: On request

GitHub: https://github.com/drewcrawford

Email: drew@drewcrawfordapps.com

I'm a senior iOS developer with 15+ years of experience, mostly contract/freelance. I've done everything from pixel-perfect GUI implementation to SDK design, reverse engineering, Metal/Vulkan, algorithm design, low-level systems programming, optimization, debugging GPU drivers, porting, leading technical teams, architecture, app review, server-side Swift/Rust, WASM, and pretty much anything that touches a mobile app or Apple technology.
by sputknick | 2025-09-01 23:10:48+00:00
This is very similar to the conclusion I have been coming to over the past 6 months. Agents are like really unreliable employees, that you have to supervise, and correct so often that its a waste of time to delegate to them. The approach I'm trying to develop for myself is much more human centric. For now I just directly supervise all actions done by an AI, but I would like to move to something like this: https://github.com/langchain-ai/agent-inbox where I as the human am the conductor of work agents do, then check in with me for further instructions or correction.
by pvtmert | 2025-09-01 23:11:22+00:00
I usually do not agree with the Amazon leadership (well, recently they haven't been "Right A lot"!)

But I agree with the following statement Matt Garman gave recently;

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said that using AI tools in place of junior employees was "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard" because these employees are "the least expensive" and "the most leaned into your AI tools."

It's because AI usually creates slop, without review these "slop" build up. We don't have infinite context window to solve the slop anyway. (even if we do, the context-rot has been confirmed)

Also, on average, Indian non-Tech employees who manages thousands of spreadsheets or manually manages your in-store cameras are much more cheaper than the "tokens" and the NVIDIA GPUs you can throw at the problem, at least for now and a foreseeable future.
by diskzero | 2025-09-01 23:11:39+00:00
There was a lot of "arguing" at Amazon, or you could call is strenuous discussions. Another principle was Disagree and Commit. I found this principle lacking at other companies. People would disgres and then sabatoge. The Amazon way was to agree to disagree and commit to sincerely work in the direction of the decision. Winning the initial argument did not make you the leader. You became the leader once your solution shipped, gained signifcant market share and some other succcess metric. This was not always the case!
by rchaud | 2025-09-01 23:11:55+00:00
Apple's advertising campaign "there's an app for that" during the 2010s has liquefied an entire generation's brains into thinking they need to download an app for something that displays words and pictures.

Like most people, I tried most of these apps. It wasn't long before I uninstalled them in favour of the mobile website versions. Most "content" apps provide no value to the user in app form. "Get the app for a better experience" - yeah, better for them. Installing the app is a way for them to access your contacts list, microphone and camera, and use your home screen and notification center as a billboard.

With the growth of the "platform services" lock-in like app stores and wallets, the value drops to practically negative, as now you have to cover not just payment processing fees, but also the passed-down cost of the digital land baron's tariff for the privilege of transacting on their turf.

No thanks.
by b112 | 2025-09-01 23:12:58+00:00
We're certainly not going to get accurate data via the internet, that's for sure.

Just taking a look at python. How often does the AI know it's python 2.7 vs 3? You may think all the headers say /usr/bin/python3, but they don't. And code snippets don't.

How many coders have read something, then realised it wasn't applicable to their version of the language? My point is, we need to train with certainty, not with random gibberish off the net. We need curated data, to a degree, and even SO isn't curated enough.

And of course, that's even with good data, just not categorized enough.

So one way is to create realms of trust. Some data trusted more deeply, others less so. And we need more categorization of data, and yes, that reduces model complexity and therefore some capabilities.

But we keep aiming for that complexity, without caring about where the data comes from.

And this is where I think smaller companies will come in. The big boys are focusing in brute force. We need subtle.
by fbhabbed | 2025-09-01 23:13:34+00:00
I see they just decided to become even more useless than they already are.

Except for the ransomware thing, or phishing mail writing, most of the uses listed there seems legit to me and a strong reason to pay for AI.

One of these is exactly preparing with mock interviews which is something I myself do a lot, or having step by step instructions to implement things for my personal projects that are not even public facing and that I can't be arsed to learn because it's not my job.

Long life to Local LLMs I guess
by twosdai | 2025-09-01 23:13:48+00:00
> You should really consider not using JWT for new designs that don't a priori need to interop with JWT.

If you're trying to make the argument that because they can be insecure, we should not use JWTs. Thats not really a great argument for most people. JWTs provide a lot of value, and the idea of having some secure, validatable, and no network required check for authentication, or transporting information. Is too valuable for businesses. So we all use JWTs, they are a decent standard.

At the very least you should propose an alternative that people use besides JWTs if you're going to vaugly hand wave about the scary security issues of 2021 firebase, and 2020 Npm packages reported by Auth0.
by colonCapitalDee | 2025-09-01 23:14:15+00:00
I am in the USA! Although these days that exclamation point doesn't feel great...

I'm using an old Android phone (Pixel 2 from 2017), a 5$ a month unlimited SMS plan from Tello, and https://github.com/capcom6/android-sms-gateway. For bonus points (I wanted to roll my own security, route messages from different numbers to prod and ppe instances of my backend, and dedup messages) I built a little service in Go that acts as an intermediary between my backend and android-sms-gateway. I deploy this service to my android device using ADB, android-sms-gateway talks to it, and it talks to my backend. I also rooted the android device so I could disable battery management for all apps (don't do this if you want to walk around with the phone of course). It works pretty well!

I plan to open-source this eventually TM, but first I need to decouple my personal deployment infra from the bits useful to everyone else
by some_furry | 2025-09-01 23:14:28+00:00
> At the very least you should propose an alternative that people use besides JWTs

PASETO: https://paseto.io

I thought this was common knowledge on HN?

> if you're going to vaugly hand wave about the scary security issues of 2021 firebase, and 2020 Npm packages reported by Auth0.

These are issues caused by the JWT standard.

https://paragonie.com/blog/2017/03/jwt-json-web-tokens-is-ba...
by rstuart4133 | 2025-09-01 23:15:10+00:00
Yes, it is much better. But now rather than my words, it's an AI's words. Despite being much better than the usual slop, they aren't in my style, the thoughts have become muddied, and the mistakes (there will be some) are no longer mine.

As I said that doesn't matter if you are being paid by the word. If the goal is to be paid, who cares where the words come from if the reader laps it up. But if you enjoy writing for it's own sake, and if you are doing because you've found the discipline involved writing something down in a way others will understand is an excellent way to sharpen you're own understanding, then the less a AI is involved the better. Sadly I need a proof reader, an AI does an acceptable job, and they are free, for now.
by cb321 | 2025-09-01 23:15:42+00:00
Also, very cool. For example, https://github.com/SciNim/Measuremancer has Nim make the utf8 ± character be an operator that constructs an uncertain number with which to do error propagation arithmetic upon. So, you can, e.g. say (50±2)*(25±3) in the code and that will give 1250 ± 158 as an answer and if you use the cligen/strUt.formatUncertain that will even get correctly rounded to 1250 ± 160 (2 digits in the uncertainty place { configurable to 1 or 3 or whatnot or even parens notation like 1.25(16)e3 a la The Particle Data Group notation. }).
by sokoloff | 2025-09-01 23:16:34+00:00
It’s simple, hard to game, and executable which puts it ahead of many other ideas on the topic.

But: Land above a subway station or in a main business square is worth A LOT more than the same amount of land 1300 feet away. Waterfront land is wildly more valuable than the land just across the street. In districts with front setbacks, corner lots are less valuable per square foot than mid-block lots.

And I’d really hate to own a normal mini-skyscraper 4 blocks away from the skyscrapers overlooking Central Park and have my building’s land be valued as the average of the sum of all the units overlooking the Park.

But your “dumb” idea is smarter than most I think.
by faangguyindia | 2025-09-01 23:16:36+00:00
There’s both “no multi-agent system” and “multi-agent system,” depending on how you look at it. In reality, you’re always hitting the same /chat/completion API, itself has no awareness of any agents. Any notion of an agent comes purely from the context and instructions you provide.

Separating agents, has a clear advantage. For example, suppose you have a coding agent with a set of rules for safely editing code. Then you also have a code search task, which requires a completely different set of rules. If you try to combine 50 rules for code editing with 50 rules for code searching, the AI can easily get confused.

It’s much more effective to delegate the search task to a search agent and the coding task to a code agent. Think of it this way: when you need to switch how you approach a problem, it helps to switch to a different “agent”, a different mindset with rules tailored for that specific task.

Do i need to think differently about this problem? if yes, you need a different agent!

So yes, conceptually, using separate agents for separate tasks is the better approach.
by phantompeace | 2025-09-01 23:16:43+00:00
What hardware are you running? Parakeet runs on nvidia and Mac and it’s way faster than Whisper. And I’ve had issues with training Qwen3 (and even Qwen2.5 but I think I was masking stop tokens wrong). I’ve had success with Gemma 3 though, and they have some really small models (270m and 1b). Maybe 270m for just transcript cleaning? I wonder if the 1b model can handle the transcript analysis…
by neilv | 2025-09-01 23:17:47+00:00
I think the workplace concern is worth trying to improve. (Certainly, I've been in tech companies that encourage snacks consumption. Many people end up eating a lot more than they would otherwise, as they sit at their keyboards, with breaks that consist of walking to the snack room/cafeteria and back.)

But regarding a particular person, I suppose that friends and family members don't want to be reading random Internet commenters' speculation about that person's health and passing.

Maybe bring up the general problem in an HN post, with a link to an informative article?
by sangeeth96 | 2025-09-01 23:18:27+00:00
> the team feels like they are caretakes as opposed to innovators, how does that impact them?

During my time at least (late COVID and layoffs), this was not perceived amongst the people I interacted with as a great position to be in unless you were raking in sizeable revenue for the company. Even then, I think folks always had eyes on the back of their heads.

> How can it really always be Day One?

I think for many there, it'd feel that way when you're a part of a re-org every year or the other and have to fulfill new projects and deadlines.
by rchaud | 2025-09-01 23:19:35+00:00
People have made money on the Internet for decades before Substack. Ask your customers to mail you a cheque, or send them a Paypal/Venmo/Cashapp payment and manually process their subscription. People will understand that you're not Amazon and waiting a day or two to get access to your content won't be a dealbreaker for them. This way, you control the pricing and spare your customer the hassle of another monthly subscription.

If your newsletter is a side gig, sure, use Substack. But if it's your primary source of income, it's bad business to be subject to the whims of a platform you have no control over. Worse still when it's not a self-sustaining business whose primary obligations are to venture capitalist growthbros rather than paying customers.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-01 23:20:13+00:00
I think their point was that becoming very involved in politics in a way that alienates half of the population has tarnished Musk’s brand (although, I’d personally adjust that down to more like 1/3). If the point of your whataboutism is that previously it alienated the other 1/3… that doesn’t seem to improve their odds, right?

If anything they’ve now pissed off 2/3 of the population at some point or another.
by kstrauser | 2025-09-01 23:20:54+00:00
The bulk of CVEs that crossed my desk in the last couple of years were in things that wouldn’t matter on a 32-bit system, like problems in brand new graphics cards or fibre channel or 10G Ethernet, or KVM hosting, or things like that. There wasn’t a huge flood of things affecting older, single-user type systems.

But in any case, I’m sure Red Hat etc would be happy to sell backports of relevant fixes.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to people with older systems. I get it. I’ve got old hardware floating around that I’ve successfully kept my wife from ecycling. It’s that I’m also sympathetic to the kernel devs who only have so many hours, and don’t want to use them supporting ancient systems that aren’t still widely used.
by schiffern | 2025-09-01 23:20:57+00:00
In the comments someone mentioned 400 golf courses in Arizona, and it got me to wondering...

In the US, golf courses consumed 1.68 million acre-feet of water in 2022[0] (down 29% from 2006, they are pleased to report), which works out to 1,499 million gallons per day.

So golf courses consume three times as much water as AI. Were's the proportional level of outrage over that issue, I wonder?

[0] https://gcmonline.com/course/environment/news/water-manageme...
by randomsofr | 2025-09-01 23:20:57+00:00
Sometimes it’s because of a company’s bad reputation, other times simply because they never follow up. I’ve noticed a lot of the same posts showing up month after month, with people complaining that companies don’t respond. That makes it look like some companies are just collecting information.

As for the downvoted posts, if you check the profile, you’ll often see the same one being reposted every month, sometimes going back two years.
by apitman | 2025-09-01 23:21:34+00:00
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah, US Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Go, Rust, JS, Python, C, web, CUDA, Node/Deno, Docker/Apptainer, WebAssembly, Wasmtime, web streaming, OAuth2, OIDC, dataviz Résumé/CV: https://apitman.com/static/anders_pitman_resume.pdf Email: &ers@apitman.com

https://github.com/anderspitman

15 years overall. Been doing datavis/bioinformatics for about a decade. Open to something new. Lots of web streaming and tunneling as well. Recently been enjoying diving into GPU programming, WebAssembly, and running local LLMs.
by addaon | 2025-09-01 23:22:19+00:00
> You do have to see a physician and psychologist to get diagnosed and to get a therapy plan.

Although be aware that this might be a career limiting (or career ending) move. From the FAA, "Taking ADHD medication or symptoms of ADHD are incompatible with aviation safety." This is one of many areas where the upside of diagnosis and treatment needs to be balanced against being locked out of various careers and hobbies.
by skissane | 2025-09-01 23:22:58+00:00
> Principle 1: Share context, and share full agent traces, not just individual messages

I was playing around with this task: give a prompt to a low-end model, get the response, and then get the higher-end model to evaluate the quality of the response.

And one thing I've noticed, is while sometimes the higher-end model detects when the low-end model is misinterpreting the prompt (e.g. it blatantly didn't understand some aspect of it and just hallucinated), it still often allows itself be controlled by the low-end model's framing... e.g. if the low-end model takes a negative attitude to an ambiguous text, the high-end model will propose moderating the negativity... but the thing it doesn't realise, is if given the prompt without the low-end model's response, it might not have adopted that negative attitude at all.

So one idea I had... a tool which enables the LLM to get its own "first impression" of a text... so it can give itself the prompt, and see how it would react to it without the framing of the other model's response, and then use that as additional input into its evaluation...

So this is an important point this post doesn't seem to understand – sometimes less is more, sometimes leaving stuff out of the context is more useful than putting it in

> It turns out subagent 1 actually mistook your subtask and started building a background that looks like Super Mario Bros. Subagent 2 built you a bird, but it doesn’t look like a game asset and it moves nothing like the one in Flappy Bird. Now the final agent is left with the undesirable task of combining these two miscommunications

It seems to me there is another way to handle this... allow the final agent to go back to the subagent and say "hey, you did the wrong thing, this is what you did wrong, please try again"... maybe with a few iterations it will get it right... at some point, you need to limit the iterations to stop an endless loop, and either the final agent does what it can with a flawed response, or escalate to a human for manual intervention (even the human intervention can be a long-running tool...)
by paulnasca | 2025-09-01 23:23:06+00:00
Location: London, UK

Remote: Yes or hybrid (depending on the commuting distance)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: C/C++, Python, Linux, signal processing & audio algorithms, embedded systems, CI, machine learning and many others.

Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulnasca/ The complete CV is available on request.

Email: nascapaul@gmail.com

Senior software engineer and DSP specialist with 20+ years turning complex ideas into fast, reliable code. I'm best known for creating the open-source synthesizer ZynAddSubFX and of the extreme audio stretching software Paulstretch.

Personal website: https://www.paulnasca.com/

Open to contract or perm role. Seeking senior/lead role.
by onecommentman | 2025-09-01 23:24:35+00:00
E-bikes help us to get up and down hills, but the safety issue doesn’t go away. Response times are slower across all sorts of dimensions (detection, response, mitigation, etc.), and an accident is more likely to end in hospitalization or actual death, e-bike or no. Well-traveled bike trails sound like fun, but I think it’s a no-go for general transport for the elderly. You can do it at that age, but I’m guessing the first age-related (higher speed, new technology) biking accident will result in disability/death way too often. You’ll feel like a fool when it happens, because you were. Not the oops you want when bones break too easily and heal too slowly.
by nostrademons | 2025-09-01 23:25:00+00:00
It comes back to "AI" meaning "aggregated intelligence" rather than "artificial intelligence". Statistical valuation approaches basically mean replacing the judgment of one assessor with the aggregated (through some smart averaging process) value of many purchasers. Aggregates are much more robust to both manipulation and misjudgment than the individual data points used to make them. Ergo, simply replacing one person's judgment with thousands of peoples' judgment will make the process more accurate.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-09-01 23:25:07+00:00
There's a lot that can be done outside of cities too. The main thing that makes it scary and inconvenient to take an e-bike eight miles to buy groceries is... sharing a road with cars! A bike path is much cheaper to build and maintain than a motorway, and especially cheap in rural areas where the rights-of-way can be purchased more cheaply.

It's also possible to have rural areas accessible by transit. If you ever visit Japan or Switzerland, you'll find a robust and convenient bus and train network that will take you all the way into very small towns.

The world outside cities is inaccessible without a car only because we've built it that way. It doesn't have to be built that way! It's not a law of nature. There are other ways to build it!
by nhaehnle | 2025-09-01 23:25:13+00:00
Others have given some answer to who was made poorer by Ballmer holding Microsoft shares, but I'd argue that this is the wrong question. Instead of looking at a specific individual, we should look at systems.

A system that allows this kind of extreme wealth accumulation is quite fundamentally at odds with democracy because extreme wealth can be and is in practice used to influence politics in a way that undermines democracy.

Some people might not care about that, but if your goal is improving the outcomes of the largest number of people, then pretty much everything else is secondary to having a functioning democracy.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-09-01 23:26:38+00:00
> Claude Code was used to automate reconnaissance, harvesting victims’ credentials, and penetrating networks. Claude was allowed to make both tactical and strategic decisions, such as deciding which data to exfiltrate, and how to craft psychologically targeted extortion demands. Claude analyzed the exfiltrated financial data to determine appropriate ransom amounts, and generated visually alarming ransom notes that were displayed on victim machines.

y'all realize they're bragging about this right?
by greatgib | 2025-09-01 23:27:08+00:00
I was also confused. Thinking that it was a rumor, like the usual dump of credentials found in internet.

But no, Google had a major leak due to a lack of security on their side. And I have a strong suspicion that they released conflicting info over the past week in order to be fuzzy enough to defuse the blame. The "nothing to see there" while at the same time covering their ass by being able to say that they were transparent about it.

Here is a summary about what happened: https://news.trendmicro.com/2025/08/26/google-data-breach-gm...

There was also an official post in Google blog about that, that conveniently is not easy anymore to find un Google search despite using all the right keywords...

So Google is using Salesforce to manage their Google ad leads and the database of their salesforces instances was breached. And despite the database not holding the passwords or credentials to your account, they have all the details about you, and your interactions with Google if you ever interacted with google ads. Like a few million persons.

And using that, it looks like hackers were able to craft more convincing than real emails looking like coming from Google, to scam people and still their credentials this time.
by trod1234 | 2025-09-01 23:27:26+00:00
Rumor-mongering is primarily what the Chinese PLC and other state apparatus on their side does these days; at least much of the public facing after-math, its called irregular warfare or 5GW.

While I'm not familiar with the specific of this particular incident the fact I mention must always be considered.They are quite good at what they do.

For a bit of background checkout the Mandiant ORB Networks talk.