MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brabel | 2025-09-30 18:55:47+00:00
> I feel you're objecting to the wrong comment

Not at all. His comment was worse in that it generalized a whole lot of people based on the minor evidence he's been able to collect. Unless he's had several dozen, at least, Java applicants, as well as dozens of Rust applicants, I assume he's just using the exact same plain old discriminatory thinking people used to employ when comparing, among many things, race and nationalities. It's incredibly hard to generalize anything about people honestly.

> whereas the other requires going out of your way to pick up, could well be a factor in the latter having more knowledgeable average applicants

I disagree. It's much more likely, in my view, that newer languages will appeal to people who value the wrong things in a business, like which language they want to use for the excitment of being in the cutting edge (not to mention technically as well - we've tried for so long to create languages that make software engineering better, but anyone with a long experience in trying things will know that language is very low in the list of things that help: many studies have shown that over the years)... which also tends to correlate with people who will leave the job as soon as something new catch their eye.

Except in extremely niche cases, the language is not that important. The only things that really help writing software are static types and tests... and that doesn't mean the more the better either: there's a diminishing return with both. That's why Haskell is NOT the pinnacle of software engineering, despite what some fanatics will try to tell you (proof of which is that almost no important software is written in Haskell or languages like it - I think the most successful type-rich language so far is actually Rust!).

> I presume the majority of Rust programmers learn it online.

What I meant is that in their region, there's a good chance that learning another language is useless to find a job because all jobs are in Java or C#/C++.

But I do advise younger people to learn many languages anyway because of the fact that it really helps them think better and not get stuck with a particular approach to software engineering when there's many.
by MrJohz | 2025-09-30 18:56:11+00:00
Is there any scale of paint chucking that can realistically represent a terrorist threat? Is there any scale of paint chucking that should lead to proscription? Because that's the key point here. It's not "can they be prosecuted for paint chucking?" (yes, obviously), or "can their paint checking escapades have serious costs or ramifications?" (sure, lock them up!) it's a question of whether their actions constituted such a grave threat to the safety of the United Kingdom that the only way of dealing with that was to make it illegal to even support their group.

If we as a country are so at risk from paint chucking that we're resorting to proscription as our tool of defence, then we have some serious issues.
by mike_hearn | 2025-09-30 18:56:33+00:00
I recently built my own coding agent, due to dissatisfaction with the ones that are out there (though the Claude Code UI is very nice). It works as suggested in the article. It starts a custom Docker container and asks the model, GPT-5 in this case, to send shell scripts down the wire which are then run in the container. The container is augmented with some extra CLI tools to make the agent's life easier.

My agent has a few other tricks up its sleeve and it's very new, so I'm still experimenting with lots of different ideas, but there are a few things I noticed.

One is that GPT-5 is extremely willing to speculate. This is partly because of how I prompt it, but it's willing to write scripts that try five or six things at once in a single script, including things like reading files that might not exist. This level of speculative execution speeds things up dramatically especially as GPT-5 is otherwise a very slow model that likes to think about things a lot.

Another is that you can give it very complex "missions" and it will drive things to completion using tactics that I've not seen from other agents. For example, if it needs to check something that's buried in a library dependency, it'll just clone the upstream repository into its home directory and explore that to find what it needs before going back to working on the user's project.

None of this triggers any user interaction due to running in the container. In fact, no user interaction is possible. You set it going and do something else until it finishes. The model is very much to queue up "missions" that can then run in parallel and you merge them together at the end. The agent also has a mode where it takes the mission, writes a spec, reviews the spec, updates the spec given the review, codes, reviews the code, etc.

Even though it's early days I've set this agent missions that it spent 20 minutes of continuous uninterrupted inferencing time on, and succeeded excellently. I think this UI paradigm is the way to go. You can't scale up AI assisted coding if you're constantly needing to interact with the agent. Getting the most out of models requires maximally exploiting parallelism, so sandboxing is a must.
by guybedo | 2025-09-30 18:57:04+00:00
i'm doing something like this, summarizing HN posts because most of the time when there's hundreds or thousands of comments, it's not possible to read everything and i feel like i'm missing something.

So far, i quite enjoy having a summary with bullet points.

For example, here's the summary of this discussion: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/kagi-s-daily-news-ritual-spar...
by redleader55 | 2025-09-30 18:57:24+00:00
> real life pick up is unwanted and creepy

The act of "pickup" is creepy because it's based on a false pretense - establishing a human connection and trust quickly. Succes is guaranteed only for the sociopaths. Talking to people in real-life, without the help of technology is not creepy and doing it casually just for the sake of human contact is what all of us should be doing more. We would be able to filter out the "creeps" much easier if most people you get in contact with are normal human beings that are being nice to other human beings.
by captainkrtek | 2025-09-30 18:57:27+00:00
I think the whole "if it's free, you're the product" nugget of information has not been broadly understood by folks, or if it has, maybe folks don't care as much about their data.

I do live these days with the understanding that pretty much all of my personal info is out there one way or another, a social security number is about as private as a phone number these days.
by fsckboy | 2025-09-30 18:57:43+00:00
i'm not being snarky but, if you want to focus on alpha, construct a portfolio that removes beta, and nobody does that except portfolio theory.

so probably "funds that focus on obtaining private information, or flaws in public information"?

focusing on alpha and finding undiscovered alpha are not the same thing, and it's absolutely not clear and contrary to portfolio theory that you would succeed
by rendleflag | 2025-09-30 18:58:03+00:00
Is your complaint that it has errors? I mean look at what it can do. This is a freaking computer generating things from scratch based on a prompt. Two years ago, technology like this was so much worse and could only generate basic images and videos. Now it can generate visuals all from the text someone puts in.

Anyone, literally anyone, can use it (eventually) to generate incredible scenes. Imagine the person who comes up with a short film about an epic battle between griffins and aliens...Or a simple story of a boy walking in the woods with their dog...Or a story of a first kiss. Previously people were limited to what they had at hand. They couldn't produce a video because it was too costly. Now they can craft a video to meet their vision.

I do find it exciting.
by neilv | 2025-09-30 18:58:17+00:00
A bit off-topic to the post, but maybe very relevant to HN techbros seeing this article, and musing about becoming (lower caste) finance bros...

You know how there's a boots on the ground truth to what an early tech startup's Incentive Stock Options are actually worth nowadays, and how people should think about them (but that most startups won't admit)?

With that secret reality in mind, how should software engineer candidates considering working for a hedge fund or private equity job think about the compensation there? Maybe especially about "carry"?

A recruiter for a firm seeking a "Principal" level engineer, which would require moving to NYC, mentioned compensation of "$X salary, 50% bonus, and $Y carry". Where $X is a usual current non-FAANG Senior+ startup SWE salary, and Y is only a bit larger than X.

The recruiter opened by stating the single number $((X*1.5)+Y), as if it were the annual TC familiar to us from levels.fyi.

When I Google for "carry", it sounds like some speculative share of something unclear about some investments the firm owns or manages, and then this share might vest over 5-10 years, if I remain with the firm that long. The $Y dollar amount sounds like it's a fixed amount bonus or capped value of a share. Also unclear whether there's an additional $Y+ grant of carry each year.

If this were most tech startup ISOs, I would know that the ISOs were probably worth $0 or less, and in some ways rigged to be that way, even if the company has a successful exit from which people with real shares profit.

For this $((X*1.5)+Y) job, the $X salary alone will cover a lifestyle of renting a modest apartment in Brooklyn, plus decent savings building from whatever the rest of it is. I'm unclear whether the bonus and carry make it even competitive with Google L6, though.

What do I need to know about "carry" or other aspects of the compensation? What time horizons, conditions, and probabilities are involved?
by jeroenhd | 2025-09-30 18:58:17+00:00
> over 100 pages for GDPR

The first 33 pages are reasons why the law needs to exist. 23 pages are instructions for EU member countries and the EU itself.

The remaining legal text itself is spaced out more than any high school teacher would ever allow, and IMO it's also quite light on the legalese. Not enough that I'd feel confident to skip the legal department in my multinational, but it's far from the unreadable mess people make it out to be.

The OSA on the other hand... I'm glad I don't personally serve the UK.
by phkahler | 2025-09-30 18:58:41+00:00
>> There's a phenomena that ofter occurs with large organizations where once their markets mature, everybody who can build a product end-to-end leaves or gets forced out, leaving only people with highly specialized maintenance skillsets.

A coworker from China once told me (and I can see it) everything in China is considered ephemeral. Companies in the US want to invest capital to generate ROI and recurring revenue (or monetize/enshittify everything) or one could say be lazy. Even big manufacturers want to invest in a plant and then enjoy the profits from ongoing production (Boeing doesn't even want to do production). This is why China has been booming, everything is temporary so everyone scrambles and is willing to take on smaller more short term production because nothing is forever. Well, that and they have the capacity since we gave it up.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-09-30 18:58:44+00:00
> I assumed billboards were for mass consumer marketing.

My hunch is that billboards on I-80 through San Francisco are a vanity product. Their actual purpose isn't marketing, but to flatter the egos of the CEOs that own the service - they get to dominate the sky, the eyes, and the brains for thousands of tech commuters twice a day. The one thing I'm not sure about is whether or not the people paying for the billboards actually think that their sales are going to materially benefit, but I'm pretty sure the sellers are clear that they absolutely will not - and either way, I'm sure people see it as a mark of prestige to have an ad there.
by imoverclocked | 2025-09-30 18:59:02+00:00
The biggest tell will be just how over budget the development process becomes. Another issue in large companies trying to build something new is the scope creep which leads to committees and then decision by committee.

If the folks leading this effort in Boeing are smart, they will keep the size of the team as small as possible. Maybe they will even hire some people back to lead this effort... assuming they can find them.

My bet is that they will produce something not unlike what they already have in their lineup. It won't be boldly different in any way as technology that has worked elsewhere will just be cargo-culted forward into the "new" design. The biggest thing that will change are the handling characteristics since they won't have to match that of a previous aircraft.

Given that outcome, I (from the peanuts gallery) would design the aircraft to handle in some ideal way using MCAS-like automation to fix any deviation from that ideal, from the beginning. Of course, that's starting to head down the road of a more-Airbus-like design.

Also, passengers are probably going to start waking up to the realities of just how bad the air-travel experience in the US has become compared to so many foreign counterparts. If you want passengers to want your plane, design it without sardines in mind; People don't like being sardines.
by pizza234 | 2025-09-30 18:59:18+00:00
Each Ryzen mobile generation also improved efficiency, in particularly the last generation (AI PRO 300).

Intel, on the other hand, started a few generation ago with an edge in terms of efficiency, and now they're behind; they are definitely the one that fell asleep.

The fact that ARM may have unreachable efficiency doesn't mean that AMD, as x86 producer, is doing nothing.
by martin-t | 2025-09-30 18:59:33+00:00
Do you believe intelligence can be achieved using ANNs? If so, ANNs can be serialized, therefore writing is rich enough.

It might not be an easy to work with format though. If you believe the broad LLM architecture is capable of reaching true intelligence, then writing is still enough because all LLMs are is the written training data and the written training algorithm. It's just that is was impossible to pay people to write enough training data and provide enough compute to process it before.
by Forgeties79 | 2025-09-30 18:59:45+00:00
Not my computer, I’m not going to say “don’t like your computer? Change browsers.” They returned it, got a little more ram, and they’re happy now. I don’t know what their use case is that in-depth so I’m not going to tell them to completely change their browsing habits and usage unless they are open to that. $200 later they were happy.

Given the field they are in, I imagine they use chrome like many do for compatibility/testing reasons
by csallen | 2025-09-30 18:59:47+00:00
Call me crazy, but it is possible to distinguish good from bad in most of these "lemon markets" the author lists.

When buying physical products, there are tons of high-quality review sites like Wirecutter, with journalists who spend months testing out products and reviewing them to find the best ones. Not to mention the reviews on sites like Amazon itself. And of course, just doing internet searches, researching the domain, learning what makes products good, seeing what others on various forums have liked. It takes some time, effort, learning, and taste to do all this searching and to weed out the fake reviews, of course, but I think many millions of people are capable of doing the above.

Social media is similar. It's not that hard to discern whether you're following a low-quality spam account vs an authentic high-quality person. And you can curate and build up your list over time, to have more signal and less noise. Will most people filter effectively? No. Again, it requires time, effort, learning, and taste. But still, it's possible.

Etc.

But I don't think it's accurate to say we're in a lemon market. We're in a taste market, and the reality is that most people just have exceptionally bad taste.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-09-30 18:59:48+00:00
There's so much optimization to be made when developing the model and the hardware it runs on, most of the big players are likely to run a non-trivial percentage of their workloads on proprietary chips eventually.

If that's 5 years into the future, that looks bad for Nvidia, if it's >10 years in the future, that doesn't affect Nvidia's current stock price very much.
by atonse | 2025-09-30 18:59:55+00:00
I think you misunderstood my comment. I wasn't challenging the concept of human editors and fact checkers. I was asking a parent for a clarification of what the parent post meant by outlining that they were LLM generated summaries.

Like, I was asking whether they were expecting the curation/summarization to be done by humans at Kagi News.
by sigbottle | 2025-09-30 19:00:28+00:00
Well, one day it might be at the level of shell scripting. I don't think about "the tradeoffs of building a specialized shell script", I just do it because it's cheap and easy and solves a problem right then and there.

I don't know how you would even begin to make this kind of same observation for ML models, but seems possible. The 2010s weren't exactly building out "trivial" models, but compared to the architectures and optimizations out now, yeah those models are toy by comparison.
by k310 | 2025-09-30 19:00:33+00:00
Readability is paramount. Websites and now user interfaces trash it. The ONLY reason my iPhone is usable is the fact that I am very nearsighted and just take my glasses off, and at my age, I will probably get 20/20 distant-only vision soon.

Icons? Spotlight or Quicksilver are my app launchers already, when icons are unclear.

It will be reading glasses or a magnifying phone case. Do you know of any? Business opportunity?

I do not like the business of unequal L/R vision. An optometrist tried that once (without asking) and I felt like my brain was being sheared. I asked for an got equal sight in both eyes.
by hinkley | 2025-09-30 19:00:43+00:00
The 737 is a clusterfuck because the giant engines throw off the physics of the plane both inertially and aerodynamically.

It’s easier to make a turbofan more efficient by making it bigger. But power density also tends to go up with new models, so there’s at least a chance that there’s a smaller, lighter engine with the same thrust and fuel economy out there, allowing them to improve (restore) the physics of the aircraft.
by thfuran | 2025-09-30 19:00:46+00:00
It's pretty well established that people are just generally irrational about free things. Because of this, I think any business model involving giving something away for free, whether it's a loss leader or or ad supported or something else, is fundamentally anti-competetive. Cognitive biases place any competitor charging for the good/service at a disadvantage. If you're a non profit, go ahead and give things away. If you're a business, you should have to charge.
by echelon | 2025-09-30 19:00:49+00:00
The Sora app squaring off against Meta's social video app is the real story here.

Sora 2 itself looks and sounds a little poorer than Google Veo 3. (Which is itself not currently ranked as the top video model. The Chinese models are dominating.)

I think Google, with their massive YouTube data set, is ultimately going to win this game. They have all the data and infrastructure in the world to build best-in-class video models, and they're just getting started.

The social battle will be something completely different, though. And that's something that I think OpenAI stands a good chance at winning.

Edit: Most companies that are confident of their image or video models stealthily launch it on the Model Arena a week ahead of the public model release. OpenAI did not arrange to do that for Sora 2.

Nano Banana, Seedream/Seedance, Kling, and several other models have followed this pattern of "stealth ELO ranking, then reveal pole position".

https://artificialanalysis.ai/text-to-video/arena?tab=leader...

The fact that this model is about "friends" and "social" implies that this is an underpowered model. You probably saw a cherry picked highlight reel with a large VRAM context, but the actual consumer product will be engineered for efficiency. Built to sustain a high volume of cheap generations, not expensive high quality ones. A product built to face off against Meta. That model compete on the basis of putting you into videos with Pikachu, Mario, and Goku.
by ranger_danger | 2025-09-30 19:01:19+00:00
Can you provide sources for these claims?

> animals as pets

This seems to say they are perfectly fine with pets: https://www.peta.org/about-peta/why-peta/pets/

> guide dogs

Seems to imply they are not against service animals in general: https://www.peta.org/media/news-releases/monkeys-arent-pets-...

Not trying to defend anyone, just looking for objective evidence.
by sillywalk | 2025-09-30 19:01:22+00:00
The article links to [0] from Microsoft's Raymond Chen.

Discussed previously:

Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems? (microsoft.com)

307 points by mooreds 10 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 192 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42166606

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250926-00/?p=11...
by simonw | 2025-09-30 19:01:25+00:00
That's really interesting. I've noticed something similar - I've tried frontend tasks against GPT-5-Codex and seen it guess the URL of the underlying library (on jsdelivr or GitHub) and attempt to fetch the original source code, often trying several different URLs, in order to dig through the source and figure out how to use an undocumented API feature.
by nadermx | 2025-09-30 19:01:33+00:00
The UK has been doing this sort of stuff for at least a decade. For example they have the PIPCU which under the guise of copyright threatens 10 years in prison for sites not even in their jurisdiction.

https://torrentfreak.com/uk-police-launch-campaign-to-shut-d...

And with that, they have at the least gotten registrars not located in their jurisdicrion to transfer domains

https://easydns.com/blog/2013/10/08/whatever-happened-to-due...
by 4dm1r4lg3n3r4l | 2025-09-30 19:01:35+00:00
I don't find it too much. For $10 I get a search engine better than all the others, I get access to many AI models via Kagi Assistant and Kagi Translate.

While I understand different people find value in different things, dismissing Kagi generally as "too expensive" is ignorant IMO.

I think it also depends what you use it for. I use both their search and their AI models for software development and it saves me precious time when looking for information - in a way it pays for itself.
by fidotron | 2025-09-30 19:01:54+00:00
> Apple is exactly arrangement of particles, it’s not abstraction over them.

No. You can do things to that apple, such as bite it, and it is still an apple, despite it now having a different set of particles. It is the abstract concept of appleness (which we define . . . somehow) applied to that arrangement of particles.

> I’m sorry but you seem to be discussing in bad faith.

Really?

> No, you don’t understand what abstraction is.
by simonw | 2025-09-30 19:02:36+00:00
I like "agentic harness" too, but that's not the name of a skill.

"Designing agentic loops" describes a skill people need to develop. "Designing agentic harnesses" sounds more to me like you're designing a tool like Claude Code from scratch.

Plus "designing agentic loops" includes a reference to my preferred definition of the term "agent" itself - a thing that runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal.