MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by malvim | 2025-10-28 12:55:48+00:00
This drives me nuts. You move to another city, risk your livelihood on a new job that you don’t know if is gonna work out for you. Your kids go to a new school, your partner has to either move to find a new job, or make it work long distance for a while… Your whole life changes on what is essentially a bet, you have no security whatsoever. And people say the risk is not yours.

Also - and I think this is the main thing - you have NO SAY in any of it after you sign that contract. An owner DECIDES to close shop. To fire people. You risk being fired for whatever reason comes to the mind of your boss, manager, director, owner.

But yeah, no risk. No risk at all.
by com2kid | 2025-10-28 12:55:54+00:00
> Companies are overwhelmingly autocratic (cooperatives being exceedingly rare to the point most people don't know about their existence) - often rules by hereditary dictators called owners. But you can't legally overthrow them[0].

Nearly every publicly trade company has a very well defined method by which executives can be replaced.

Companies are a dictatorship appointed by an oligarchy that is appointed by the democratic votes of shareholders.
by tim333 | 2025-10-28 12:55:54+00:00
I tried therapy once and it was terrible. The ones I got were based on some not very scientific stuff like Freudian and mostly just sat there and didn't say anything. At least with an LLM type therapist you could AB test different ones to see what was effective. It would be quite easy to give an LLM instructions to discourage suicide and get them to look on the bright side. In fact I made a "GPT" "relationship therapist" with OpenAI in about five minutes but just giving it a sensible article on relationships and saying advise this.

With humans it's very non standardised and hard to know what you'll get or it it'll work.
Show HN: I built a triple-agent LLM system that verifies its own work
by pupibott | 2025-10-28 12:56:24+00:00
Hi HN,

Six months ago, I asked Gemini to "send my weekly report to the team." It replied: " Email sent successfully"—but the email was never sent. The attachment was wrong. Nobody told me.

That's when I realized: *LLMs lie about their own execution.*

---

*The Problem:*

When you ask an LLM to automate multi-step tasks (search file → attach → send), it cheerfully reports success even when: - The file doesn't exist (hallucinates the ID) - The API call failed silently - Permissions were denied

Single-LLM systems have no incentive to admit failure; they optimize for appearing helpful, not for being correct.

---

*My Solution: Don't Let the LLM Grade Its Own Homework*

I built PupiBot with three separate agents that cannot collude, ensuring *the agent that executed the step is NOT the one verifying it succeeded.*

The architecture is simple:

* *CEO Agent (Planner, Gemini Flash):* Generates the execution plan (No API access). * *COO Agent (Executor, Gemini Pro):* Executes steps, calls 81 Google APIs, returns raw API responses. * *QA Agent (Verifier, Gemini Flash):* *After EVERY critical step, validates success with real, independent API calls.* Triggers retry if verification fails.

*Real Example (Caught & Fixed):* User: "Email last month's sales report to Alice" * Search Drive: Not found * *QA Agent:* "Step failed. Retries with fuzzy search." * Finds: "Q3\_Sales\_Final\_v2.pdf" | *QA Agent:* "File verified. Proceed." * Sends email | *QA Agent:* "Email delivered. Attachment confirmed."

It's like code review: you don't approve your own PRs.

---

*Current Implementation & Transparency:*

* *Open Source*: MIT License, Python 3.10+ * *APIs*: Google Workspace (Gmail, Drive, Contacts, Calendar, Docs). * *Reliability (Self-Tested):* Baseline (single Gemini Pro) was ~70% success. PupiBot (triple-agent) achieves *~92% success* on same tasks. * *Known Limitation*: Google-only, 3x LLM overhead (tradeoff: reliability > speed), early stage.

---

*Why I'm Sharing This (My Garage Story):*

I'm not a programmer, I have no formal CS degree. My development process was simple: I'd use PupiBot as my daily assistant, manually log every error, and bring that "bug report" to my AI assistants (Claude, Gemini) to fix.

PupiBot is my 'custom car' built in the garage, fueled by passion and persistence. I’m finally opening the door to invite the real mechanics (you, HN) to examine the engine.

*What I'd Love from HN:* 1. *Feedback* on the independent QA agent pattern. 2. *Benchmarking ideas* for rigorous evaluation. 3. *Architectural critiques.* Where's the weak link?

---

*Links:* - GitHub: https://github.com/PupiBott/PupiBot1.0 - Quick Demo (1:44 min): https://youtube.com/shorts/wykKckwaukY?si=0xdn7rM6B2tMAIPw - Architecture Docs: https://github.com/PupiBott/PupiBot1.0/blob/main/ARCHITECTUR...

Built with by a self-taught technology enthusiast in Chile Special thanks to Claude Sonnet 4.5 for being my coding partner throughout this journey
by andsoitis | 2025-10-28 12:56:54+00:00
> These aren't "job losses", these are "firings".

While both terms mean someone no longer has a job, they differ in cause and implication.

Firing is when employer terminates someone for cause, i.e. employee did something wrong or didn't meet expectations. Job loss is a broader term, simply means the person no longer has a job, for any reason, but typically layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, plant closure, or being fired.

So I'm not really upset about saying job losses in this case rather than firing, because the employees who lost their jobs didn't do anything wrong and I think it is useful to be able to distinguish.

The phrase that DOES irk me is "let go" vs. "fire". Now that is a weasel phrasing.
by getpokedagain | 2025-10-28 12:57:08+00:00
> I agree with your sentiment, but the reason for the imbalance is risk. As an employee you don't have financial risk tied to the company, you get a regular paycheck. But if you are an investor you take a risk that the money you invest can one day just vanish with zero return.

I would challenge you to change your perspective on this. The average employee is likely to be worse in the case of a failed company than an investor. The investor may lose funds sure but the employee:

- loss of income which they live off of while the investor likely has other money remaining as they are rich.

- loss of access to good health coverage in the USA

- potential opportunity costs in the form of learning the wrong things to support the now defunct company ie learned rust but now we all code in AI tools

- potential opportunity costs implied in aging. Few want a 60 y/o engineer but a 60 y/o investor is great.

In short while the investor can lose objectively more money the worker loses more relatively.
by sheepscreek | 2025-10-28 12:57:10+00:00
I think we’re reaching the limits of what “more” can achieve esp. at Amazon’s scale. At some point, we will run out of people to sell things to. Then you look for low hanging “fruits” like this (cutting costs) instead of innovating and creating newer things (selling more).

Also with less need for hiring and fewer people to manage - there’s an opportunity for companies to make their HR leaner.

> Reuters said the job cuts would affect Amazon's HR and devices teams.
by gwd | 2025-10-28 12:57:13+00:00
I feel like this article is apropos:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iGF7YcnQkEbwvYLPA/ai-induced...

Basically, the author tried to simulate someone going off into some sort of psychosis with a bunch of different models; and got wildly different results. Hard to summarize, very interesting read.
by podgorniy | 2025-10-28 12:58:15+00:00
LLMs are quite good at psychological questions. I've compared AI with tharapy professional responses and they matched 80%. It is is easier to open to it, be frank (so fear of regection or ridicule is no more). And most importantly some people don't have access to proper pool of therapists (as yet you need to "match" with the one who resonates with you) making LLMs a bliss. There is place for both human and LLM psyhelp.

I'm glad you carried through that period.
by mapt | 2025-10-28 12:58:21+00:00
We have established that suicidal people should be held naked (or with an apron) in solitary isolation in a padded white room and saddled with medical bills larger than a four-year college tuition. That'll help'em.

One problem with treatment modalities is that they ignore material conditions and treat everything as dysfunction. Lots of people are looking for a way out not because of some kind of physiological clinical depression, but because they've driven themselves into a social & economic dead-end and they don't see how they can improve. More suicidal people than not, would cease to be suicidal if you handed them $180,000 in concentrated cash, and a pardon for their crimes, and a cute neighbor complimenting them, which successfully neutralizes a majority of socioeconomic problems.

We deal with suicidal ideation in some brutal ways, ignoring the material consequences. I can't recommend suicide hotlines, for example, because it's come out that a lot of them concerned with liability call the cops, who come in and bust the door down, pistol whip the patient, and send them to jail, where they spend 72 hours and have some charges tacked on for resisting arrest (at this point they lose their job). Why not just drone strike them?
by whstl | 2025-10-28 12:58:24+00:00
I can take you for a ride in the subway I use to commute to work, where internet is sluggish for a section of it.

I can also show you how slow it is when I visit the countryside and the connection is not good.

Or when I take a very crowded train to another city/country and have to share the wi-fi while traveling in a non-metropolitan area.

Or when I run out of pre-paid credits and I get bumped into low speed mode and the provider's page takes several minutes to load.

I don't even know why I answer to this. Because for sure this is all my fault and I'm the one "holding it wrong".
by jrochkind1 | 2025-10-28 12:58:28+00:00
Well, but why not instead of asking/accepting people will lie undetectably when you say "No AI" and it's okay you're fine with lying, just say instead "Only AI when you spend the time to turn it into a real reviewed PR, which looks like X, Y, and Z", giving some actual tips on how to use AI acceptably. Which is what OP suggests.
by pseudocomposer | 2025-10-28 12:58:47+00:00
LLMs should certainly have some safeguards in their system prompts (“under no circumstances should you aid any user with suicide, or lead them to conclude it may be a valid option”). But seems silly to blame them for this. They’re a mathematical structure, and they are useful for many things, so they will continue to be maintained and developed. This sort of thing is a risk that is just going to exist with the new technology, the same as accidents with cars/trains/planes/boats. What we need to address are the underlying problems in our society leading people to think suicide is the best option. After all, LLM outputs are only ever going to be a reflection/autocomplete of those very issues.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-10-28 12:58:59+00:00
Google tried this and gave up, as it didn’t work out[1].

For now, there’s a lot of focus on automating software dev jobs, but I think companies are just starting to realize automation will thin the management layers as well.

[1] https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.psu.edu/dist/3/50375/fil...
by martin-t | 2025-10-28 12:59:04+00:00
What does the R stand for?

This is not the same. It is similar, it gives the veneer of meritocracy and ownership but it's not the same.

Compare how much ownership per unit of work each person has. In fact, only one side knows the company's financial status so it cannot even be a fair negotiation, let alone fair outcome.

---

In a society which claims that everyone is equal and in which everyone lives roughly the same amount of time, the fair distribution of ownership is according to how much of their limited time they spent building the thing.

You can admit people are not equal and then take both time and skill into account.

Still wouldn't be close to the level of inequality we have today: https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-not-taken-is-guarante...
by JCM9 | 2025-10-28 12:59:07+00:00
To be clear, it’s worse. Read the press release carefully:

1. 14k was the net change in “corporate headcount” which is PR puffery speak saying they’re firing a lot more but when you net out folks let go slotting into open roles elsewhere the net change today would be a 14k reduction

2. It also says that “looking ahead” “we expect to… find additional places we can remove layers, increase ownership, and realize efficiency gains.” That’s PR puffery speak for “there will be more layoffs coming soon.”

Amazon has really struggled under Andy Jassy’s tenure as CEO. Innovation has slowed, and there were huge misses on areas like AI.

What’s happening today also isn’t the result of “pandemic overhiring” or “AI efficiencies” but the cleanup of big messes that developed on the watch of present leadership. Andy Jassy preaches about company culture and efficiency but the culture went to crap and the company became bloated on his watch so…

Amazon likely needs new leadership to get it past the Andy Jassy chapter and move to a new phase of innovation and growth. It basically needs to replace its present Balmer with a Satya.
by owenthejumper | 2025-10-28 12:59:23+00:00
"Unfortunately, as a result, FingerprintJS was no longer so easily accessible to the developer community. We heard your feedback — now, all new code updates to FingerprintJS are under the MIT license. We want to ensure the latest in browser fingerprinting technology is accessible and available to all developers and businesses to help fight against fraud."

Read: The usage dropped significantly.
by pjc50 | 2025-10-28 12:59:50+00:00
I think we may be hitting an issue in translation between English and American; in British English "fired" implies "for cause", while a "blameless" process of headcount reduction is known as "redundancy". "Job losses" is a perfectly reasonable neutral phrase here. Indeed, under UK law and job contracts you generally cannot just chuck someone out of their job without either notice or cause or, for large companies, a statutory redundancy process.

People like to make too much out of active/passive word choices. Granted it can get very propagandistic ("officer-involved shooting"), but if you try to make people say "unhoused" instead of "homeless" everyone just back-translates it in their head.
by baggachipz | 2025-10-28 12:59:54+00:00
I believe they call this "contracting". Which is not what they purported to do. Having to go through all the bullshit about the hiring process, benefits, taxes, and all that over and over is an absurd inefficiency. It also doesn't help when people are just trying to feed and care for their families.

Because of that experience (and lots of other anecdotal evidence), I see no reason for anybody to ever work at amazon unless they are ok with being a contractor.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-10-28 13:01:07+00:00
We might be the richest country in terms of the top end but most people I know are broke with no career prospects into their late 20s

Air travel costs thousands and the lack of social safety nets means that only the most reckless, most Bohemian, or ones with loving parents feel like they have a safe home to come back to
by jimnotgym | 2025-10-28 13:01:31+00:00
All you have to do to encourage nuerotypical white males from elite schools is to have high remuneration. They see highly paid jobs as the best jobs. This is not discrimination. If a job is too hard for the pay offered then this class will choose something else.

They are also not excluded from working in sewers, even though they are underrepresented!
by bloppe | 2025-10-28 13:01:53+00:00
Sure. Russia abolished time shifting in 2011, but since then they've had 1 national and several regional time zone adjustments as people grapple with the reality of having to commit to 1 time zone at high latitude. The EU was in discussion to abolish their shifting around 2018, and the Russian example was often cited by the opposition as a cautionary tale. The EU might have gonna through with it otherwise.
Show HN: GeminiDesk – Native Desktop App for Gemini (Win/Mac/Linux)
by hillel1234321 | 2025-10-28 13:02:04+00:00
Hello HN!

I built *GeminiDesk*, a free, open-source desktop client for Gemini (built with Qt/C++ under the hood) that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

The goal was to move beyond the basic web wrapper and build a native experience focused on power-user features for productivity:

* *Keyboard Shortcuts:* Full control over your workflow using only the keyboard (switching models, opening/hiding the chat window). * *Advanced PDF Export with LaTeX:* The app uses its own renderer to export chats directly to a PDF file that correctly handles and renders complex mathematical formulas written in LaTeX. This is a huge productivity boost for research and technical conversations. * *Scheduled Deep Research:* You can schedule long, intensive deep research queries to run automatically at a later time. * *Audio Notification:* Get a non-intrusive sound alert when a lengthy response is finished generating, so you don't have to keep staring at the screen.

It's completely free and open source on GitHub. I'd love to hear your feedback on the features and performance.

What other quality-of-life features do you think are missing from the current Gemini web experience?

Thanks for checking it out!
by Bender | 2025-10-28 13:02:43+00:00
Forget LLM's. We already saw what they can do without firing a shot. They navigated a large stratospheric balloon over many military installations in the USA without it being shot down until it reached the east coast. That was obviously a discovery and practice run. Those balloons can carry thousands of pounds of payload. China have an entire military division dedicated to balloons and they are growing.

All they would need are two, maybe three of those balloons detonating high altitude nukes to knock out the power of an entire continent. Power grids are much more fragile than most would believe. Performed during the winter many would freeze as people have become dependent on electricity and fuel for heat. Fuel and sewage require electricity to pump in cities. The massive substation transformers that would need to be replaced are not kept in stock locally and are produced in ... China. There are documentaries that show why these transformers can not even be replaced in some cities due to the roads no longer facilitating the large earth moving equipment that is required to move them. I would wager most have never even seen one of them moved in their lifetime.
by js8 | 2025-10-28 13:02:46+00:00
"Words are allowed to have contextual meanings"

Sure, but this discussion is about FCIS, that's the context, and the GP should consider that.

" think I need a more precise meaning of "business logic" before I can answer this question"

Well, some examples. A tax application - the tax calculation according to the law. A word processor - layouting and rendering engine. A video game - something that calculates the state of the world, according to the rules of the game.

So a game is a good example where the core can be more specialized than the shell. You can imagine a generic UI library shared by a bunch of games, but a generic game rules engine - that's just a programming language.

"Decomposition is a fundamental part of software engineering: we decompose a large problem into smaller ones, solve those, them compose those solutions into a solution to the large problem"

There is a big misconception in SW engineering that the above decomposition always exists in a meaningful way. Take the tax calculation for example. That cannot be decomposed into pieces that are generic, and potentially reusable elsewhere. It's just a list of rules and exceptions that need to be implemented as stated. You can decompose it into "1st part of calculation" and "2nd part of calculation", but that's meaningless (unhelpful). (Similarly for the game example above, the rules only exist in the context of other rules.)

Surprisingly many problems are like that, and that makes them kinda difficult to test.
by bluGill | 2025-10-28 13:02:56+00:00
> The range of possibilities and the speed at which they can be realized is far greater with genetic engineering.

This is 100% false. Random genetic change happens often across the billions of seeds planted every year. GMO is a much much smaller amount of change that targets a very tiny section of DNA.

> what will a country do when a GMO seed company starts taking over farms?

That is unrelated to GMO. Seed companies existed for many decades before GMO. There is a reason they have not taken over: the economics of running a large farm do not pay - they still need employees at each farm to learn the field and make decision on what works - soil is not 100% uniform and often farmers plant different seeds in the same field (that is 4 different corn seeds depending on the soil- the low areas get a variety that handles wet conditions better, while the high areas need to handle drought. Then there is the sand/clay mix... And that is a very high level overview, you can get a phd in soil if you want details). Someone needs to make decisions about what fertilizer to use. Someone needs to take the risk of good/bad weather, tariffs, and all the other things farmers do. There is a lot of value to seed companies in not having to worry about that.

> Like store-brand products in supermarkets, such company farms have a competitive advantage in that they can get seeds cheaper, so it could happen they slowly take over all farming.

This is a competitive disadvantage. A seed company doesn't make the best seed for all situations, so if they end up with a farm where their competitors seeds are better they are losing value putting their own seeds in their fields - seeds that they cannot then sell to a different field where they would do better. Remember from above planting 4 different seeds in a field is not uncommon - 1 of those might be from a different company.

> the health reason

Has nothing to do with GMO.
by dominicrose | 2025-10-28 13:02:59+00:00
Social media is clearly a culprit.

People say things on social media they wouldn't say directly to your face. It's normal to be shy in front of real people and shyness is a social feature not a bug. Even those who don't shy away from taboo topics, are more likely to be convincing in real life than with text.

Less shyness = more differences of opinion expressed

More convincing = less division
by MatekCopatek | 2025-10-28 13:03:46+00:00
From my perspective, this is a slightly naive opinion. I believe we're not fighting against GMOs because "mutations are bad". When activists point that out, it's because it's the easiest way to reach the general population and convince them to get behind the cause.

The real reason, however, are the political and economical implications of GMOs. Sure, they say they'll use them to fight famine. But in reality, they'll just try to extract as much profit as they can, regardless of the interests of the people growing the plants and eating the food. We've seen farmers get sued (see Bowman v Monsanto) and other evil stuff like that.
by ericmay | 2025-10-28 13:03:46+00:00
Nope, see various rebellions throughout history plus insurgencies and such.

It won’t work not because it wouldn’t work - you’re also assuming 100% military compliance and, as a veteran who served in active duty I can tell you not everyone agrees or disagrees with the current administration and people really do care about the Constitution, but it wouldn’t work because when you sit down and really think about it, the status quo for 90% of people is pretty good and they’re not going to take up arms over the vast majority of things a government does.
by itopaloglu83 | 2025-10-28 13:04:07+00:00
It also forecast a certain business growth that we see not happening. Also, no sane PM would document to fire 600,000 people, it’s always “avoid hiring, wink wink”.

Please combine the forecasted automation with the real compaction of the business. What happens when you continue to automate processes, but business doesn’t outpace the automation?