MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benjbrooks | 2025-10-31 16:59:05+00:00
disclosure: i'm an eng on this team

sales is a really interesting breeding ground for the first wave of vertical agents:

- success metrics are well-defined (did we get an email response? did we book a meeting? did we move a deal down the funnel?)

- enterprise sales is about getting a reasonably well-defined process working at scale. sales reps have to deeply understand enablement materials (what problems does my employer solve? what other companies have those problems?), qualify prospects relentlessly, and talk to lots of potential buyers.

- it's knowledge work (writing emails, preparing documents, communicating with counterparts over video call, etc.) that is mostly about aggregating information at scale. the really good sellers take rigorous notes and ask thoughtful questions.

Assuming they have the right information in context (hard work but not complex), LLMs are quite good at this work. And we think we're taking a pretty unique position in that we're not trying to replace top-of-funnel email drafting (this is somewhat trivial & also not that useful), we're making it significantly easier for sellers to find & utilize the information that enables them to do their jobs effectively.
by zozbot234 | 2025-10-31 16:59:18+00:00
Abstraction overhead is very much worth it for non-trivial programs. The "simpler" syntax of languages like Python is a one-time initial gain (and even then, it really only "saves" a tiny bit of boilerplate) that ultimately turns into a big drawback as programs grow more complex and your abstraction possibilities are severely limited due to an overly simplistic initial approach to the code.
by GuB-42 | 2025-10-31 16:59:27+00:00
This is a more precise statement than just "you can recall things you thought you forgot".

It is specifically about trauma, and generally you don't forget traumatic events and that's often a big part of the problem. We are not talking about trivial things like the name of your maths teacher in high school, which have a tendency to come and go.

It is also specifically about therapy, that is an environment where you are actively encouraged to recall memories. We know how easy it is to make up memories, especially with the help of a third party (here, the therapist).

Combine the two: memories that are hard to forget and an environment conductive to making false memories and it becomes very likely that the "lost" memories are completely made up.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-10-31 16:59:41+00:00
> Didn't someone say something about using French to speak of love and german to speak of science? Maybe english is getting it's use.

That's interesting - as someone noted below, in musical notation, the keywords are nearly all Italian, and it would feel quite weird if they were written in English instead. So in that sense, yeah, maybe `for`, `if`, `then`, `import`, etc. are the "fortissimo" and "d.s. al coda"s of the programming world.
by rvz | 2025-10-31 16:59:59+00:00
One of the worst lies since "AGI".

Even most here on HN who are in the business of replacing humans with AI would agree that Amazon knows they are lying.

Must be close to a rats den working at Amazon's offices with over 200K+ employees in corporate to then look at them and then lay them off and say it's for "culture".

There's no reason for them to tell the truth, given its immensively profitable to keep lying with no costs at all.

If you decide to join Amazon after this, make sure you get a brain scan first.
by rkomorn | 2025-10-31 17:00:23+00:00
I don't care how many rubies I have, except for disk space, which I clean up regularly, so it's a bit moot.

I actually don't look at the package names either as much as I look at the number of hashes, which I find easy to eyeball.

Quite frankly, I don't really look at the paths anyway (on any kind of regular basis). I just know that when I've looked at them, the hash vs package name thing made sense to me because of the configuration -> result relationship. :)

Edit: oh, when I said I'm pretty sure I'm human, I meant "I'm human too but I don't seem to be seeing things the same way you do".
by toast0 | 2025-10-31 17:00:28+00:00
Hospital admissions are a mix of ER referals and less urgent matters. There are a lot of hospital procedures where you can shop for price, (perceived) quality, or other factors.

Otoh, it's often very hard to price shop, because it's difficult (often nearly impossible) to get an estimate for medical care when insurance may be involved. If you need your car repaired, you can get estimates and in many jurisdictions the mechanic needs consent to go beyond the estimate. If you want a cosmetic procedure that's never covered by insurance, you cam get an estimate that will be accurate unless there's complications (and if they're likely, you may get contingent estimates for likely options).

If you need a covered medical procedure, good luck; chances are you won't know what it cost until 6-9 months after.
by sholladay | 2025-10-31 17:01:00+00:00
Star Trek has a number of organic computing examples, too. Species 8472, Data, and the Borg all use varying degrees of organic components.

There's also the bio-neural gel packs on Voyager and the unnamed 31st century Earth vessel discovered by Archer and the NX-01 Enterprise.

New Trek even has a mycelial network in space.
by dlubarov | 2025-10-31 17:01:04+00:00
> For me Zionists for Palestinians are fair game

I hope you meant to say something like militants, otherwise this is justifying unlawful violence based on the victims' political beliefs.

It certainly wouldn't have been fair game for Jews to massacre random German civilians at a music festival, for example, irrespective of any speculation about their victims' political ideology.
by bazmattaz | 2025-10-31 17:01:09+00:00
I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say that Spotify “cut” the revenue per stream. Spotify doesn’t have a fixed revenue per stream, payouts are dynamic and based on how much revenue it made and how many streams there are in total. Also Spotify gives something like 80% of its revenue to the music industry.

It’s essentially a pie that gets divided up amongst all artists by steam count. If your friend’s garage band are angry that they only get 0.001 cents per stream then they should be angry at Spotify listeners for streaming too much Taylor Swift!!!

Furthermore to pay the artists Spotify has to pay the labels and of course they take a giant cut. This trope of Spotify being an evil corporation is unfair
by embedding-shape | 2025-10-31 17:01:10+00:00
> We do.

> It's just that startups don't go after the frontier models but niche spaces

But both of "New SOTA models every month" and "Startups don't go for SOTA" cannot be true at the same time. Either we get new SOTA models from new groups every month (not true today at least) or we don't, maybe because the labs are focusing on non-SOTA instead.
by singron | 2025-10-31 17:01:31+00:00
Thanks for presenting. I was a fig lover so this area is interesting to me.

This is a really hard topic since it's hard to understand the significance of the jj contributions without explaining a ton of internal details like Piper, CitC, TAP, blaze, etc. I think you struck a good balance here.

I don't think you need to "be more engaging" or be more passionate, and when people say that, it indicates they aren't engaged, but it's not a useful suggestion of how to improve.

I think the main issue was that on just about every slide, I found myself wanting to read ahead on the slides instead of waiting to listen to you talk. There are a couple factors to this:

1. Impatience. I want to ingest information faster. Believe it or not, the "talk slowly" advice is usually not good for a technical talk with decent acoustics. E.g. listen to a talk by Bryan Cantrill and notice how fast he talks while still being clear. Rehearsal helps, but if you simplify your slides, you can also make them easier to perform. Listen to a random slide in your video and notice how much time is filled with silence or filler words.

2. Scanning the slide because I'm unsynchronized with the speaker. E.g. if everything you say isn't clearly correlated with the content of the slide in a linear way, then I have to scan the slide to attempt to "resychronize" and figure out what bullet you are on. Sometimes presenters don't want to read the bullets verbatim, which makes it difficult to match up the spoken language with the written language, whereas if you said the first word in a bullet, I could quickly seek to that line. Skipping bullets also causes this, especially at the end of a slide, since then I want to try to read all the bullets on a slide ahead of you in case you decide to skip them in the future.

Fewer bullets per slide and fewer words per bullet help with both of these. Aggressively cut or summarize material so you don't have to skip over anything (e.g. instead of listing 6 jj piper commands and only talking about 2, list just 2 and write the number of total commands e.g. "we added 22 subcommands including mail and submit"). Put extra material (if any) in an appendix after the end if you think you might have extra time or want to use it for Q&A. Rehearse until you can belt out what you want to say on each slide without fillers or pauses (and record yourself so you can tell how much you are doing this). When I'm sharing my screen, I actually like to point my mouse cursor at the bullet I'm on so nobody has to guess where we are, but sometimes that's not available.

Your first slides essentially teach the audience how to consume your talk. E.g. a good pattern is if (1) all your bullets are short (2) you read every bullet verbatim, elaborate on that bullet for a bit, and then repeat on the next bullet. If you stick with a pattern like that, then your audience knows how to follow along. Other patterns work too.

I'm sorry this wasn't shorter and I hope it's helpful.
by eddealmeida | 2025-10-31 17:01:46+00:00
Recent cases in Brazil got me thinking about the psychological weight of our curated online selves. An influencer arrested after a fatal procedure looked nothing like her filtered photos. A shooter's mugshot was unrecognizable from his "Greek god" Instagram persona.

These aren't just stories about crime—they're about what happens when the digital self becomes so detached from reality that the disconnect turns physically dangerous.

It makes me wonder: as developers and designers building these platforms, what responsibility do we have when digital identity curation enables real-world harm? Are we creating tools that help people express themselves, or are we building factories for digital ghosts?

Some questions worth discussing:

Where's the line between self-expression and dangerous deception?

Should there be ethical constraints on identity-altering technology?

How do we maintain authenticity in an economy that rewards curated perfection?

I explored these questions through the lens of psychology and digital ethics: https://blog.thecodejedi.online/2025/10/digital-ghosts-psych...

Curious if others in tech have faced similar concerns about the real-world impact of the identity tools we're building.
by matwood | 2025-10-31 17:02:43+00:00
> Point is that all of this companies need to start making real profits and pretty damn big ones

MS, Meta, Google, Apple, Nvidia make enormous profits. I think part of this AI push we're seeing is that all of these companies have so much money they don't know how to spend it all. Meta is a great case where they bounced from blowing excess cash on the metaverse and now to AI.
by standardly | 2025-10-31 17:02:56+00:00
> The human brain is a finite, physical thing. It can't store an infinite amount of data.

True, but it doesn't really detract from his statement because do we really know what that upper bound even is? I don't think we come close to the theoretical storage limit... So saying "every memory you have is permanently stored" is effectively true, at least true enough for a thought experiment like this. Perhaps when people live to be 200 years old and we know more about the brain we can test this, though.

I used to be weary of learning new, complex things, thinking I'd "lose" old knowledge XD
by thrance | 2025-10-31 17:03:02+00:00
I don't think a surveillance state is the root cause of authoritarianism, in that sense I believe it is a slippery slope fallacy. I am still very much against this kind of mass surveillance, simply I think this rhetoric is doing everyone a disservice.

We don't get authoritarianism without an actual will from a group of people with enough power and support to achieve it. Mass surveillance is simply a milestone on their path to oppression.
by some_guy_nobel | 2025-10-31 17:03:10+00:00
> OpenAI applies the same strategy, but they’re using their equity to buy compute that is critical to improving their core technology. It’s circular, but more like a flywheel and less like a merry-go-round. I have some faith it could go another way.

I'm commenting here in case a large crash occurs, to have a nice relic of the zeitgeist of the time.
by _wire_ | 2025-10-31 17:03:33+00:00
> Yet we think AI will have it

Lenny Bruce joking as Tonto to the Lone Ranger:

Who is "we" white man?

The lede observation depends upon whether "we" can expect our science to ever produce an intelligible theory of mind.

The difficulty of producing a theory of mind makes the Imitation Game a compelling approach to setting expectations for AI.

And also portends of the hazard that we become so distracted by simulacra that we lose all bearing upon ourselves.
by stabbles | 2025-10-31 17:04:37+00:00
Seems like this is not using glibc's hwcaps (where shared libraries were located in microarch specific subdirs).

To me hwcaps feels like a very unfortunate feature creep of glibc now. I don't see why it was ever added, given that it's hard to compile only shared libraries for a specific microarch, and it does not benefit executables. Distros seem to avoid it. All it does is causing unnecessary stat calls when running an executable.
by Yizahi | 2025-10-31 17:04:46+00:00
In this particular case it is obviously evil and misguided. There is no "iron wall" around EU phones or EU computers, a criminal can install literally anything on their PC and almost anything on their phones. So the real actual criminal won't be affected by the change at all, they will use software without backdoors for their shady stuff. This is obvious to everyone really, so this leads to a conclusion that the real reason for the enforced breaking of encryption is to spy on the political opposition, on the business competitors and in general promote a healthy fear and paranoia in society. Just what we need, in the age when EU enemies are acquiring more and more collaborators and tools inside EU, to disrupt and hopefully destroy the union.
by qingcharles | 2025-10-31 17:04:53+00:00
I was lead dev once and the unofficial "rubber duck." I'd always get called over when someone was stuck on a thorny problem, lean over their shoulder and ask them to explain it and it was always instantly "Oh! I see it now, thank you!" and I had done nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-10-31 17:05:07+00:00
It's very odd reading this because, to me, the Beats were never regarded well by authority figures, teachers, or other established credentialiers of literature that you interact with as a kid. They were seen as comic books, video games, etc. Junk for people who like junk.

I think the appeal of them was never that they had great, enviable lives. Ginsberg's famous refrain is that he saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness. Doesn't that resonate so much with young people, especially today, who have all the acumen, follow all the rules, and end up priced out of any kind of normal middle class life? Sure it's not the same thing the Beats faced, but isn't the idea of seeing a society from the outside and never being able to join (or for the Beats, wanting to join) isn't that common?

They were talented writers who didn't fit into the times they lived in, and who made choices that made their lives worse (and documented them extensively) and who reached for drink and drugs (and Eastern spirituality) to numb themselves at being in a world which they felt so apart from. How much different is that than many famous writers across many times and places in history?
by colechristensen | 2025-10-31 17:05:55+00:00
Very few people are in the situation where this would matter.

Standard advice: You are not Google.

I'm surprised and disappointed 1% is the best they could come up with, with numbers that small I would expect experimental noise to be much larger than the improvement. If you tell me you've managed a 1% improvement you have to do a lot to convince me you haven't actually made things 5% worse.
by nielsbot | 2025-10-31 17:05:56+00:00
My very minor complaint about TypeScript is you use to use `const` which is 2 additional letters.

Seriously though, I do find it slightly difficult to reason about `const` vars in TypeScript because while a `const` variable cannot be reassigned, the value it references can still be mutated. I think TypeScript would benefit from more non-mutable values types... (I know there are some)

Swift has the same problem, in theory, but it's very easy to use a non-mutable value types in Swift (`struct`) so it's mitigated a bit.
by monerozcash | 2025-10-31 17:06:12+00:00
Or like Target? https://www.reuters.com/legal/target-sued-by-florida-defraud...

Blatant lying also?

> Yesterday New York State Attorney General Barbara Underwood filed a securities-fraud lawsuit against Exxon Mobil Corp. “alleging that the company misled investors regarding the risk that climate change regulations posed to its business.”

>Blatant lying

Can you elaborate? Looking at the case it seems pretty clear that Exxon did not lie, especially not in any "blatant" manner.
by mingus88 | 2025-10-31 17:06:13+00:00
At that scale, it’s the worst of both worlds.

You set the expectation that you can deliver at the pace of a lean startup, but every step of the way you are slowed down by a process or internal dependency that is operating like a fortune 100 company.

Large companies should just fund startups and acquire them when the product has shipped than try to create a culture where teams are expected to operate a speedboat that is towed by an oceanliner.
by ArtTimeInvestor | 2025-10-31 17:06:31+00:00
Are there any publicly traded European cloud companies that will benefit from Europe hosting more of their stuff on their own?

I looked at IONOS, but it seems they just let their cloud product rot away? The cloud backend looks outdated and lacks basic features like uploading private keys that can be used when provisioning new VMs.

I also looked at OVH, but their website and interface look like total chaos to me. I felt lost all the time while I was trying to set up a VM, and while trying to use their AI APIs.

Considering that Europe has an economy as large as the USA, it is puzzling how small these companies are. The combined market cap of IONOS and OVH is less than $10B.
by zahlman | 2025-10-31 17:06:36+00:00
I have consistently found the opposite to be the case across decades of programming experience, as regards the extraction of helper functions. This is not "indirection" in the same sense as with data structures. It is abstraction of currently-irrelevant detail.

Reading and understanding code is a process of answering "what are the immediate steps of this task?", without thinking about what those steps consist of or entail. It is not a process of answering "where is the variable representing ..., and the code that manipulates this?", especially since this makes assumptions that may prove incorrect.
by jeffbee | 2025-10-31 17:07:23+00:00
I wonder who downvoted this. The juice you are going to get from building your core applications and libraries to suit your workload are going to be far larger than the small improvements available from microarchitectural targeting. For example on Ubuntu I have some ETL pipelines that need libxml2. Linking it statically into the application cuts the ETL runtime by 30%. Essentially none of the practices of Debian/Ubuntu Linux are what you'd choose for efficiency. Their practices are designed around some pretty old and arguably obsolete ideas about ease of maintenance.
by warkdarrior | 2025-10-31 17:08:08+00:00
Correct. CEO's layoff explanation indicates two things.

First, the people who made the hiring decision back then were wrong, since they seemingly hired a lot of people for unneeded roles.

Second, the people in charge now lack the vision or ideas on how to put 14,000 already-trained employees to good use on new projects, new products, etc.
by wat10000 | 2025-10-31 17:08:17+00:00
You might be underestimating the wealth of modern billionaires. According to Forbes, the net worth of the 50 wealthiest people in the US totals about $3.9 trillion. There are something like 320 million US citizens at the moment, so that's around $12,000 each. That's just the top 50. All US billionaires would be about $8 trillion, or $25,000 per citizen.

I agree with your overall point, seizing all the billionaires' wealth and redistributing it doesn't solve money woes (there are other reasons to do it), but they amount they do have is getting strikingly high.

In any case, money is accounting, not ability. The important question is: do we have the resources and skilled people needed for it? If not, then all the money in the world won't make it work. If so, then it can be done if people want it badly enough.
by rdtsc | 2025-10-31 17:08:44+00:00
That's pretty neat. Thanks for pointing it out.

The abstraction on top still async based and I agree it makes sense for Zig. But in general I don't like that abstraction. I like it when it's flipped around -- the abstraction is process/thread/green thread-like and sending messages or events around. Underneath it may involved having a few IO pollers with select/epoll/io_uring, a thread pool, etc. But the top level API doesn't handle promises, futures, callback, deferreds, etc. I am thinking of Go's goroutines, BEAM VM processes, or even plain threads or processes talking over the network or locally via queue.
by bpj | 2025-10-31 17:08:45+00:00
This has been my experience as someone who has experienced childhood trauma, and what I've inferred from my therapist. He taught me that the memories I have are typically exaggerations of what happened and it's hard to pin down what truly happened. The only evidence I have that has any merit is my siblings can corroborate with similar experiences since it happened to all of us, and I'm sensitive to things related to these traumas. Almost every day I can feel the things that happened, and on my worst days these areas are much more sensitive.

On top of that, I have legitimate memories that were not traumatic, but still related to the same traumas because said person attempted to encourage these activities throughout my young life on rare occasions. I didn't remember what happened as a kid, but I knew something wasn't right and I wasn't comfortable. It wasn't until I was almost 30 that I had my first "flashback" which was a fractured memory, I still remember it looked like a faded photograph in my mind, and it was accompanied by an extremely uncomfortable feeling.

The re-surfacing memories aren't real in a sense, but in my case they aren't entirely fake either.

I wonder if it's possible that things can be completely imagined with absolutely no basis what-so-ever in certain circumstances, and I also wonder how difficult it is to discern that. It seems to be a difficult concept to manage.
by DenisM | 2025-10-31 17:09:04+00:00
Chat logs don’t run out. We may run out of novelty in those logs, at which point we may have ran out of human knowledge.

Or not - there still knowledge in people heads that is not bleeding into ai chat.

One implication here is that chats will morph to elicit more conversation to keep mining that mine. Which may lead to the need to enrage users to keep engagement.