MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deaux | 2025-10-09 13:41:37+00:00
> The incentive structure for managers (and literally everyone up the chain) is to maximize headcount. More people you managed, the more power you have within the organization

Ding ding ding!

AI can absolutely reduce headcount. It already could 2 years ago, when we were just getting started. At the time I worked at a company that did just that, succesfully automating away thousands of jobs which couldn't pre-LLMs. The reason it ""worked"" was because it was outsourced headcount, so there was very limited political incentive to keep them if they were replaceable.

The bigger and older the company, the more ossified the structures are that have a want to keep headcount equal, and ideally grow it. This is by far the biggest cause of all these "failed" AI projects. It's super obvious when you start noticing that for jobs that were being outsourced, or done by temp/contracted workers, those are much more rapidly being replaced. As well as the fact that tech startups are hiring much less than before. Not talking about YC-and-co startups here, those are global exceptions indeed affected a lot by ZIRP and what not. I'm talking about the 99.9% of startups that don't get big VC funds.

A lot of the narrative on HN that it isn't happening and AI is all a scam is IMO out of reasonable fear.

If you're still not convinced, think about it this way. Before LLMs were a thing, if I asked you what the success rate of software projects at non-tech companies was, what would you have said? 90% failure rate? To my knowledge, the numbers are indeed close. And what's the biggest reason? Almost never "this problem cannot be technically solved". You'd probably name other, more common reasons.

Why would this be any different for AI? Why would those same reasons suddenly disappear? They don't. All the politics, all the enterprise salesmen, the lack of understanding of actual needs, the personal KPIs to hit - they're all still there. And the politics are even worse than with trad. enterprise software now that the premise of headcount reduction looms larger than ever.
by IanCal | 2025-10-09 13:41:45+00:00
> Many of us mastered the hard problem of navigating various abstraction layers of computer over the years, only to be told, we now effing dont know how to write a few sentences in English? Come on.

If you're trying to one shot stuff with a few sentences then yes you might be using these things wrong. I've seen people with PhDs fail to use google successfully to find things, were they idiots? If you're using them wrong you're using them wrong - I don't care how smart you are in other areas. If you can't hand off work knowing someones capabilities then that's a thing you can't do - and that's ok. I've known unbelievably good engineers who couldn't form a solid plan to solve a business problem or collaboratively work to get something done to save their life. Those are different skills. But gpt5-codex and sonnet 4 / 4.5 can solidly write code, gpt-5-pro with web search can really dig into things, and if you can manage what they can do you can hand off work to them. If you've only ever worked with juniors with a feeling of "they slow everything down but maybe someday they'll be as useful as me" then you're less likely to succeed at this.

Let's do a quick overview of recent chats for me:

* Identifying and validating a race condition in some code

* Generating several approaches to a streaming issue, providing cost analyses of external services and complexity of 3 different approaches about how much they'd change the code

* Identifying an async bug two good engineers couldn't find in a codebase they knew well

* Finding performance issues that had gone unnoticed

* Digging through synapse documentation and github issues to find a specific performance related issue

* Finding the right MSC for a feature I wanted to use but didn't know existed - and then finding the github issue that explained how it was only half implemented and how to enable the experimental other part I needed

* Building a bunch of UI stuff for a short term contract I needed, saving me a bunch of hours and the client money

* Going through funding opportunities and matching them against a charity I want to help in my local area

* Building a search integration for my local library to handle my kids reading challenge

* Solving a series of VPN issues I didn't understand

* Writing a lot of astro related python for an art project to cover the loss of some NASA images I used to have access to.

> the folks pushing or better said

If you don't want to trust them, don't. Also don't believe the anti-hype merchants who want to smugly say these tools can't do a god damn thing. They're trying to get attention as well.
by luciferin | 2025-10-09 13:41:46+00:00
I am curious if the timing have impacted the inability to measure a benefit. AI is rolling out at the same time as widespread return to office campaigns. Remote work was widely studied and touted as improving efficiency, but no one is showing the drop for RTO. Is AI in part just balancing it out? There's also an ongoing massive brain drain. Many companies are either laying off their most tenured and competent employees, or they are making life miserable for them in the hopes that they quit.

All of this said, using AI in your back end takes a huge amount of time from your users and employees. You have to vary multiple prompts, you have to make the output sane, touch it up, etc. The most useful part of AI for me has been using it to learn something new, or push through a task that I otherwise couldn't do. I was able to partially rewrite a logging window to reduce CPU use significantly. It took me over two weeks of back and forth with AI to figure out a workable solution and implement it into the software. I competent programmer probably could have done it better than I did in less than an hour. There's no business benefit to a help desk person being able to spend 2 weeks writing code that an engineer would be much better suited to handling. But maybe that engineer could write it in 10 minutes instead of an hour if they used AI to understand the software first.
by anthonylevine | 2025-10-09 13:42:02+00:00
If this was an article on linting, I'd agree.

But who has become the defacto steward of React over the last 5 years? Vercel. Whose CEO has made a lot of news recently for their political views? Guillermo What front-end framework library now needs to distance itself from Vercel as it's main steward? React.

IT'S ALL POLITICS. That's the entire point of the foundation. That's what this whole discussion is about.
by skeeter2020 | 2025-10-09 13:42:17+00:00
It's not the top IME, but the big fat middle of the org chart (company age seems to mirror physical age maybe?) where middle to senior managers can hide out, deliver little demonstratable value and ride with the tides. Some of these people are far better at surfing the waves than they are at performing the tasks of their job title, and they will outlast you, both your political skills and your tolerance for BS.
by satiated_grue | 2025-10-09 13:42:42+00:00
I was always amazed that the idea of towing a plane with three other planes (the "Troika-Schlepp") was not only conceived, but performed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_323_Gigant#Me...

https://ww2talk.com/index.php?threads/glider-towing.22518/
by itake | 2025-10-09 13:42:45+00:00
yes, I've worked on face recognition databases with 150m and 40m faces for banking and safety.

The models are not perfect. Humans should still be in the loop to verify, especially when the consequences of being wrong really suck for the user: losing access to their bank account, getting fired from their job.

If you're referring to algorithms like phash (Where they are using the same core image, but just add a filter), they wont work well, because everyone's ID card mostly looks the same. There will be too many FPs.
by Orygin | 2025-10-09 13:42:47+00:00
> No one reading here is an expert on geopolitical issues. You're just connecting on the wrong post, and probably the wrong website, if you want to talk about these things

I don't know, I see a lot of posts and threads here of people discussing geo-political issues. Not just for the sake of it of course, but because politics is everywhere and affects everything, because technology is always going to have some form of politics attached, and because everyone is a political actor in their lives.

Separating fully any technology news and political happenstance is impossible. Now of course it doesn't mean every topic should devolve into identity politics, but having discussion about how and why things are they way they are is inherently political.
by sixtyj | 2025-10-09 13:42:57+00:00
Edit: I am considering to delete the following paragraph as it seems that my hands were quicker than my brain :)

I'm sorry, but it's like scratching your left ear with your right hand. But for fun, yeah, there are worse things people do. Good luck and have fun. Now here's where most of us will probably be sarcastic, but it's certainly a good way to explore whatever others consider bullshit.

Edit: Pls read the following comment. I would hire him/her because I consider this as a waste of OP skills and he/she would be useful in many more projects.

TLDR; it was not a hate. I am sorry if it sounds so.
by imglorp | 2025-10-09 13:43:22+00:00
Maybe not wallets but regular "sign in with X" SSO.

If all the X's can agree that one of the claims in the SSO is "is_adult", then at least you limit the exposure of your government ID to X getting breached, while all the "sign in with X" sites won't have access to the ID itself, just the claim.

Of course, pretty much every X gets breached anyway, and the walled garden shenanigans are not attractive, but it's better than ever site getting your ID.
by jkercher | 2025-10-09 13:43:24+00:00
I certainly would not use it prescriptively as I said originally. I wouldn't use any poker book prescriptively. You make your own style and pull pieces from others just like any other trade. I like the way Joe does X.. I like the way Jane does Y.. I have my own way to do Z. That becomes my style.

There are nuggets of wisdom in every poker book I've read even if I disagree with some parts or some are just flat out wrong. Super System, in particular, provided insights into the mind of one of the greatest player of all time. I particularly liked the psychological view on things. If nothing else, it provides context for the ones that came before you. Its been 15+ years since I read it, but beyond the fundamentals, I recall picking up (hopefully not misattributing anything here)...

- a quick, in-your-head method of calculating odds based on outs

- psychology of playing runs and others perceptions of you at the table

- the pitfalls of playing AA

- a realistic look at "tells"

- the general psychology of aggression

- how/where tight players make money and how/where aggressive players make money

Super System is the seminal book of poker. It is the book that your opponents are most likely to have read. As I alluded in my original comment, you wouldn't want to be the only person at the table who doesn't recognize someone playing the super system to the letter. IIRC, the goal was to make the player just appear lucky. It was meant to be confusing. It's like reading K&R as a C programmer. Sure, some of the information might not hold up today, but it provides a lot of context.
by jghn | 2025-10-09 13:43:24+00:00
That's a good reminder, I forgot about it being temporary. Looks like it was ~6 years before the initial failure, and it's been ~4 years since.

I should start investigating potential migration paths that would allow me to do a HDD migration as that would be ideal. Although it looks like that might be a pain due to some of their OS-level limitations.
by conradludgate | 2025-10-09 13:43:37+00:00
It's a mix of both. https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/core/ptr/non_null.rs.html#72-7...

#[rustc_layout_scalar_valid_range_start(1)] #[rustc_nonnull_optimization_guaranteed]

This declares that NonNull cannot be outside of the range (1..). These magic attributes are only allowed to be used by the stdlib, and they're direct compiler instructions. Nonnull is special because the optimisation is guaranteed so the compiler does have special code to handle it, but other types can be optimised without compiler changes.
by skywal_l | 2025-10-09 13:43:39+00:00
Andrew Kelley (author of zig) has a nice talk about programming without pointers allowing ultra fast serialize/deserialization. [0]

And then you have things like cap'n'proto if you want to control your memory layout. [1]

But for "productivity" files, you are essentially right. Portability and simplicity of the format is probably what matters.

[0]: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/05c72e39-c07e-41bc-ac40-85e83...

[1]: https://capnproto.org/
by btbuildem | 2025-10-09 13:43:48+00:00
This is because they're trying to reduce the wrong headcount. The largest inefficiencies in corpo orgs lie in the ways they organize their knowledge and information stores, and in how they manage decision making.

The rank and file generally have a really good grasp on their subset of the domain -- they have expertise and experience, as well as local context. Small teams, their managers -- those are the ones who actually perform, and deliver value.

As you move up the hierarchy, access to information does not scale. People in the middle are generally mediocre performers, buried in process, ritual and politic. In addition to these burdens, the information systems do their best to obscure knowledge, with the usual excuses of Safe and Secure (tm) -- things are siloed, search does not work, archives are sunsetted, etc.

In some orgs tribalism also plays an outsized role, with teams acting competitive, which largely results in wasted resources and seven versions of the same failed attempt at New Shiny Thing.

Then as we look higher yet in the hierarchy, the so-called decision makers don't really do anything that cannot be described as "maximize profit" or "cut costs", all while fighting not to get pulled down by the Lord of the Flies shenanigans of their underlings. They are the most replaceable.

A successful "AI Transformation" would come in top-down, going after the most expensive headcount first. Only truly valuable contributors would remain at that level. Organizational knowledge bases would allow to search, analyze and reason about the institutional knowledge accrued in corporate archives over the years, enabling much more effective decision making. Meanwhile, the ICs would benefit from the AI boost, outsourcing some menial tasks to the machine, with the dual benefit of levelling up their roles, and feeding the machine more context about the lower-level work done across the org.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-09 13:43:52+00:00
> - If you post on /r/conservative you can expect to receive a bunch of bans from unrelated (popular) subs. Doesn't matter what you posted, being associated with that subs "taints" your account enough for some moderators.

You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs.

If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked.

It’s not a real subreddit. It’s a moderator-curated echo chamber. They run it like a propaganda outlet, only allow approved thought from approved commenters, and ban anyone who steps out of line with the mods.

That’s why every thread you view there will have “load more comments” buttons that never load anything: They remove more comments than you’re allowed to see.
Show HN: Enfra – Live SEO/Ads Data Inside ChatGPT (Chrome Extension)
by siddharthdeswal | 2025-10-09 13:44:09+00:00
Hey people, we built Enfra, a Chrome extension that pipes live SEO & Google Ads data into ChatGPT so you’re not prompting “blind.”

Enfra is a Chrome extension that pulls Google SERPs, Ads, and page markup for a keyword or URL you choose, and adds that context in your chat. Works in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.

The problem: we built a Marketing agent, but end-users in design partner companies weren't using it. So we asked them how they're using AI currently, and they said "we have a ChatGPT tab open at all times".

What it does: injects structured data from SERPs, Google Ads, URLs and Search Console so that users can run their own chat workflows.

The big change is that users don't have to learn a new interface. They're already using ChatGPT and others for a ton of Marketing work, now they get better answers because the AI tools have better context.

And about privacy, we only fetch and insert Marketing data, we don't read your chats.

We'd deeply appreciate any comments or feedback.
by ashtonjamesd | 2025-10-09 13:44:24+00:00
Hi, sorry maybe I should've added a comment for that.

The 'appRoute' is a macro that expands to a function signature.

The macro is: '#define appRoute(name) HttpResponse name(AppContext ctx)' and the parameter I passed as 'home' is expanded into the function name. The reason is because all controller function signatures are the same, so just writing 'appRoute' allows the developer to save time writing endpoints!

It is a tradeoff between readability and development speed. And one of the ideas behind the framework is succint and minimal code.
by goalieca | 2025-10-09 13:44:59+00:00
> I don't think they were ever really sold as that, and we have better tools for that.

We have OpenAI calling gpt5 as having PhD level of intelligence and others like Anthropoc saying it will write all our code within months. Some are claiming it’s already writing 70%.

I say they are being sold as a magical do everything tool.
by cheema33 | 2025-10-09 13:45:03+00:00
It was not a very sophisticated scam. The vendor had rebadged an opensource software I was very very familiar with. The only changes they had made were to rename things and fudge the reported stats.

It was not all that dissimilar from what Nikola Motors did when they pushed a non-working Hydrogen truck down a hill and filmed it and said look, the truck is working great. They too were caught. And eventually got an Italian company to produce a truck and put their name on it. And then eventually went bankrupt. But not before the officers, including the founder made bank on the entire scam. CEO was convicted of fraud. But he paid/donated $1m to Trump and was swiftly pardoned.
by zdimension | 2025-10-09 13:45:28+00:00
For anyone wondering, NonNull (along with other "constrained" types like NonZero integers) uses internal compiler attributes (https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/core/ptr/non_null.rs.html#72):

#[rustc_layout_scalar_valid_range_start(1)]

This gives rustc enough information to perform niche optimizations such as collapsing Option<NonNull<T>>.

You can technically use those for your own types, but it requires nightly, obviously.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-10-09 13:45:51+00:00
How often is "You should pay me much more, it will make both of us wealthier" a winning argument when asking for a raise?

Trade very much is zero sum, at least some of the time. Prices are set by power disparities, not by abstract concepts of relative value.

One of the many problems with mainstream econ is that gloms together a whole set of unrelated interactions in a single crude concept of "price."

In reality share dealing, corporate wage bargaining, negotiations between farmers and supermarket chains, lemonade stands, and tourists haggling with craft vendors on vacation are all completely different kinds of interactions.

They end up with a price because they're mediated in currency, but their differences are far more interesting and economically revealing than their very superficial similarities.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-10-09 13:46:05+00:00
Very fair! I only came back to edit it because right after leaving that comment I went to see if Best Buy had something I needed locally, clicked into search, typed, hit enter, and it fucking broke. Seemingly entirely, even the search button didn't work, so cmd+a, cmd+c, cmd+r, click in again, paste, enter, and that worked.

I just fucking loathe how common this experience is now. Amazon seems to be the only one that doesn't do it, but I've experienced this exact issue on Best Buy, Target, Etsy, Mercari, ebay, and it just DRIVES ME UP THE WALL.
by SecretDreams | 2025-10-09 13:46:11+00:00
> Is AI in part just balancing it out?

Likely, no. In my industry, I see a fraction of ICs using it well, a fraction of leadership using it for absolute dog shit idea generation, and the remainder using it to make their jobs easier in the short run, while incurring debt in the long run since nobody is "learning" from AI summaries and most people don't seem to be reading the generated "AI notes" sent in emails.

By and large, I think AI is going to hurt my workplace based on the current trajectory, but it won't be realized until we are in a hard hole to dig out of.
by jitix | 2025-10-09 13:46:22+00:00
This could be because of developer fatigue and the trend of forcing backend devs to do fullstack.

Its very hard to keep up with the frequent changes to programming models, new frameworks, CSS libraries (why the heck are they soo many?!) when you also have to design O(Log n) backends, IaC, Observability, LLMOps, etc.

I have come to a compromise and have started advocating for React/Redux/TS/NextJS as the default CRUD application stack so that I can focus on solving real CS problems in the backend that I’m passionate about.
by rglover | 2025-10-09 13:46:24+00:00
If you just want tools that work/make it easy to build apps and websites with JS (and you want direct access to the guy building them), you may find what I built after leaving React/Next interesting [1]. I built this because the creeping complexity and confusion of React's APIs combined with the stress of building a SaaS w/ Next.js became a giant ball of stress and time waste.

Feel free to jump in the Discord [2] with any questions.

[1] https://cheatcode.co/joystick

[2] http://discord.cheatcode.co
by throwaway173738 | 2025-10-09 13:46:26+00:00
Suppose I think I may need 128 entries at some point, but the vector is allocated with room for 16 entries by default. I may not want to allocate and then immediately allocate again. But if I get to a 17th entry then I’m already causing allocation. So I might as well allocate 128 at that time so there are no more allocations at all.
by tom_ | 2025-10-09 13:46:27+00:00
There are two examples on the landing page, and they both look quite different. Surely if the API is the same for both, there'd be just one example that covers both cases, or two examples would be deliberately made as identical as possible? (Like, just a different new somewhere, or different import directive at the top, and everything else exactly the same?) I think that's the point.

Perhaps experienced users of relevant technologies will just be able to automatically figure this stuff out, but this is a general discussion - people not terribly familiar with any of them, but curious about what a big pile of AI code might actually look like, could get the wrong impression.
by walkabout | 2025-10-09 13:46:47+00:00
This kind of "data driven" corporate stuff is, IME, so bullshitty and hand-wavy that I'd assume if only 30% are able to claim to have found quantifiable ROI (most of them with laughably bad methodology a slightly-clever 10th grader who half paid attention in their science and/or stats classes could spot) it means that only 5% or fewer actually found ROI.