MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dangus | 2025-10-05 01:56:38+00:00
The product naming is completely insane. In the span of a year my corporate portal changed name from portal dot office dot com, to Microsoft 365 dot com, and now its copilot something or other dot com.

The portal completely changed in design and the former portal functionality is hidden in a tiny search icon in a knock off chatgpt interface.

The average non-technical corporate user must be so confused.
by gullywhumper | 2025-10-05 01:56:59+00:00
I live in a city where people are shot and killed every week (no exaggeration) and car jackings weren't even tracked until the last couple years. The city government can't manage things that are getting people killed or brutally beaten, so where should late-night noise rank on their priorities? I can still hear the gunshots when I'm going to bed, but in my HOA at least I don't have to worry about my immediate neighbors causing too much trouble. There's at least some level of local accountability, despite the tradeoffs.
by gtowey | 2025-10-05 01:57:24+00:00
Sales and marketing is the only thing they've ever been good at. Really.

They make their money because they can go to the largest corporations & governments, talk to the CTO and tell them they have a product for everything that checks all their regulatory requirements, and all these products kind of sort of work together.

Who else can offer that?

For Microsoft, engineering is just about checking boxes on feature lists. Quality doesn't matter and engineering is a cost to be minimized. The people who make the purchasing decisions aren't the ones who have to use their stuff.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-10-05 01:57:51+00:00
Think of it like FDE work. It's cost front-loaded but very profitable on the back end, so early on you want to limit it to lighthouse customers. That being said my suggestion is to build some tooling for now to support your existing work that can be expanded gradually as a substrate for AI service, I expect the tools should mature within 6mo-1year, so you can offer trial AI services to new clients to reassess periodically.
by xp84 | 2025-10-05 01:58:24+00:00
It really is sad. They are convinced that “growth” (insert worshipful gesture by executives) can only be most efficiently pursued via “services revenue” rather than quaint old ideas like convincing you to buy new OS versions on their merits, or to stay loyal to the platform because it was good. In 2000, this meant Microsoft set your homepage to MSN and dropped an MSN ISP icon on your desktop. Now every touchpoint in both Mac OS and Windows is an opportunity to advertise another Service.
by ijk | 2025-10-05 01:58:29+00:00
Adding knowledge works, depending on how to define knowledge and works; given sufficient data you can teach an LLM new things [1].

However, the frontier models keep improving at a quick enough rate that it's often more effective just to wait for the general solution to catch up with your task then to spend months training a model yourself. Unless you need a particular tightly controlled behavior or need a smaller faster model or what have you. Training new knowledge in can get weird [2].

And in-context learning takes literal seconds-to-minutes of time if your information fits in the context window, so it's a lot faster to go that route if you can.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00213

[2] https://openreview.net/forum?id=NGKQoaqLpo
by herval | 2025-10-05 01:59:29+00:00
It’s not a “narrative” - technical-minded people tend to be more realistic/pessimistic, which has severe implications on company growth.

It matches my personal experience (the most technical CEOs I work with consistently underperform) and the industry averages (the majority of the companies that make it big have CEOs who aren’t deeply technical).

That includes YC to- from Coinbase to Dropbox, the CEOs are hardly strong technical people (some have CS backgrounds, but they don’t really have a career as accomplished technical individuals and aren’t exactly know for their incredible CTO careers).
by w0m | 2025-10-05 02:00:11+00:00
> It’s “installed” at my company but basically refuses to interact with basic company data like files in sharepoint.

on my work computer - there's a sep. 365Copilot app that is tied into Teams,Sharepoint, outlook, and I believe our engineering wiki. Probably other stuff I'm not aware of.

I'm honestly shocked how often I use it now.

If I get a random Pipeline failure; I'll copy/paste it into the o365 Copilot app - and it points me to an email I didn't notice ~3 months ago about a new policy change, and then points me to discussion thread I wasn't on ~2 weeks ago about how to get in compliance with direct links to EngWiki 'how to fix..' documentation, and an Teams link to join the breaking teams Office Hours.

Just off a single ~1 sentence prompt and a stack trace

It's kind of amazing.
by Shekelphile | 2025-10-05 02:01:00+00:00
> when we drain the planet dry of easily-accessible fossil fuels we’ve deprived any successor civilization of its opportunity to escape the planet.

There will be no successor civilization to humans. Earth won't be able to support multicellular life in a few hundred million years due to the sun becoming gradually more luminous over time, resulting in higher surface temperatures that will eventually culminate in a runaway greenhouse happening, as it already has on Venus. Due to human-driven climate change effects this event will certainly happen much sooner (<100m years) as well, which is simply not enough time for another intelligent species to evolve after a large-scale extinction event.

Even if life evolving on earth was an incredibly rare event the chance of such circumstances not happening elsewhere even in our own galaxy is infinitely small - there are trillions of planets and 100b+ stars. On top of that there are 100s of billions of galaxies within the observable universe as well.
by mindslight | 2025-10-05 02:01:14+00:00
Teflon tape is for NPT (National Pipe Taper), which seals through thread interference. For the various things I do, I generally use a three layer sandwich of pipedope-tape-pipedope for the least chance of dealing with leaks. I'd rather take a little more time to make up a joint than have to disassemble and remake one in the middle of an assembly.

Showerheads are generally NPS (National Pipe Straight) which seals with a rubber washer. So if there is leaking, the real problem is that rubber washer is missing or old, or the female piece is cracked. Adding tape often encourages cracking the showerhead female, as it pushes out on the threads and showerheads are often chromed plastic. This goes doubly when the pipe coming out of the wall is actually NPT, and the tape encourages you to really over tighten it. Tape can be useful sometimes to hackily make things better, it's just not a good default.
by roenxi | 2025-10-05 02:03:21+00:00
Although we should notice the other side of that - managers that don't have an explicit onboarding where they lay that algorithm out for their reports are doing a terrible job. It is literally 3 lines. Lay it out at least once. Maybe go through it in a standup once a year. They are letting people slip through the cracks to the point where we have junior and even mid software engineers that don't realise there are priorities and that they should be working on them. Wow.

One of the reasons companies get dysfunctional is low- & mid-tier managers seem to be allergic to the idea of laying out what the priorities are and provide feedback on whether people are working on them or not.
by dugite-code | 2025-10-05 02:04:14+00:00
Not really, I don't send many emails these days but find the ability to filter and run automations on emails coming into my server very useful.

Not to mention I use a separate email per service so I can tell if there's a data breach (usually end up seeing an uptick in spam).

*Edit: Not to mention I can pay for a relay service other than Amazon SES without using Google's services, and for significantly less.
by tuatoru | 2025-10-05 02:04:18+00:00
This seems like an argument from incredulity, and also static-world fallacy.

People are not thinking about the trend in AI. How good were AIs three years ago? How good are they now? How good will they be in another three years?

Kelsey Piper's analogy is good. How much smarter is a teacher than a room full of kindergartners? Who gets whom to do their bidding?
by NaOH | 2025-10-05 02:04:40+00:00
Previously:

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42835806 - Jan 2025 (10 comments)

A list of Hacker News's undocumented features and behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38773957 - Dec 2023 (283 comments)

Hidden Functions of Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38572756 - Dec 2023 (1 comment)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33076053 - Oct 2022 (70 comments)

* A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors* - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30459276 - Feb 2022 (67 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018-20) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26866482 - April 2021 (259 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23439437 - June 2020 (267 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20292361 - June 2019 (25 comments)

A List of Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19212822 - Feb 2019 (188 comments)

Hacker News's Undocumented Features and Behaviors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16437973 - Feb 2018 (395 comments)
by username223 | 2025-10-05 02:08:16+00:00
> $16Bn in compute spend (rent) rising to $400bn in 4 years. Definitely not a bubble. ;)

Just to put that in context, US GDP last year was about $30tn, and Apple's revenue was about $400bn. So Altman is saying he wants to spend around 1% of US GDP, or most of Apple's revenue, on compute alone in 2029. He's clearly using the "fire all your white collar employees" pitch deck at the very least, if not the "prepare to meet your Silicon God" one.
by bdcravens | 2025-10-05 02:09:01+00:00
The speed of games in those days was influenced by very little reliance on relievers (it's why Cy Young is the leader in wins AND losses, though even in recent history, Nolan Ryan had more complete games in some years that many pitchers today have in their ENTIRE careers). The need for breaks between innings, switching pitchers, etc to fit with TV commercial breaks is also an influence.
by eadmund | 2025-10-05 02:09:23+00:00
> Life-or-death care almost certainly needs to be a government-run, single-payer system.

> If giving another kid their cancer meds means one less gold-leaf-covered item in the presidential ballroom, so be it.

Why do you think a government would choose to cover an additional kid’s cancer medications rather than an additional luxury for government workers? You’re placing a ton of faith in governments.

At least with private companies there is choice (normally). And private companies do not directly wield government power (normally).
by acdha | 2025-10-05 02:09:58+00:00
Here’s a recent example of an American citizen having his property damaged, being tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed, held illegally for three nights, and denied access to a lawyer or a call to his family—and then they just let him go as if that’s nothing.

https://newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-a-us-citizen-and-a-ve...
by PeterHolzwarth | 2025-10-05 02:10:38+00:00
"The problem is that it doesn’t actually do anything."

I disagree, and I think you'll see what I mean when you shift the frame of reference from "person working at a large company with Office 365 installed" to a couple hundred million average Joe's having access to it at home.

Webs search is now a horrifying wasteland, and people know it. Remember the conversations we all had just a few years ago: LLM will replace web search. That's the key point here - not "replace web search" for the subset of people who have office jobs, but web search for the vastly greater number of people who just have it at home on their computer.

The tech - the products - are good enough for your average person at home who wants a starting point and a structure to work through for something they know nothing about. I think that's actually one of the strengths of the tech as it exists for the winder audience: you don't really need ultra accurate, super precise, info and checklists and guides when you just want to know what to look into to do some decorative tiling on the top of an old table you bought; a way to make sense of and work through a type of pop media you have become interested in; to give you a starting point to work through some new problem you have encountered in day to day life.

That "80 percent vaguely accurate-ish" threshold that LLMs can broadly deliver for a novice is actually good enough for that vast majority of things people deal with that aren't really super-critical. Are you idly curious about some ways to think about how to replant and re-do your back yard greenery? Curious about how to make sense of all the competing numbers and criteria and features when looking to buy your first air-conditioner? Want to take a vague, repetitive, not very well put together response to something your neighbor starting holding forth on on Nextdoor and make it tighter and better expressed?

That little Copilot icon that comes default in Windows legitimately can help you there.
by saghm | 2025-10-05 02:10:59+00:00
How do you download and manage the various language toolchains though? At least in my experience, the ease of doing this varies quite a bit by language and OS. Some distros have better package managers than others, and some of them don't have first-party ones at all. If I want to install Python on MacOS and haven't been using it enough to know which of the half dozen or so tools that are recommended by various people for it (or might have a sense of what to use but lack interest in learning the specifics of yet another tool for a language I need to do something fairly basic in), having a single tool that I'm already using for a bunch of other languages that I can also use for Python might be pretty nice.
by iamnothere | 2025-10-05 02:12:41+00:00
The first amendment doesn’t mention recording, although I admit that an argument could be made regarding an implied right. But then why are wiretapping laws allowed? Hiding a recorder in an otherwise public meeting area can violate these laws in some states (notably Illinois and Oregon). Are these laws unconstitutional?

Besides, the first amendment does not give the government the right to record or to benefit from those recordings. Rather, it prevents the government from restricting speech acts of private citizens. Therefore there should be no conflict with the 1st if a hypothetical law prevents the government from recording or accessing private recordings, even if private recordings are considered protected speech.
by blini-kot | 2025-10-05 02:12:53+00:00
that's exactly what I am on about, and facing those restrictions as well

as such, sarcasm here is beyond measurement - obviously those measures were just a distraction for own voters, but presented as a matter of principle yada yada yada

an absolutely identical situation gets a 100% hush hush reverse treatment, hence my comment on being a matter of principle - even though I don't agree with such measures, seeing them implemented against Israelis would at least be an honest thing to do instead of the current hypocrisy
by southwindcg | 2025-10-05 02:13:34+00:00
She has a great video about this post's very topic as well.

https://youtu.be/fLzEX1TPBFM

Altman doesn't merely suggest building a Dyson sphere, which is already laughably beyond our capability, but a Dyson sphere around the solar system. It is so, so stupid. He might as well have suggested using wizard magic to power our data centers.
by noosphr | 2025-10-05 02:14:48+00:00
Malthusianism for computers.

Moore's law is dead. The only way to increase compute is to increase the power we feed to computers. AI is just the shiniest example. Everything else will follow suit until electricity costs increase enough that it doesn't make sense to throw any more computation at it.

Any country that doesn't have energy to spare will be in the position of countries which didn't have food to support armies before the industrial revolution.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-10-05 02:16:45+00:00
That doesn't at all say what you think. Every country has foreign relations. That doesn't mean it leads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_North_Kor...

Is it safe to say North Korea is a world leader? If your method is anything to go by, yes. Does North Korea dominate India in its world leadership? Quite likely!
by saghm | 2025-10-05 02:17:12+00:00
I guess the question is just whether we want to be the generation that decides to try to do something about this problem or let it keep going on for a later generation to solve. Either way, we won't be the ones who actually are around when the pain starts to be felt, and it's not like as individuals we can do a whole lot about it anyhow. My wife and I have no interest in having kids, so I guess we're doing as much as we can, although our decision is pretty much completely unrelated to any opinions about population I might have.
by scarface_74 | 2025-10-05 02:18:36+00:00
I am 51. I love small companies. My second best experience was working as the second technical hire by a then new to the company CTO who was hired to bring technical leadership into the company. The two non technical brothers who were founders outsourced the development to a consulting company until they found product market fit.

But I still did the same thing the article and commenters suggested. I stayed strictly aligned with what the CTO wanted and just from that, I was able to guide the entire technical architecture of the company for two years even though I had no hands on experience with AWS.

Let’s not be fooled though. My next job after that startup that had 60 people was at the second largest employer in the US - AWS working in the consulting division (AWS Professional Services).

It was an immediate 50% bump in pay. An even greater contrast is that an intern I mentored got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I made at 46 in 2020. They are now at 25 making slightly more than I’m making at a medium size third party consulting company working full time as a staff consultant.

Your principled stand is leaving a lot of money on the table.

At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at any large company again and I have turned down a position that was going to be created for me at another large well known non technical company where a former coworker was a director and ignored overtures from GCP in their professional services department that would pay a lot more.

I also wouldn’t like the company I work at now with around 700 people if I weren’t brought in as a staff engineer where I have almost complete autonomy on how I lead my projects and the ear of the CxOs

But let’s not pretend the extra $75K to $100K+ I could be making isn’t worth playing politics. I’m just at a place in life where I can prioritize other things than money.

Also, at 51, I’ve learned a few things. Not to make your “career” at any company and to always be prepared to jump ship when the environment changes or the raises don’t keep up with the market. I’m now on my 10th job.
by exasperaited | 2025-10-05 02:18:46+00:00
One of the great challenges that any government succeeding what is happening now will face is that almost every single official who is in office at the point that they take over will be culpable for some sort of federal crime; the scale of lawbreaking is breathtaking.

Many presidential appointments are structured so that their terms outlast the president in question; Biden kept Chris Wray on, for example. But that simply won’t work this time, because these people are loyal to Trump first; that is what he demands. It is impossible to imagine any Democratic or national unity president keeping Kash Patel in his job, or Brendan Carr in his, or whoever Trump finally installs at the Federal Reserve.

Whoever takes over from Trump would legitimately have to purge and criminally charge essentially everyone he hired, and many, many people they hired, all the way down the chain. It would be the right thing to do but it will seem indistinguishable from what Trump is currently doing under false pretences.

Even assuming Trump does not simply die of or retire from old age or ill health in office, he himself is essentially untouchable. So to his remaining supporters it will look like an unfair proxy war against him, targeting his employees and loyalists.

Nothing is ever going to go back to the way it was before, and I think people will have to steel themselves for the possibility that the only thing that will provide any sort of foundation for rebuilding the federal USA is some sort of truth and reconciliation commission, and these people will, in fact, have to get away without meaningful sanction if the full truth is to be known.

Apart from that, the only solution will be to dissolve the union and start from scratch.
by gullywhumper | 2025-10-05 02:19:50+00:00
Should the government of California lead by example and also limit the maximum level of fines levied by any entity within the state (state, county, city, or other org)?

Why is a fine levied by an HOA any different than an org at one of those other levels of governance from the perspective of democracy?

Seems to me, many of the same people cheering this law, also bemoan 'attacks on democracy' from the federal gov't. So what is the right level of democracy?
by vacuity | 2025-10-05 02:20:00+00:00
Although not a comprehensive report, people tend to count the source lines of unsafe in a Rust codebase as a metric. Moreover, reputable libraries worth using typically take care to reduce unsafe, and where it is used, encapsulate it well. I don't think you have a substantive point on the matter. Unsafe certainly can be abused, but it's not a bogeyman that people scarcely catch glimpses of. Unsafe doesn't demote the safety of Rust to that of C, or something like that.

Your comments on Rust's philosophy towards memory management are off base. Rust is unlike GC languages, even Swift, in that it makes allocations and deallocations explicit. For example, I know that one approach to implementing async functions in trait objects was rejected because it would've made implicit heap allocations. Granted, Rust is far behind on reified and custom allocators. Rust has functionality to avoid the default alloc crate, which is the part of libstd that does heap allocations, and a library ecosystem for alternate data structures. Rust doesn't immediately give you total access, but it's only a few steps away. Could it be easier to work with? Absolutely. The same goes for unsafe.
by dredmorbius | 2025-10-05 02:20:01+00:00
This is well outside my area of expertise, assess accordingly.

From some quick DDGing, PRI (primary rate interface) is one of several possible options for a packet-switched telephony system, and is specifically contrasted with SIP VOIP connections in this article:

<https://enterprise.spectrum.com/support/faq/voice-and-collab...>

NB, "always 23" ... unless you're in Europe, in which case 23 === 30.

More on PRI vs. SIP: <https://enterprise.spectrum.com/support/faq/voice-and-collab...>.

(Other than being able to spell PRI and the above articles, I've no knowledge on the topic.)