MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tomhow | 2025-10-28 13:23:35+00:00
It's the first ever comment by that account, and it seems to contain fulmination and snark, both of which are explicitly against the guidelines, as is curmudgeonliness. Criticism is fine, but it needs to be substantive. If the article isn't fit for HN, people can flag it, and if they really want to, they're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com to point out what's wrong with it and we'll consider further penalties.

Comments like the one I replied too just make HN seem mean and miserable and that's definitely something we're trying to avoid.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-10-28 13:23:39+00:00
Some DEC CPUs were wire-wrapped until VLSI became a thing. The KL-10 was notoriously an ECL wire-wrap design.

But they had a semi-automated machine to handle it. I don't think anyone mass-produced non-trivial numbers of wire-wrap boards by hand. It's fine for prototypes, but it's a very error-prone process and makes it difficult to handle noise, especially at fast clock speeds.
by pruetj | 2025-10-28 13:23:43+00:00
The only thing I can think of is if they had converted Alexa into a truly useful assistant and gotten people to sign up for a premium to it while everyone was still in awe of and having fun talking to LLMs.

Even if they executed this perfectly though, I think all it would do is increase the burn rate related to Alexa. Plus there's no moat, everyone has a phone with more capable hardware that would be a better place for this assistant to live long term.

I don't think they missed too much on the AI front. Bedrock was crap during formative LLM-solution building times, maybe that was a legitimate miss of theirs? SageMaker still is crap, another miss?
by pjmlp | 2025-10-28 13:23:45+00:00
When I was a kid helping my father with in-house electronics, early 1980's, this meant using specific pens and paper to layout them into boards, and then do chemical baths, drying the boards, and then hope for the best when starting to solder components on top.

Usually a mistake in any step would mean throw away the whole board and start from scratch.
by mikeocool | 2025-10-28 13:24:07+00:00
Most boards(particularly of large publicly traded tech companies) don't hire CEOs to ensure their companies remain stable in the longterm at the expense of profits, they hire them to grow short term profits.

Boards don't see the over-hiring as a mistake. On the contrary, had CEOs not moved to grow their companies relentlessy and pursue profits in the years during/after COVID when tech was booming, their boards would have fired them. Now that times are leaner, they need to rein in spending to maintain profits -- if they dont do that, then they'll be fired.
by roenxi | 2025-10-28 13:24:17+00:00
Do the multiple elections contested not count any more? MAGA clearly don't endorse insurrection, their basic strategy to control the government is to win lots of votes and come back to try again a few years later if it doesn't work (they're impressively persistent). Which has involved broadening their support base into low-wage minorities in US society and trying to prise the Black and Hispanic votes away from the Democrats, I note. Might be seeing the fruits of that starting to turn up in the 2024 presidential elections. Or might be a fluke and just Trump's charisma, the Republicans are hard to support.
by ssttoo | 2025-10-28 13:24:22+00:00
I recently started exploring supplements. Turns out a lot of what you find in the likes of CVS and Whole Foods can be all over the map: from 0 of the actual ingredient to 10x what’s on the label. Current consensus on reputable brands seems to be Thorne, NOW, Life extensions, and Pure. The last one acquired by Nestle, make of that what you will.
by TallGuyShort | 2025-10-28 13:24:59+00:00
From: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-workfor...

> we want to operate like the world’s largest startup

This is a phrase I hear repeated by leadership a lot, and it's usually code for "why doesn't everyone else just make the business grow faster?" It is almost always, as in this case, followed by statements that suggest they don't understand what is actually different about the way a start up functions and why they stopped operating that way at some point in the first place.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-28 13:25:08+00:00
>The writ of habeas corpus applies to detention, not prosecution.

It doesn't. If a cop stops you on the sidewalk for 10 minutes, that's being "detained", but they don't need to meet the burden of first going to a judge and presenting the evidence required in habeas. Which is all of the detention that occurs in these cases, after that it becomes deportation.

But, should habeas be required of deportation, then only proof required for that is "here is the documentation showing lack of citizenship".
by jack_tripper | 2025-10-28 13:25:29+00:00
>but in general GPs shouldn't be doing psychological evaluation, period. I am in Europe, and this is the default.

Where did I say GPs have to do that? In my example of my friend's being misdiagnosed by GPs, it was about another issue, not mental, but it has the same core problem of doctors misdiagnosing patients worse than a LLM bring into questions their competence or that of the health system in general if a LLM can do better than someone who spent 6+ years in med school and got a degree to be a licensed MD to treat people.

>You also don't expect butcher to fix your car, those are as close as above

You're making strawmen at this point. Such metaphors have no relevance to anything I said. Please review my comment through the lens of the clarifications I just made. Maybe the way I wrote it initially made it unclear.

>You get what you pay for at the end

The problem is the opposite, that you don't get what you pay for, if you're a higher than average earner. The more you work, the more taxes you pay, but get the same healthcare quality in return as unskilled laborer who is subsidized.

It's a bad reward structure to incentivize people to pay more of their taxes into the public system, compounded by the fact that government workers, civil servants, lawyers, architects, and other privileged employment classes of bureaucrats with strong unions, have their own separate heath insurance funds, that separate from the national public one that the unwashed masses working in the private sector have to use, so THEY do get what THEY pay for, but you don't.

So that's the problem with state run systems, just like you said about corruption, that giving the government unchecked power over large amounts of people's taxes, allow the government to manipulate the market and choosing winners and losers based on political favoritism and not on the fair free market of who pays the most into the system.

Maybe Switzerland managed to nail it with their individual private system, but I don't know enough to say for sure.
by ruszki | 2025-10-28 13:25:37+00:00
There is enough people who don’t read articles just headlines whose world view can be changed with this.

In Hungary, where I’m originally from, one of my friends sent me an article, which was about immigration in 2015, because she thought that the local district government wanted to move “migrants” (dog whistle for non white people over there) into her district. The headline said that, the body said the exact opposite… and it worked.

Also there are a ton of comments here, on Reddit, and really everywhere, that makes it quite obvious that a lot of people don’t read just headlines.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-10-28 13:25:57+00:00
It was a thing, but it was also a thing to have it disabled or simply not working. XP was famous for its hackability. And web frameworks were also far from what you see today with auto updates. It's hard to describe to people who were not involved how crazy ITsec was back then. It felt like the wild west compared to today. Literally every other DB had a critical unpatched vulnerability. Thankfully Shodan did not exist yet, so the barrier to entry was high for people without a particular skillset (which was also much harder to learn back then). But MSF pushed security awareness pretty hard once people realized how easy it can be if you just collect a bunch of scripts for common exploits in a simple framework that everyone can learn.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-10-28 13:26:02+00:00
I have no idea about most of the words you wrote but I'd love to see alternative approaches to SAT solving.

CryptoMiniSAT has native support for Gaussian Elimination but it has to put a lot of effort into recovering XORs from the CNF.

A different format (XORSAT + 2SAT) plus an efficient algorithm to exchange information from the two sides of the problem would be interesting.
by tomhow | 2025-10-28 13:26:12+00:00
If the article isn't fit for HN, people can flag it, and if they really want to, they're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com to point out what's wrong with it and we'll consider further penalties.

Comments like the one I replied too just make HN seem mean and miserable and that's definitely something we're trying to avoid.
by JustExAWS | 2025-10-28 13:26:13+00:00
I have been an employee for 30 years across 10 jobs - one of which was Amazon from 2020-2023. I never once considered my “main source of income” my current job. My main source of income was my ability to get a job. I always stayed ready to look for a job at a moments notice and it has never taken me more than a month to get a job when I was looking.

In fact, ten days after getting my “take severance package and leave immediately or try to work through a PIP (and fail)” meeting, I had three full time offers. I’m no special snowflake. I keep my resume updated, my network strong, skills in sync with the market, 9-12 months in savings in the bank.

Whether you are an enterprise developer or BigTech in the US you are on average making twice the median income in your area. There is usually no reason for you not to be stacking cash.

And equity in startups are statistically worthless and illiquid - unlike the RSUs you get in public companies that you can sell as soon as they vest.

As far as an “annuity”, you should be taking advantage that excess cash you get and saving it. But why would you want an “annuity” based on the performance of a specific company? I set my preference to “sell immediately” when my RSUs in AMZN vested and diversified.

Fortunately after the ACA, you can get insurance on the private market regardless of preexisting condition (I lost my job once before the ACA. It was a nightmare) or pay for COBRA. Remember that savings I said everyone should have?
by prymitive | 2025-10-28 13:26:22+00:00
The problem with AI isn’t new, it’s the same old problem with technology: computers don’t do what you want, only what you tell them. A lot of PRs can be judged by how well they are described and justified, it’s because the code itself isn’t that important, it’s the problem that you are solving with it that is. People are often great at defining problems, AIs less so IMHO. Partially because they simply have no understanding, partially because they over explain everything to a point where you just stop reading, and so you never get to the core of the problem. And even if you do there’s a good chance AI misunderstood the problem and the solution is wrong in a some more or less subtle way. This is further made worse by the sheer overconfidence of AI output, which quickly erodes any trust that they did understand the problem.
by gostsamo | 2025-10-28 13:26:31+00:00
My take:

OpenAI self-evaluated to $500B;

Microsoft commitment for $250B of services, a.k.a still 50% of that value is somewhat locked;

AGI still undefined;

Some more kicking of the can toward the future when it comes to payments;

Both have more freedom to do research and offer services;

Overall, lots of magic money talk with pinkie promise in the future and somewhat higher possibility of new products and open weights models.
by codegeek | 2025-10-28 13:26:46+00:00
"he doesn’t seem to care, he’s paid well."

There is your answer. Most people want to have a job where if they are paid well and are reasonably safe, they don't care. I am not saying its a good or bad thing. It's just the way it is.

You cannot convince someone to pick up new things because YOU think thats what they should do. I personally think people should always be learning new things but I cannot expect my friend to do it if thats not what they think.
by sgarland | 2025-10-28 13:27:05+00:00
IMO, all of those make logical sense. If you’re inserting a line break or literal line, it can be thought of as a 1-dimensional object, which cannot enclose anything. If you want another one, insert another one.

In contrast, paragraphs and lists do enclose content, so IMO they should have clear delineations - if nothing else, to make visually understanding the code more clear.

I’m also sure that someone will now reference another HTML attribute I didn’t think about that breaks my analogy.
by jandrese | 2025-10-28 13:27:12+00:00
When people talk about the “AI bubble popping” this is what they mean. It is clear that AI will remain useful, but the “singularity is nigh” hype is faltering and the company valuations based on perpetual exponential improvement are just not realistic. Worse, the marginal improvements are coming at ever higher resource requirements with each generation, which puts a soft cap on how good an AI can be and still be economical to run.
by abdibrokhim | 2025-10-28 13:27:36+00:00
I Made World's Most Expensive Tutorial Expenses. my mom shocked, lol

Air flights: $1245 (with return) Uber: $54 (one-way) Public transport: $140 (in total) Boat: $70 (with return) Photo: $1100 (it's iPhone 16 Pro, lol) Hotel 1-night: $50 (approx.) Food: $0 (i'm broken) Total: $2659 Music credits: https://www.instagram.com/p/DK1jtGEA8-r/ Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/DO_6XewDUPL/ (used on the video)
by respondo2134 | 2025-10-28 13:27:47+00:00
it's notable that there is no talk about defining what exactly AGI is - or even spelling out the three letter acronym - because that doesn't serve his narative. He wants the general public to equate human intelligence with current OpenAI, not ask what does this mean or how would we know. He's selling another type of hammer that's proving useful in some situations but presenting it as the last universal tool anyone will ever need.
by isolay | 2025-10-28 13:27:53+00:00
This is interesting, but techniques like CDCL seem to only ever find any one valuation that makes a proposition true. My homegrown solver finds all valuations that make a proposition true and then can eliminate redundancies, such that `X or not X and Y` gets simplified to `X or Y`, just to mention one example (proof: truth tables are identical). Are there any other SAT solvers out there that do something like that? My own one suffers from combinatorial explosion in the simplification stage when expressions get "complex" enough. But then, the simplification is NP-complete, AFAICT.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-28 13:28:20+00:00
>It needs to leave a paper trail, and provide someone the opportunity to prove that they're a citizen or here legally.

If you would read the articles where people are griping about this case or that case, none of these immigrants have contested it with a "but I'm a citizen". I suspect this is because they know that won't fly. For the amazingly few cases where a citizen is temporarily detained, many of those cases are leftists trying to jam ICE up by not making the claim and hoping they overstep.

None of those that have made the news are cases where it goes to court because the detainee claims citizenship and ICE denies it.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-10-28 13:28:22+00:00
It’s actually not warehouses. It’s groceries. Amazon jumped from a few hundred thousand to 1mm+ with the acquisition of Whole Foods. The corporate jobs is inclusive of engineering and aws.

They do an annual “top grading” layoff that’s variable in size from 5% to 10% which are performance based. There is obviously attrition as well. This leads to a constant hiring flow as these are typically backfilled.

These layoffs are often in addition to top grading and are not backfilled.

Note this is also on top of the RTO misery and thumb screw attrition drive to force out top performing talent in an inverse top grade maneuver.

Almost every single person I had an ounce of respect for at Amazon has left over the last few years. I find it hard to understand why anyone would work there any more.
by EmptyCoffeeCup | 2025-10-28 13:28:38+00:00
Fuel duty works out at about 5p/mile. Slightly more for thirstier vehicles, slightly less for lighter vehicles.

There is zero need to implement anything for petrol or diesel vehicles, which nicely eliminates the "pre-2016" problem (How many 10 year old electric vehicles are there? Not enough to worry about). I'd be inclined to provide a government API, and require the manufacturers to provide the data in a specified format. Make it part of type approval for use on the UK roads.

Not impossible, nor should a VIN + Mileage number be particularly risky for privacy concerns - the number should be pushed regularly, to prevent wind-back tricks.

15p/mile has got to be a joke though. That'd be the equivalent of setting fuel duty to £1.50/litre - it would immediately shag what's left of the economy.
by rubslopes | 2025-10-28 13:28:40+00:00
A bit of a counterpoint. I've done 3 years of therapy with an amazing professional. I can't exaggerate how much good it did; I'm a different person, I'm not an anxious person anymore. I think I have a good idea of how good human therapy is. I was discharged about 2 years ago.

Last Saturday, I was a little distressed about a love-hate relationship that I have with one of the things that I work with, so I tried using AI as a therapist. Within 10 minutes of conversation, the AI gave me some incredible insight. I was genuinely impressed. I had already discussed this same subject with two psychologist friends, who hadn't helped much.

Moreover: I needed to finish a report that night and I told the AI about it. So it said something like, "I see you're procrastinating preparing the report by talking to me. I'll help you finish it."

And then, in the same conversation, the AI switched from psychologist to work assistant and helped me finish the report. And the end product was very good.

I was left very reflective after this.

Edit: It was Claude Sonnet 4.5 with extended thinking, if anyone is wondering.
by flohofwoe | 2025-10-28 13:28:57+00:00
> that code submitted for review must follow the project's code format and conventions

...that's just scratching the surface.

The problem is that LLMs make mistakes that no single human would make, and coding conventions should anyway never be the focus of a code review and should usually be enforced by tooling.

E.g. when reading/reviewing other people's code you tune into their brain and thought process - after reading a few lines of (non-trivial) code you know subconsciously what 'programming character' this person is and what type of problems to expect and look for.

With LLM generated code it's like trying to tune into a thousand brains at the same time, since the code is a mishmash of what a thousand people have written and published on the internet. Reading a person's thought process via reading their code doesn't work anymore, because there is no coherent thought process.

Personally I'm very hesitant to merge PRs into my open source projects that are more than small changes of a couple dozen lines at most, unless I know and trust the contributor to not fuck things up. E.g. for the PRs I'm accepting I don't really care if they are vibe-coded or not, because the complexity for accepted PRs is so low that the difference shouldn't matter much.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-10-28 13:29:23+00:00
> But they aren't marked as liked, and liking one will increase the like indicator.

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

In addition to "optimistic UI". https://imhoff.blog/posts/optimistic-ui-primer

The UI optimistically allows the user to tap/click the like button and the eventually-consistent backend determines if the like is valid. The UI doesn't verify if the user is allowed to like because that's the backend's job.

Tom Scott has a video on it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=RY_2gElt3SA
by wolrah | 2025-10-28 13:29:51+00:00
Or without an OS installed at all, or with a broken OS.

I do VoIP phone systems for a living and this is why I deploy Supermicro mini-ITX servers, so even if something goes totally sideways as long as the client's IT is competent enough to get me remoted in to their voice network in some way I can troubleshoot it fully and in many cases fix it without leaving my desk possibly half way across the country. If it's an actual hardware problem and I can't fix it remotely I still then know for sure what's wrong and whoever's going on site can be properly equipped for the actual problem rather than having to bring everything.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-10-28 13:29:57+00:00
"I don't understand why you wouldn't just give the platform that continually gets worse your money for a slightly less worse experience"

I can't believe anybody who did not start using youtube yesterday would ever consider rewarding them. The sheer amount of overwhelmingly negative and widely disliked shit they do every single year for the last decade is staggering.
by Lerc | 2025-10-28 13:30:09+00:00
It is possible that some projects could benefit from triage volunteers?

There are plenty of open source projects where it is difficult to get up to speed with the intricacies of the architecture that limits the ability of talented coders to contribute on a small scale.

There might be merit in having a channel for AI contributions that casual helpers can assess to see if they pass a minimum threshold before passing on to a project maintainer to assess how the change works within the context of the overall architecture.

It would also be fascinating to see how good an AI would be at assessing the quality of a set of AI generated changes absent the instructions that generated them. They may not be able to clearly identify whether the change would work, but can they at least rank a collection of submissions to select the ones most worth looking at?

At the very least the pile of PRs count as data of things that people wanted to do, even if the code was completely unusable, placing it into a pile somewhere might be minable for the intentions of erstwhile contributors.
by IAmBroom | 2025-10-28 13:30:14+00:00
> Can you imagine if your government tried to use the weapons it bought from America, only to have them refuse to start because America decided they shouldn't? Or if you're within the US, imagine if the nukes refused to launch because Raytheon or whoever included a digital kill switch?

Yes, and John Lennon even wrote a song about imagining it.

> That would completely defeat MAD.

And that's a bad thing? Besides, it wouldn't. The threat of MAD is what makes it work, not actual MAD itself. Unless <Bad Actor> confidently controlled that kill switch, the threat would remain.
by stego-tech | 2025-10-28 13:30:24+00:00
Literally this. Corporations are good at making up plausible excuses, but anyone who takes more than two seconds to evaluate their claims beyond face value will find they’re almost always complete bullshit.

Underperformers should be rotated out long before a mass layoff occurs. If your company isn’t axing them until a mass layoff, they’re doing bad business.
by Oras | 2025-10-28 13:30:31+00:00
> OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250B of Azure services, and Microsoft will no longer have a right of first refusal to be OpenAI’s compute provider.

So OpenAI could be on Google (GCP) and AWS, and possibly Claude and Gemini on Azure? that could be a good thing.

I use OpenRouter in multiple applications, the practicality of having one provider to host all possible LLMs is such a win to try and iterate without having to switch the cloud (big for enterprise who are stuck with one cloud provider)