MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nostrademons | 2025-11-18 23:05:40+00:00
"All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet."

Duh, if they reduce headcount then they will have fewer people in their department, which will negatively affect their chances for promotion and desirability of their resume. That's why they actually offshore the jobs to India and Southeast Asia; it lets them have 3x+ the headcount for the same budget.

If you want to have them actually reduce headcount, make org size the denominator in their performance reviews, so a director with 150 people needs to be 15x more productive than a manager with 10, who needs to be 10x more productive than the engineer IC. I guarantee that you will see companies collapse from ~150,000 employees to ~150, and profit/employee numbers in the millions (and very likely, 90% unemployment and social revolution). This is an incentive issue, not a productivity issue. Most employees and their employers are woefully unproductive because of Parkinson's Law.

You'll never see a manager or even a managing-CEO propose this, though, because it'll destroy their own marketability in the management job market. Only an owner-CEO would do it - which some have, eg. Valve, Nintendo, Renaissance Technologies. But by definition, these are minority employers that are hard to get into, because their business model is to employ only a few hundred people and pay them each millions of dollars.
by LoganDark | 2025-11-18 23:06:02+00:00
> Same, but I don't think it's possible without a large and sustained investment into a free geometric modelling kernel, which can probably be only done by a government.

Fornjot has been attempting this: https://www.fornjot.app

It's going to be years or decades before it's competitive though. Also, it looks like they switched to keeping progress updates private except to sponsors, which means I don't actually have any easily-accessible information about it anymore which is sad.
by etamponi | 2025-11-18 23:06:22+00:00
I might be misunderstanding what booing means then. My understanding is covering another person's voice with shouts in order to sabotage his speech. It might indeed be part of what some society might define free speech, but I'd consider it more of a coward form of violence.

If with "booing" you mean "disrespect whatever good idea a person has because it also has very bad ideas", then I wonder who we will end up respecting. Even I have ideas I end up discovering bad. Should I boo myself and ignore everything else I say?

If I am missing another definition of booing then I am sorry.
by jitix | 2025-11-18 23:06:26+00:00
I hope you understand the concept of relative prosperity - The current equivalent would be a factory worker at Boeing. In 60s cars were innovative in US, now Nigeria can outcompete China in cars.

Times change, standards rise, competition increases. If America wants to remain competitive globally you need to work in the top 1% fields like you did back in 60s, not expecting $25 per hour for flipping burgers (which should have been automated with robots by now).
by louisbourgault | 2025-11-18 23:06:32+00:00
I feel like 1.5 was still pretty good -- my school blocked chatgpt at the time but didn't bother with anything else, so I was using it more than anything else for general research help and it was fine. The blocking fact is probably the biggest reason I use Gemini 90% of the time now, because school can never block google search and ai mode is in that now. That, and the android integration.

To be fair, for my use case (apart from GitHub copilot stuff with Claude 4.5 sonnet) I've never noticed too big of a difference between the actual models, and am more inclined to judge them by their ancillary services and speed, which google excells in.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-11-18 23:06:39+00:00
Even networks like HN and Reddit are filled with outrage and groupthink these days. I think the kind of person that spends all their time on social media gets stuck in a weird epistemic bubble which consists of ragebait posts and opinions that fish for community approval (likes, retweets, upvotes, etc.) Sitting in that soup for too long probably warps your sense of what's actually happening in the world around you. The folks that don't want to deal with this just opt out of the open web.

I think open forums on the Internet are a bit of a lost cause unless you specifically tune your algorithm to derank ragebait, pile ons, and karma fishing. YouTube did this and the comment section improved dramatically. Though it's obviously important to remember that the draw of YouTube is the videos and not the comments, unlike microblogging sites.
by Animats | 2025-11-18 23:06:52+00:00
There are lots of commercial gadgets like that.

Most of the affordable CO2 meters are relative, not absolute. They set their 400 PPM level based on the lowest value they ever see. That's usually OK, but it's not good enough for places with permanent people occupancy, such as nursing homes. Absolute detectors with NIST calibration are available but around US$500.[1]

[1] https://www.forensicsdetectors.com/products/carbon-dioxide-d...
by Blamklmo | 2025-11-18 23:07:08+00:00
Doesn't even matter at this point.

We have a global RL Pipeline on our hand.

If there is something new a LLM/AI model can't solve today, plenty of humans can't either.

But tomorrow every LLM/AI model can solve it and again plent of humans still can't.

Even if AGI is just the sum of companies adding more and more trainingdata, as long as this learning pipeline becomes faster and easier to train with new scenarios, that will start to bleed out humans in the loop.
by int_19h | 2025-11-18 23:07:36+00:00
Well, it depends. Just recently I had Opus 4.1 spend 1.5 hours looking at 600+ sources while doing deep research, only to get back to me with a report consisting of a single sentence: "Full text as above - the comprehensive summary I wrote". Anthropic acknowledged that it was a problem on their side but refused to do anything to make it right, even though all I asked them to do was to adjust the counter so that this attempt doesn't count against their incredibly low limit.
by apsurd | 2025-11-18 23:07:47+00:00
speaking of paying for LLMs, am i doing something wrong? i paid cursor $192 for a year of their entry level plan and i never run out of anything. I code professionally, albeit i'm at the stage where it's 80% product dev in finding the right thing to build.

Is there another world where $200/m is needed to run hundreds of agents or something?

am i behind and i dont even know it?
by adastra22 | 2025-11-18 23:08:10+00:00
I've been experimenting with this with a custom /plan slash command for claude code, available here: https://github.com/atomCAD/agents

Planning is definitely still something that requires a human in the loop, but I have been able to avoid the problem you are describing. It does require some trickery (not yet represented in the /plan command) when the overall plan exceeds reasonable context window size (~20k tokens). You basically have to start having the AI consider combinatorially many batches of the plan compared with each other, to discover and correct these dependency issues.
by Spooky23 | 2025-11-18 23:09:15+00:00
The market is priced for perfection. Delivery is underwhelming. I think the audacity and hijinks of Altman, Musk, the Trump whack pack, Theil, etc in this zero regulatory environment is starting to wear thin on Wall St.

The honest players like NVidia, Micron, Microsoft, Meta and Google who are shipping product or making money with this tech. IMO there’s a non-zero probability that OpenAI and the “Elon cinematic universe” are Enron style disasters.

The SEC is essentially gone. Their contracts with FINRA mostly cancelled. You can’t invest like it’s 2024.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-18 23:09:21+00:00
What? I’m almost 40, and my whole life it has been common knowledge that American cars are of inferior quality compared to Japanese cars.

It makes no sense to buy a GM Suburban or Ford Expedition because you think a Stellantis Pacifica is low quality. The Japanese minivans have always been there for purchase, if you wanted a quality minivan.

People have been choosing to pay extra for bigger, taller cars because they want bigger, taller cars to signal ostentatious consumption, not any other reason. I’ve heard this direct from many, many people on why they chose an SUV or pickup truck over a minivan (though they will couch it in terms like “cool” or “sleek” or whatever).
by nomel | 2025-11-18 23:09:53+00:00
> Apple --> OpenAI can make a device that runs ChatGPT as the OS instead of relying on iOS.

Or, instead of spending billions training models that are nearly all the same, they instead take advantage of all the datacenter full of GPUs, and AI companies frantically trying to make a profit, many most likely crashing and burning in the process, to pay relative pennies to use the top, nearly commoditized, model of the month?

Then, maybe someday, starting late and taking advantage of the latest research/training methods that shave off years of training time, save billions on a foundation model of their own?

I don't think it makes sense for Apple to be an AI company. It makes sense for them to use AI, but I don't see why everyone needs to have their own model, right now, during all the churn. It's nearly already commodity. In house doesn't make sense to me.
by lovich | 2025-11-18 23:09:57+00:00
He’s an example. He has to burn massive amounts of money to counteract the fact that he wants to be the town asshole in public constantly.

If someone who had 5 dollars to their name acted like Elon Musk no one on this forum would question hating the fucker, but he’s got cash so some set of people think he might be right
by johnnymedhanie | 2025-11-18 23:10:24+00:00
Hi everyone!

Tired of reading outdated docs or README's? Quick start guide not completely up to date? API endpoints docs are muddy with different versions?

what if it could be self-updating, staying in sync with every code change.

Doctective is that tool. We hook into your git repository and with every update - self update the documentation classes/functions/db/api schemas (and keep track of versions of them too) - auto maintain a Quick Start of the repo (for your new teammates) - embedded AI chat, you can ask what components would break if you made changes to a class/function

just released this tool for early access!
by 7thaccount | 2025-11-18 23:10:28+00:00
Forth is generally all about minimalism as I understand it, but that has nothing to do with what I wrote. I was just saying the man obviously wants to focus on something else at this stage of his life and that is perfectly okay. I think he might port to Raspberry Pi if he was a few years younger, but he pointed out that he didn't think it was worth it at this point.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-11-18 23:10:50+00:00
FreeCAD is probably the single most frustrating and unintuitive pieces of software I have ever used. I almost drafted hate mail to the devs after 15 minutes of crash coursing fusion360 got me further than 2 days of trying to use FreeCAD.

It seems like it has lots of capability but still "punch your monitor" levels of difficulty just trying to do the most basic stuff.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-18 23:10:59+00:00
Since when did disagreeing become policing? But yes, if someone calls me ignorant without any justification, I'm going to disagree. And if you think that's "policing", I'm sorry but you seem to be the ignorant one here around the meaning of that word.

"Geez," it's just a name. Is it too much to not get worked up over a perfectly innocent and fun name?
by lowsong | 2025-11-18 23:11:51+00:00
> With an LLM, you have to specifically setup a convoluted (and potentially financially and electrical power expensive) system in order to provide MANY MORE examples of how to improve via fine tuning or other training actions.

The only way that an AI model can "learn" is during model creation, which is then fixed. Any "instructions" or other data or "correcting" you give the model is just part of the context window.
by Teever | 2025-11-18 23:12:15+00:00
You may be interested in CAD Sketcher: https://www.cadsketcher.com/

You're on point that there's a tremendous amount of money captures by Autodesk for CAD software that could be better directed at the open source community instead.

Software like OpenSCAD and FreeCAD are obviously not suitable for much commercial work, and have very irritating limitations for hobbyist work, in my mind a big part of that is the UI and Blender has a good and established UI at this point so I'd love to see the open source CAD that provides an alternative to vendor lock in come from a Blender add-on instead of a separate program.

I am no expert but as I understand it the primary difficulty with developing good alternatives to commercial CAD software lie in the development of an effective geometric kernel.

It seems to me that if a developer of an opensource CAD program develops it as a Blender add-on they can effectively outsource the remainder of the development efforts to the Blender community while focus can be made on the CAD kernel itself.
by netcoyote | 2025-11-18 23:12:35+00:00
Hey, I got to see this code!

Back when Blizzard was still Silicon & Synapse, we got Rebecca's source code to Another World SNES from Interplay to use for a game we would develop, and they would publish, and I was the engine programmer.

I remember reading the source code, which was ... sparsely documented, and wondering what was going on. Like "you're writing to the DMA registers?!?"

The code was amazing, because it has has to draw polygons into 8x8 pixels cells that are stored in planar format at 60FPS. On a 3.5 Mhz processor. Blew my mind.

Incidentally, the game was called "Nightmare", and later became "Blackthorne", which was released for SNES, Genesis, and PC.
by db48x | 2025-11-18 23:12:47+00:00
Is the author surprised by that, or did you just misread it? The only relevant quote on that page that I see is “It is impressive to see Quake run at full speed knowing that Windows 95 runs DOS executable in a virtual machine.”

He is perhaps surprised that it runs _at speed_ in the VM, not that it runs in the VM which he already knows about.
by Uehreka | 2025-11-18 23:12:50+00:00
I design projections for independent theatre in Baltimore. I use AI in my workflows where it can help me and won’t compromise on the quality of what I’m making. I frequently use AI to upscale crappy footage, to interpolate frames in existing video (for artistic purposes, never with documentary archival stuff) and very occasionally to create wholesale clips in situations where video models can do what I need.

I recently used WAN to generate a looping clip of clouds moving quickly, something that’s difficult to do in CGI and impossible to capture live action. It worked out because I didn’t have specific demands other than what I just said, and I wasn’t asking for anything too obscure.

At this point, I expect the quality of local video models (the only kind I’m willing to work with professionally) to go up, but prompt adherence seems like a tough nut to crack, which makes me think it may be a while before we have prosumer models that can replace what I do in Blender.
by BeetleB | 2025-11-18 23:14:39+00:00
Before the SALT cap of $10K, it could easily matter. Prior to the cap, I itemized deductions every year - easy if you have a mortgage, live in a high income tax state, and both spouses work. In those days the standard deduction was $12K, and just our state taxes exceeded that amount - forget about mortgage + charity.

Even after the SALT cap, on some years itemizing was better.

And I believe as of next year (or the one after?), the SALT cap is going up significantly. Back to itemizing every year.
by tharne | 2025-11-18 23:14:49+00:00
> The problem becomes that eventually all these people who are laid off are not going to find new roles.

> Who is going to be buying the products and services if no-one has money to throw around?

I've wondered about this myself. People keep talking about the trades as a good path in the post-AI world, but I just don't see it. If huge swaths of office workers are suddenly and permanently unemployed, who's going to be hiring all these tradesmen?

If I were unemployed long-term, the one upside is that I would suddenly have the time to a do a lot of the home repairs that I've been hiring contractors to take care of.

The other thing I worry about is the level of violence we're likely to see if a significant chunk of the population is made permanently unemployed. People bring up Universal Basic Income as a potential, but I think that only address a part of the issue. Despite the bluster and complaints you might hear at the office, most want to have the opportunity to earn a living; they want to feel like they're useful to their fellow man and woman. I worry about a world in which large numbers of young people are looking at a future with no job prospects and no real place for them other than to be made comfortable by government money and consumer goods. To me that seems like the perfect recruiting ground for all manner of extremist organizations.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-11-18 23:14:49+00:00
What I usually try to test with is try to get them do full scalable SaaS application from scratch... It seemed very impressive in how it did the early code organization using Antigravity, but then at some point, all of sudden it started really getting stuck and constantly stopped producing and I had to trigger continue, or babysit it. I don't know if I could've been doing something better, but that was just my experience. Seemed impressive at first, but otherwise at least vs Antigravity, Codex and Claude Code scale more reliably.

Just early anecdote from trying to build that 1 SaaS application though.
by nostrademons | 2025-11-18 23:14:56+00:00
Using your scale? ↑7 or ↑8. That seemed to be the sweet spot in capabilities to me, without getting to the point where engagement eats everything else including productivity and future maintenance.

Using semiconductor process nodes? 45-65nm. That was around the point that Moore's Law broke down. At that point, you could do most of the functionality that we depend upon computers for (eg. GUIs, 3D rendering, networking, basic machine-learning, some speech recognition and text synthesis). It also roughly corresponds to ↑7 or ↑8 on your scale, so it's self-consistent.

Conceptually? I'd like to have multiple checkpoints, so that if the ecosystem gets borked you can roll back further.
by superultra | 2025-11-18 23:15:16+00:00
You’re wrong on several things. There’s a big difference in the kind of domestication of dogs - which we generally think of when we think of domestication - and animals who serve extracurricular domestication, ie ferrets.

I also have 2 cats, having had 2 prior. They’re great. But it’s just science that they are not fully domesticated.

I also lived on a farm as a kid.

So let’s not make assumptions to prove an incorrect point.
by toast0 | 2025-11-18 23:15:19+00:00
From the install guide [1] under "Installation Instructions, General", step 5 is:

> Cut the positive wire to the third brake light and strip the insulation from both ends of the cut.

That's altering the factory wiring harness. That's an extra junction the factory didn't authorize and when it fails, the factory warranty won't cover it, because the wiring harness modification lead to the failure. All so the dealer can make about $250 extra on a sale.

If these were built as a module you plugged in between the wiring harness plug and the light module socket, I'd have a smidge less hate for them; but there's too many plug types for that, and there might not be enough room anyway, so the dealer has to cut into the wiring harness for this ... if there's a real benefit to flashing brake lights, it should be standardized and done by the manufacturers.

[1] https://pulseprotects.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Sales-R...
by imiric | 2025-11-18 23:15:22+00:00
> The agentic spam is exhausting. I just wanted to code.

Ditto. And we still can.

I've yet to use an "agent", and still use a chat UI to an LLM in Emacs. I rely on these tools for design discussion, rough prototyping, and quick reference, but they still waste my time roughly a quarter of the time I use them. They have gotten better in the last year, though, and I've been able to broaden my reach into stacks and codebases I wouldn't have felt comfortable with before, which is good.

I just have no interest in "agents". I don't want to give these companies more access to my system and data, and I want to review every thing these tools generate. If this makes me slower than a vibe coder, that's intentional. Thankfully, there are still sane people and companies willing to pay me for this type of work, so I'm not worried about being displaced any time soon. Once that happens, I'll probably close up shop, figure out an alternative income stream, and continue coding as a hobby.
by palmotea | 2025-11-18 23:16:14+00:00
> Nvidia is the one that would get bailed out. As would Microsoft, if it came to that.

> I also think they should be let to fail, but there's no way the US GOV ever allows them to.

There's different ways to fail, though: liquidation, and a reorganization that wipes out the shareholders.

OpenAI could be liquidated and all its technology thrown in to the trash, and I wouldn't shed a tear, but Microsoft makes (some) stuff (cough, Windows) that has too much stuff dependent on it to go away. The shareholders can eat it (though I think broad-based index funds should get priority over all other shareholders in a bankruptcy).
by atombender | 2025-11-18 23:16:44+00:00
Newer cars with matrix LED headlights account for this, such as the Volkswagen ID series. The brights not only "blot out" the shape of the cars around you, they also rotate when turning or going around a curve, so that you never accidentally point them at oncoming traffic.

It's quite magical and weird to observe in real time. When driving past oncoming cars, you can see a halo of darkness around each car. There are videos on YouTube that show the effect pretty well.
by MichaelBurjack | 2025-11-18 23:17:07+00:00
Not in a way meaningful to assessing infectious risk, no.

I consider outdoor air to be unshared, except in cases of large dense crowds (such as say outdoor festivals or sporting events).

I consider risky shared air to be indoor air with one or more other individuals that are not known to be taking infection-prevention precautions.

One can measure CO₂ as a proxy to rebreathed air fraction.

For example, a CO₂ reading of 2300ppm (common in a small or medium room with a few others, or larger rooms with a crowd or conference room, or in a car) means 5% of your air is rebreathed (5% of your intake is output from another person's lungs).

A way to think about this is we take ~20 breaths a minute on average. So in that scenario, it would be equivalent to one breath every minute coming directly from someone else's lungs. If they happen to be contagious with an airborne contagion (such as Covid, or influenza, or RSV), there's a high likelihood that you will catch it if you're spending more than a short time in that environment.

There are nuances, such as maybe the air is being scrubbed (eg by a HEPA filter) which won't affect the CO₂ levels but will drastically lower the infectious risk of that environment.

More reading: https://www.energyvanguard.com/blog/what-a-carbon-dioxide-mo...