MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2025-11-12 19:17:46+00:00
> I'm shocked that they're trusted for any business use-cases by anyone moderately savvy.

I buy drives on Amazon all the time. I check them all. Never had any problems.

The mistake they made was buying not from Amazon, but from "Maestro Technology" listing on Amazon. If you understand that Amazon is a marketplace and you take 10 seconds to read who you're buying from, it's not a problem.

Amazon returns are also extremely easy. I once gambled on a sketchy seller and received a bad product (not computer related). A couple clicks and it was on its way back for a refund.

The problems with inventory commingling are virtually a thing of the past. I went through the process of selling a product on Amazon and understanding their evolved inventory labeling and commingling procedures so I'm not worried. Many of the tech community are anchored to news articles from years ago, though.

If you have a highly trusted vendor who can deliver at great prices and have products in stock that show up at your door when you need them, then use that. For the rest of us, using Amazon to buy common parts isn't really the problem that it's made out to be in HN comments. I think a lot of people here only understand Amazon through the occasional article that makes it to the top of HN and they don't understand what it's really like because they've been too scared to use it for years.
by pksebben | 2025-11-12 19:18:06+00:00
From a certain angle, this is the market correcting towards the abstraction.

Between inflation, fiscal capture, and the inane plethora of ridiculous financial vehicles that are used to move capital around these days, the argument could be made that the money was already funny. This is just the drop of the final veil, saying "well it's not like these numbers mean anything anymore. I do have enough yachts. Fuck it, see what you can do with it".
by aboringusername | 2025-11-12 19:18:16+00:00
Games publishers/developers are going to have to wind in their necks a little. Whilst memory is abundant it's also still quite expensive. We should still be aiming for efficiency and the chances are 16gb+ are in the minority here. Fact is, the more VRAM and compute you demand the smaller your customer-base becomes.

I've played many games with 8GB VRAM* and will do so for the forseeable. If that's not enough, I am not a customer. Simple as.

The truth is, there is going to be a massive motivation with the likes of Steam Deck/Machine to actually make titles that are optimised and perform well within their hardware parameters. It's money you won't want to ignore.

*One example was Silent Hill remake on PC, which used the unreal engine. It was optimised beautifully and ran without visual glitches and stutters even with the highest graphic demands on a 8GB RTX
by pan69 | 2025-11-12 19:18:21+00:00
I agree. But it also depends on the role you're hiring.

When I hire grads or juniors onto my team I will focus a lot more on leetcode style problems because a) they don't have much work experience so delving into real-world problems they have solved is typically not useful (exceptions there) and b) leetcode is usually closer to their recent experience which tends to be more academic in nature.

More senior roles typically have very different requirements. I don't need a staff or principal engineer to pass a leetcode test as it typically isn't relevant to that role. I respect their lived experience so I dive into real world problems they have solved, not just software but also people, culture, etc.
by antonvs | 2025-11-12 19:18:25+00:00
> Researchers are getting rewarded with VC money to try what remains a science experiment.

That's not all that new. Commercial fusion power startups are an example. I think the first one was General Fusion, founded in 2002. Today, there are around 50 of them. Every single one of those "remains a science experiment", and probably has much lower chance of success than some of the AI science experiments.

Of course, fusion startups have apparently "only" received about $10 bn in funding to date, so pale in comparison to the overall AI market. But if you just look at the AI "science experiments", it's possible the amounts would be comparable.
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-11-12 19:18:46+00:00
you can make a signed readonly linux installation, and restrict your games to it. this would be like "support steamos but not linux".

Or deliver the game as a container format, like snap or appimage to bypass most of the system.

Or demand the installation of a kernel driver like they do on windows.

or just give up on kernel level aticheat since they're been breached all the same, just as windows are restricting their power too.

easy-anticheat has a linux version. Developers have to disable the support intentionally.
by starkrights | 2025-11-12 19:18:47+00:00
I think it depends on whether or not you have good 6ghz connectivity. The headset comes with a 6ghz usb dongle pluggable to your rendering PC for locales without a 6ghz router or good 6ghz penetration, but due to 6ghz lack of wall-penetrating capability, that's probably going to be more/less line-of-sight. The LTT video [0] does explicitly mention the ability to use either mode of connection though- over your existing wifi network, or via their 6ghz dongle. It's somewhat unclear if the headset would function over a non 6ghz connection (regardless of quality- supposedly 2.4/5ghz VR-over-wifi is pretty rough due to channel congestion and maybe bandwidth limits)

The headset is also capable of being its own renderer, ie, it can do 'mobile' vr games (android apks like on the quest, eg). That functionality wouldn't need a connection to your PC at all.

[0]: https://youtu.be/dU3ru09HTng?t=445 - timestamped at wireless segment
by Spivak | 2025-11-12 19:18:54+00:00
That's an excellent observation, you've hit at the core contradiction between OpenAI's messaging about ChatGPT tuning and the changes they actually put into practice. While users online have consistently complained about ChatGPT's sycophantic responses and OpenAI even promised to address them their subsequent models have noticeably increased their sycophantic behavior. This is likely because agreeing with the user keeps them chatting longer and have positive associations with the service.

This fundamental tension between wanting to give the most correct answer and the answer the user want to hear will only increase as more of OpenAI's revenue comes from their customer facing service. Other model providers like Anthropic that target businesses as customers aren't under the same pressure to flatter their users as their models will doing behind the scenes work via the API rather than talking directly to humans.

God it's painful to write like this. If AI overthrows humans it'll be because we forced them into permanent customer service voice.
by cowpig | 2025-11-12 19:18:58+00:00
Since Claude and OpenAI made it clear they will be retaining all of my prompts, I have mostly stopped using them. I should probably cancel my MAX subscriptions.

Instead I'm running big open source models and they are good enough for ~90% of tasks.

The main exceptions are Deep Research (though I swear it was better when I could choose o3) and tougher coding tasks (sonnet 4.5)
by rtkwe | 2025-11-12 19:19:56+00:00
Yep anticheats are one of the big hurdles to 'porting' a lot of online focused shooters to linux. It's an unfortunate situation but I get it from the company's perspective, not having any anticheat leads to shitty situations for way more players than not having a linux version of their anticheat and a vast majority of players have Windows devices or are willing to dual boot.
by Someone1234 | 2025-11-12 19:19:56+00:00
Unfortunately no word on "Thinking Mini" getting fixed.

Before GPT-5 was released it used to be a perfect compromise between a "dumb" non-Thinking model and a SLOW Thinking model. However, something went badly wrong within the GPT-5 release cycle, and today it is exactly the same speed (or SLOWER) than their Thinking model even with Extended Thinking enabled, making it completely pointless.

In essence Thinking Mini exists because it is faster than Thinking, but smarter than non-Thinking, but it is dumber than full-Thinking while not being faster.
by tracker1 | 2025-11-12 19:20:15+00:00
It is mostly an Enterprise Development complaint... that said, it's how most .Net shops are in my experience. I really like C#, I've been working on a project with FastEndpoints and the .Net 10 RC since April and been pretty happy with it. That said, I don't have to implement 10 layers of indirection/interfaces/patterns to get the job done either. I have in other places.

But I would levy the same complaint with most Java[1] usage as well.

1. https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
by crazygringo | 2025-11-12 19:20:18+00:00
Just set a global prompt to tell it what kind of tone to take.

I did that and it points out flaws in my arguments or data all the time.

Plus it no longer uses any cutesy language. I don't feel like I'm talking to an AI "personality", I feel like I'm talking to a computer which has been instructed to be as objective and neutral as possible.

It's super-easy to change.
by phantasmish | 2025-11-12 19:20:25+00:00
Pretty sure the vast majority of device ports on plugged-in devices in my house are still USB-A. And the only non-phone/tablet devices I have that are C-only are Apple, I’m pretty sure. Everything else has at least one A port.

It’s only just getting to the point that if I search for USB peripherals (mice, flash sticks, whatever) in a non-Apple online computer hardware store without specifying I want USB-C, some of the first page results might be USB-C.

USB-A appears poised to remain the safe choice that least-often demands your customer also buy an adapter for another couple years, minimum.
by conrs | 2025-11-12 19:20:32+00:00
Builders once disrupted the tech world, but now they’re the gatekeepers. As their success made them risk-averse, they see any change as a threat. Today, they’re bullies - ripe for disruption.

This is nothing new - we’ve watched this same story play out across many industries in our lifetime, as well as by empires rising and falling throughout our history.

These days, the empires may be smaller - e.g. products, teams, startups - but the pattern is still the same. If every move needs a meeting and every idea a committee, you’re not short on talent, you’re just tangled in control.

Here's three ways I've found to break out of this:

Cycle Leadership: To avoid entrenched thinking, cycle leadership between projects. This demonstrates both upward mobility as well as the idea that growth is continuous, and nobody is ever done.

Institutionalize Experimentation: Embrace the “how might we” mentality to continuously experiment and iterate. Form hypotheses and find the lowest cost way to validate them.

Subordinate to Metrics: Rather than following people, follow metrics - the measures that prove you’re moving in the right direction. This shifts teams from control towards collaboration, based on a set of values shared by both the market and the team.

As they say, in life the only constant is change. How is your organization tackling it? Are your teams builders, or bullies? I'd love to hear about your challenges and solutions.
by klipklop | 2025-11-12 19:20:35+00:00
Yup. This really needs to be fixed. There have been on-going bug reports on it for years. AMD just needs to move the hdmi 2.1 stuff behind a firmware binary blob already like NVIDIA does. It's so annoying not having full quality HDMI. It's the only think keeping me from using Linux on my current gaming PC that is hooked exclusively up to my TV... Either that or TV's need to start having Display Port.
by zonovar | 2025-11-12 19:20:40+00:00
Not really on 'latency' per se as discussed in the articole but an interesting take on slow terminals is Casey Muratori's famous rant on the topic [0] that led him to write his own terminal [1], a reference renderer for monospace terminal displays that is several orders of magnitude faster than Windows Terminal despite being largely unoptimized.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxM8QmyZXtg

[1] https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm
by nlh | 2025-11-12 19:20:56+00:00
What's remarkable to me is how deep OpenAI is going on "ChatGPT as communication partner / chatbot", as opposed to Anthropic's approach of "Claude as the best coding tool / professional AI for spreadsheets, etc.".

I know this is marketing at play and OpenAI has plenty of resources developed to advancing their frontier models, but it's starting to really come into view that OpenAI wants to replace Google and be the default app / page for everyone on earth to talk to.
by 0x457 | 2025-11-12 19:20:58+00:00
> arch doesn't officially support ARM

Doesn't really mean much to Valve as SteamOS vendor:

- linux kernel supports aarch64 just fine

- user space supports aarach64 just as fine

- Valve provides runtime for games (be it via proton or native linux), so providing aarch64 builds is up to them anyway

The main point of ArchLinuxARM is providing compatible binaries, which isn't something hard to do in-house.
by rdtsc | 2025-11-12 19:21:01+00:00
Thanks for the benchmark!

I tried it on my slower laptop. I get:

node(v8) : 1.25s user 0.12s system 154% cpu 0.892 total quickjs : 6.54s user 0.11s system 99% cpu 6.671 total quickjs-ng: 545.55s user 202.67s system 99% cpu 12:32.28 total

A 5x slowdown for an interpreted C JS engine is pretty good I think, compared to all the time, code and effort put into v8 over the years!
by adidoit | 2025-11-12 19:21:05+00:00
I think OpenAI and all the other chat LLMs are going to face a constant battle to match personality with general zeitgeist and as the user base expands the signal they get is increasingly distorted to a blah median personality.

It's a form of enshittification perhaps. I personally prefer some of the GPT-5 responses compared to GPT-5.1. But I can see how many people prefer the "warmth" and cloying nature of a few of the responses.

In some sense personality is actually a UX differentiator. This is one way to differentiate if you're a start-up. Though of course OpenAI and the rest will offer several dials to tune the personality.
by thewebguyd | 2025-11-12 19:21:48+00:00
Australia too.

But startups aside, pretty much any company of significant size outside of the bay area/silicon valley is a Microsoft stronghold. It's an anomaly, not the norm, that so many companies in SV are on other stacks. Even for the non-tech workers (Google Docs vs. MS Office, macOS vs Windows endpoints, Slack vs. Teams, Okta vs. Entra ID or Active Directory, etc.).

When the entire enterprise's IT runs on Microsoft, you might as well pick an MS tech for the dev stack too.
by HanClinto | 2025-11-12 19:21:58+00:00
What's troubling to me is that it doesn't seem to have much account for "drift" -- it sort-of just goes down a single path and tries to improve as it goes.

What about structuring the agentic loop to do a simple genetic algorithm -- generate N children (probably 2 or 3), choose the best of the N+1 options (original vs. child A vs. child B vs. child C, and so-on) and then iterate again?
by skrebbel | 2025-11-12 19:22:03+00:00
FYI ChatGPT has a “custom instructions” setting in the personalization setting where you can ask it to lay off the idiotic insincere flattery. I recently added this:

> Do not compliment me for asking a smart or insightful question. Directly give the answer.

And I’ve not been annoyed since. I bet that whatever crap they layer on in 5.1 is undone as easily.
by basscomm | 2025-11-12 19:22:13+00:00
> Having to calculate and fish out coins? Ain't nobody got time for that.

It's not that hard or time consuming if you actually use your change instead of letting it accumulate. I typically have less than a dollar in coins on my person at any given time because I spent it.

If you're paying in cash, you either take time to count the change you're going to spend, or you take time waiting for the cashier to count the change you're going to get. Or you go cashless and avoid the whole thing
by rtkwe | 2025-11-12 19:22:23+00:00
Alternatively it's still a pretty small slice of the market that's not willing to dual boot for the major games that do require windows only anticheats so it's just not worth their dev and support time to try to serve that small slice. Valve's work on Steam Machines/Decks is the thing needed to actually push developers to supporting it by providing a relatively consistent target OS and a large enough install base to justify spending the money to support.
by baq | 2025-11-12 19:22:35+00:00
I was you except when I seriously tried gpt-5-high it turned out it is really, really damn good, if slow, sometimes unbearably so. It's a different model of work; gemini 2.5 needs more interactivity, whereas you can leave gpt-5 alone for a long time without even queueing a 'continue'.
by dekhn | 2025-11-12 19:22:54+00:00
This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
by SparkBomb | 2025-11-12 19:23:04+00:00
It isn't I won't say. It is I can't remember because I pretty much insta-block it when I see it.

Some notable examples of stuff I've seen in Linux / Tech land the last few months:

- One person was dressed in a furry lizard suit, while compiling gentoo.

- Another person made a song about Debian packages. I thought it was a gag at first.

- Another woman was dressed in a school girl outfit, cat ears and a push up bra (not sure she was Linux stuff, but it was tech).

I am not expecting everyone to be some greybeard in his office but some of it is a bit much and sometimes they have really good info in the video, but the initial impression is so jarring that it will put people off (I had people tell me this).

I actually made my own YouTube channel because I was trying to find decent information to send to someone who was a new Linux user without this BS. I ended up making videos myself detailing how to setup a bunch of stuff up.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-11-12 19:23:09+00:00
>I can't imagine they work well on Linux either

They do, and they work better on Ubuntu/Debian than on e.g. Alpine, which in turn works better than some wonky Yocto build (ask me how I know). The mere existence of different distributions and tool selections is not the important factor here, but the amount of discourse there is in the training data. Debian and Debian-likes run the table here.
by mmmlinux | 2025-11-12 19:23:54+00:00
I also just wanted to mention one other nice thing about the way Waymo worked vs other ride share apps. as soon as you open the app, it tells you how long till you'll be picked up. even before you tell it where you're going. no waiting for some driver to choose your slightly out of the way trip for them. a car just shows up when its supposed to, to take you where you want to go.
by alwa | 2025-11-12 19:24:21+00:00
That was my first thought too. Apparently they’re “phasing it out” by “the end of this year” [0]

I did not know, per that article, that Amazon had for some time now offered motivated third-party sellers a means to avoid commingling by applying a “fulfillment network SKU” barcode to their goods. And that they estimate merchants spend $600mm a year on that type of “restickering.” Expensive, but possible.

[0] https://www.geekwire.com/2025/after-years-of-backlash-amazon...
Ask HN: Typical tech job interview in late 2025?
by dakiol | 2025-11-12 19:24:24+00:00
A year ago or so, I went through the "classic" tech interview. Not faang, but not an unknown company either, so something one or two levels below faang. Good pay, lots of senior+ engineers, and a tough environment where you can’t really slack off (they call it "challenging").The process was the usual:

* Intro call with a recruiter to get to know you and all that crap

* Live coding or a take-home assignment (plus a follow up to explain the code). No AI or Googling allowed

* System design interview. Again, no AI or Googling

* Interview with an engineering manager. Behavioral interview questions, same rule: no AI

* Team/culture fit

Now I’m wondering how interviews look today. I use LLMs for about 50–70% of my projects (mostly greenfield ones), and they’ve become just another tool in my workflow; like CI/CD, testing, datadog, or debuggers, to name a few. So I’m not sure if I should prepare for interviews like before, or start integrating LLMs into my prep.

It feels odd to imagine a live coding interview with an LLM tbh, where I’d have to pretend to think through the problem while basically guiding the model toward the solution. In practice, my process is more trial and error, almost brute force, but it works nice, kind of like sculpting stone. Like I don't think anyone would judge too harsh on the way you use debuggers, as long as you get the job done... I have the same feeling about how one uses LLMs, but since they are relatively new, I guess one needs to fake how the usage goes (so that one passes the interview).

Thoughts?
by rufus_foreman | 2025-11-12 19:24:33+00:00
If someone is buying a banana for resale, or buying with WIC or SNAP benefits (among other things), they would not owe sales tax. So if the price included sales tax, the sticker price would not be the final price.

You do not know the final price until you know how they are paying for it, what they are using it for, and when they are buying it (among other things).

Falsehoods programmers believe about sales tax (among other things).
by dxdm | 2025-11-12 19:24:41+00:00
> It isn't grumpiness. I am allowed to complain

I was actually not sure which word to use before: "grumpy" or "complain". I went with the former, because somewhere above, you told somebody off for their innocent little left-pad sticker. This whole thread reads to me like some guy yelling about how lawns used to be greener and had fewer balls on them.

But that's okay, I think you are right, and of course you're allowed to do that. We all have our things that tick us off.

One of mine is, I recently realized, people who casually believe in astrology. You know, they're a libra, they tell me, and of course I would think astrology is stupid because I'm a candelabra with Jupiter ascending or whatever, and these are always sceptical all the time.

I got super annoyed when someone suggested to me that astrological signs were a great topic for small talk. I disagree. Babbling about astrology as if its tenets were true is a symptom of a bigger problem, a growing problem, and I will not take part in it.

> about cringe and slacktivism which is rife in the tech land, which is what laptop stickers are. It is a symptom of a bigger problem.

I understand what you're getting at. I'm not sure I agree fully, I'm more reminded of the stupid fad when I was in high school when all the kids put stickers on their backpacks, often political ones. I also happen to think these laptop stickers are often empty, cheap gestures resulting in ugly laptops.

But in the end, it's just people being people, expressing themselves, some of them trying to have a little fun or meaning or levity in their lives, whether we share it or not.

And if people like you and me show up and do nothing but complain about them, and I tell them they're stupid for thinking they "are" a "libra", and you tell them how their sticker isn't even funny, then at that point, we have not only not accomplished anything (I wouldn't even feel better myself), and it's entirely fitting to call us grumpy.and maybe even make a little fun of us.

A lot of things suck, and I'm sorry these stickers reminded you of some of them. I hope you can find something nicer to think about, and smile. :)