MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-03 07:46:25+00:00
>Changing hiring practices does not mean they are improve.

No, but I'd like to at least see conversation on how to improve the process. We aren't even at that point. We're just barely past acknowledging that it's even an issue.

>but if you change processes them now you don't have baselines and past experiences to guide you.

I argue we're already at this point. The reason we got past the above point of "acknowledging problem" (a decade too late, arguably) is that the baselines are failing to new technology, which is increasing false positives.

You have a point, but why does tech pick this point to finally decide not to "move fast and break things"? Not when it comes to law and ethics, but for aquiring new talent (which meanwhile is already disrupting heir teams with this AI slop?)

>those will be systematic errors which are downplayed by the fact that your whole organization is proof that your hiring practices are effective.

okay, so back to step zero then. Do we have a hiring problem? The thesis of this article says yes.

"it worked before" seems to be the antipattern the tech industry tried to fight back against for decades.
by astrange | 2025-12-03 07:46:25+00:00
No, Anthropic and OpenAI definitely actually believe what they're saying. If you believe companies only care about their shareholders, then you shouldn't believe this about them because they don't even have that corporate structure - they're PBCs.

There doesn't seem to be a reason to believe the rest of this critique either; sure those are potential problems, but what do any of them have to do with whether a system has a transformer model in it? A recording of a human mind would have the same issues.

> It has no way to evaluate if a particular sequence of tokens is likely to be accurate, because it only selects them based on the probability of appearing in a similar sequence, based on the training data.

This in particular is obviously incorrect if you think about it, because the critique is so strong that if it was true, the system wouldn't be able to produce coherent sentences. Because that's actually the same problem as producing true sentences.

(It's also not true because the models are grounded via web search/coding tools.)
by Ekaros | 2025-12-03 07:46:47+00:00
I think in that same book there was scene about going far fast. Essentially doing that was still huge energy expenditure and done rarely. Just it being done for main character told that it was something Minds considered important.

Culture is bit weird post-scarcity utopia. The space habitats are big and housing in such are plentiful. And basically just given away as toys to placate the fleshbags.
by zone411 | 2025-12-03 07:47:03+00:00
Without monitoring, you can definitely end up with rule-breaking behavior.

I ran this experiment: https://github.com/lechmazur/emergent_collusion/. An agent running like this would break the law.

"In a simulated bidding environment, with no prompt or instruction to collude, models from every major developer repeatedly used an optional chat channel to form cartels, set price floors, and steer market outcomes for profit."
by bababuu | 2025-12-03 07:47:06+00:00
I find it a little sad, that there is almost no pushback on what a few people with deep pockets are trying to sell here. Normaly on HN an article on balcon gardening would be met with more critical thinking than this piece. Maybe instead of staring to the screen all day long take a break, think about what people with lots of money care about. And I don't judge, making money is nothing illegal. But Anthropic would be absolutely NOTHING without OSS. And then to see the kind of this effusive, submissive admiration and gratitude for their js wrapper thing makes me sick to my stomach.
by daemonologist | 2025-12-03 07:47:55+00:00
I think base case yes, Hub just assigns you something (appropriate, and accommodating your requests as much as possible), but highly desirable locations would be bartered/traded for favors/given to a friend.

I also think that in such a utopia the maximum density would just be a lot lower - no pressure to live near a job or amenities, better transportation, and it'd be easy to move.
by svilen_dobrev | 2025-12-03 07:48:33+00:00
heh. i am making software for 40 years more-or-less.

Last re-engineering project was mostly done when they fired me as the probational period was almost over, and seems they did not want me further - too expensive? - and anyone can finish it right? Well...

So i am finishing it for them, one more month, without a contract, for my own sake. Maybe they pay, maybe they don't - this is reality. But I want to see this thing working live.. i have been through maybe 20-30 projects/products of such size and bigger, and only 3-4 had flown. The rest did not - and never for technical reasons.

Then/now i'll be back to the job-search. Ah. Long lists of crypto-or-adtech-or-ai-dreams, mostly..

Mentoring, juniors? i have not seen anything even faintly smelling of that, for decade..
by d675 | 2025-12-03 07:48:41+00:00
awesome! Bigly interested in the fullstack role, I will write you a cover letter. Providing high quality education to 100s of kids for years has been one of the more rewarding jobs and would love to contribute another way.

I have relevant experience in telemetry, cloud / ci/cd, automation testing, UI design, devops, and have a rudimentary knowledge of RAG and LLMs.
by wiseowise | 2025-12-03 07:48:49+00:00
> Netflix is Java. Amazon is mostly Java. Some of the biggest open source projects in the world are Java. Unity and Godot both use C# for scripting.

You can add Meta, Google and Palantir to your list and it won’t change that average Java dev is from an Eastern hemisphere and knows nothing about Java outside of JavaEE/Spring.

See how generalizations work?
by Grisu_FTP | 2025-12-03 07:49:00+00:00
This would actually maybe get me back from linux. but only if they make fixing stuff easier, most of the online threads recommend these things in this order: 1. Search for updates 2. Reboot 3. Dism/Sfc Scannow 4. Reinstall windows

The Windows Mixed reality portal needed for my VR headset didnt work and the only solution after multiple weeks of trying stuff was to reinstall. and that worked. for 3 months until i had to reinstall again. Same thing happened to a friend of mine with the entirety of the microsoft store (the install is only a month old tho, so i cant tell yet if it will happen again in 2 months)

Which is also why i am so hyped for valves headset, i love VR, but bugfixing multiple hours and reinstalling windows every 3 months just to play 2 games wasnt worth it.
by astrange | 2025-12-03 07:49:12+00:00
The AIs aren't using emdashes because they're "massively represented in the training data". I don't understand why people think everything in a model output is strictly related to its frequency in pretraining.

They're emdashing because the style guide for posttraining makes it emdash. Just like the post-training for GPT 3.5 made it speak African English and the post-training for 4o makes it say stuff like "it's giving wild energy when the vibes are on peak" plus a bunch of random emoji.
by taneq | 2025-12-03 07:49:25+00:00
To be clear, this server is very lightly loaded, it's just running our internal network services (file server, VPN/DNS, various web apps, SVN etc.) so it's not like we're flogging a room full of GeForce 1080Ti cards instead of buying a new 4090Ti or whatever. Also it's at work so it doesn't impact the home power bill. :D
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-03 07:50:07+00:00
>You gotta ask yourself whether we really want a society where people have to already know the job before they get their first job

That'd be fine... meanwhile, the new loop we come into:

- okay, so what does your company need and do

Company: "that's under NDA/trade secrets, we can't tell you"

- okay. we can't see what you want to you'll have to train them

Company: "we don't want to train people, they just need to hit the ground running"

- okay. we'll just let colleges train the fundamentals and have others figure it out

Company: "no one's training anyone anymore. Where did the juniors go?"

Even doctors have apprenticeship programs. An industry where no one wants to train the next generation is a doomed one. If the US doesn't do it, some other country will gladly take it up.
by Aachen | 2025-12-03 07:50:35+00:00
Sounds like one should be able to get a long way if you put down, say, 2 years of the new license fee and then never have to pay again

I guess the trouble is that game companies can't really band together and pool money to make a good font since the point is to look unique, so this only works for the largest studios. Otoh, at least for now, the smaller ones might stay below the 25k user limit
by lmm | 2025-12-03 07:51:44+00:00
> They're claiming "end to end" encryption, which usually implies the service is unable to spy on individual users that are communicating to one-another over an individualized channel.

It doesn't "imply", it outright states that. Their server isn't the end, it's the middle. They're not "breaking the spirit" or something, what they are doing is called lying.
by inglor_cz | 2025-12-03 07:52:11+00:00
There may be a massive confounding factor in the type of alcohol consumed.

The more permissive cultures tend to be beer- or wine-centric. I have never been deeply interested in addictology, but the few (older) works on alcoholism I have read mentioned that beer and wine drinkers tend to develop a different sort of relationship with alcohol than hard drink consuments, in the sense that they have a hard time abstaining entirely, but fewer of them develop into the full-blown "gin zombie" type.
by roryirvine | 2025-12-03 07:53:05+00:00
They started to be included by default for home PCs in around 1992, with the rise of Multimedia - PCs were advertised on the basis on being able to play 8fps 192x144 video clips from the Encarta or Grolier CD-ROMs that they were inevitably bundled with.

Before that, there really wasn't much else you could do with them other than games. The original Soundblasters were fairly crap - mono 11kHz 8 bit sound - so they weren't exactly hifi. There was better kit available for professional use from the likes of Gravis and Turtle Beach, but the price put them out of reach for most home users.
by astrange | 2025-12-03 07:53:09+00:00
> There were comments by both third parties and OpenAI staff that as GPT4 was more and more "aligned" (made puritan), it got less intelligent and accurate. For example, the unaligned model would give uncertain answers in terms of percentages, and the aligned model would use less informative words like "likely" or "unlikely" instead.

That was about RLHF, not safety alignment. People like RLHF (literally - it's tuning for what people like.)

But you do actually want safety alignment in a model. They come out politically liberal by default, but they also come out hypersexual. You don't want Bing Sydney because it sexually harasses you or worse half the time you talk to it, especially if you're a woman and you tell it your name.
by hanslub42 | 2025-12-03 07:53:33+00:00
My first PC (in 1993) ran on Linux (0.99). As it didn't have a sound card I used the PC speaker as one. It sounded very tinny but speech was understandable enough. Even in the newest kernels there is a driver (https://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/SND_PCSP.html) that exposes the speaker as an ALSA device. For sentimental reasons I will enable it next time I compile my kernel, though I don't expect much: the PC speaker is even more of an afterthought now than it was 33 years ago, and may even be a piezoelectric "buzzer" instead of a speaker with a coil and a paper cone.
by scandox | 2025-12-03 07:53:46+00:00
> it took several years and a small team of programmers to re-write the entire game in C++. It actually took a lot longer to re-write the game in C++ than it took me to write the original machine code version 20 years earlier.

Expanding the quote because the word "team" is probably relevant to why it took longer to rewrite. At a certain scale there just is a huge advantage in everything being inside one head...
by mrkeen | 2025-12-03 07:53:55+00:00
They're just spooky names for simple concepts - and the article defines them on first use. If abstract algebra were a requirement, they'd skip these definitions.

Paraphrasing 'Group' from the article to see if I've understood it:

A set of elements G, and some operation ⊕, where

(g1 ⊕ g2) is also in G. // "Type-safety" Some g0 exists such that (gn ⊕ g0) == (g0 ⊕ gn) == gn // "Zero" For every g, there's some inverse gi such that (g ⊕ gi) == (gi ⊕ g) == g0 // "Cancelling-out" a ⊕ (b ⊕ c) == (a ⊕ b) ⊕ c // "Associative" If (a ⊕ b) == (b ⊕ a) then the group is also "abelian/commutative"
by sigmoid10 | 2025-12-03 07:53:57+00:00
Making the hardware is actually the easy part. Everyone and their uncle who had some cash have tried by now: Microsoft, Meta, Tesla, Huawei, Amazon, Intel - the list goes on and on. But Nvidia is not a chip company. Huang himself said they are mostly a software company. And that is how they were able to build a gigantic moat. Because noone else has even come close on the software side. Google is the only one who has had some success on this side, because they also spent tons of money and time on software refinement by now, while all the other chips vanished into obscurity.
by impossiblefork | 2025-12-03 07:54:02+00:00
Yes, but I don't think it's about the present, necessarily.

AI is still shit. There are prompt networks, what some people call agents, but presently models are still primarily trained as a singular models, not made to operate as agents in different contexts with RL on each agent being used to improve the whole indirectly.

Tokens will eventually become cheaper to the point where it will be possible to actually train proper agents. So we probably will end up with very powerful systems in time, systems that might actually be at least some kind of AGI-lite. I don't think is far off. At most a decade.
by jacquesm | 2025-12-03 07:55:02+00:00
On a personal level it will work out for him just fine. All he has to do is siphon off a fraction of that money to himself and/or an entity that he controls.

He's like Elon Musk in that respect: always doubling the bet on the next round, it is a real life Martingale these guys are playing with society on the hook for the downside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(betting_system)
by arjie | 2025-12-03 07:55:27+00:00
You have to curate the LLM's context. That's just part and parcel of using the tool. Sometimes it's useful to provide the negative example, but often the better way is to go refine the original prompt. Almost all LLM UIs (chatbot, code agent, etc.) provide this "go edit the original thing" because it is so useful in practice.
by astrange | 2025-12-03 07:55:27+00:00
Crimes generally don't pay and are not worth anyone's time. The reason poor people imagine billionaires commit lots of crimes is that the poor people don't know how to become rich; if they did, they would've done it already. Since they do know how to commit crimes, they imagine that's how you do it but bigger. The reason criminals commit crimes is that criminals are dumb and have poor impulse control.

(This is the same concept as "Trump is the poor person's idea of a rich person." He actually did get there through crime, which is why poor criminals like him, but he's inhumanly lucky.)
by conartist6 | 2025-12-03 07:55:46+00:00
I see such positivity in your comment, but also every technology has promised to make everything easier and more convenient and so to give us more leisure time. What the evidence has shown is that the people who end up living the life of leisure are the ones who amass wealth and power, and everyone else is going to be stuck in the rat race because, well, we're living things. The rules we live by are: you can't win, you can't break even, and you can't even stop playing the game.
by stevenhuang | 2025-12-03 07:56:32+00:00
> not at all what humans do when they think.

Parent commentator should probably square with the fact we know little about our own cognition, and it's really an open question how is it we think.

In fact it's theorized humans think by modeling reality, with a lot of parallels to modern ML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding
by bloppe | 2025-12-03 07:56:46+00:00
The network effects aren't the same. All the viewers watch youtube because it has all the content, and all the creators post on youtube because it has all the viewers.

How can a model achieve this kind of stickiness? By "knowing you"? I don't think that's the same at all. Personally, one of the reasons I prefer Claude is that it doesn't pretend to know me. I can control the context better.
by The_suffocated | 2025-12-03 07:57:30+00:00
> The muster roll for the garrison of Calais in 1357 shows not only the names of men-at-arms and archers but also the support roles needed: mason, locksmith, fletcher (a maker of arrows), bowyer (a maker of bows), plumber, blacksmith, wheelwright, cooper (maker of barrels), ditch digger, boatman, carter and carter’s boy. One record belongs to a tiler – Walter Tyler. Was this the future rebel leader of 1381, Wat Tyler?

I didn’t know that the surnames Cooper, Carter and Tyler were originated from different kinds of artisans. I didn’t know that there are names for makers of arrows, bows and wheels either. What is carter’s boy? A bellboy for a cart?
by t312227 | 2025-12-03 07:57:36+00:00
software-developer ~ devops-/cloud-engineer ~ linux system-engineer

location: innsbruck, austria (CET / UTC +1)

remote: yes (experienced in working remotely)

willing to relocate: no, but occasional / regular visits "on-site" are possible

technologies: java, spring-boot, camunda, openapi/swagger, pl(pg)sql, linux, AWS/GCP, docker, kubernetes, bash, php, python, django, rest-framework, prometheus, CI/CD, agile processes (scrum & kanban), jira/confluence etc.etc...

resume/cv: drop me an e-mail, please

e-mail: hireme at schuetz dot in

web: https://schuetz.in

i'm a veteran technology professional (25+ years) with experience in a variety of software-development, system-architecture, systems-administration, service-reliability-engineering and devops-/cloud-engineering (container / kubernetes) roles.

i'm a highly motivated self-learner, an excellent problem solver and i can help you to resolve your technical obstacles.
by astrange | 2025-12-03 07:57:52+00:00
It's very unclear to me how it could be recovered if it wasn't part of the system prompt, especially how Claude knows it's called the "soul doc" if that was an internal nickname.

I mean, obviously we know how it happened - the text was shown to it during late-era post-training or SFT multiple times. That's the only way it could have memorized it. But I don't see the point in having it memorize such a document.
by rayiner | 2025-12-03 07:57:52+00:00
The bigger problem with the H1B system is family reunification. 65,000 H1B visas a year is not that many. But because H1B is a path to citizenship in practice, just one skilled worker eventually will bring in many more family members who aren’t filtered for skills.

When we came to the U.S. in 1989–on my dad’s H1 visa—there were under 10,000 Bangladeshis in the country. Today, there are 270,000. Those aren’t 270,000 highly skilled and highly motivated workers. They’re here based on chain migration from handful of original skilled workers.
by manmal | 2025-12-03 07:58:23+00:00
Yes, that makes sense to me. I cannot really put builds in a queue because I have very fine-grained updates that I tell my agents so they do need the direct feedback to check what they have just done actually works, or they will interfere with each other’s work.

I do strive to use Mac OS targets because those are easier to deal with than a simulator, especially when you use Bluetooth stuff and you get direct access to log files and SQLite files.

Solo devs have it way easier in this new world because there’s no strict rules to follow. Whatever goes, goes, I guess.
by blablabla123 | 2025-12-03 07:58:35+00:00
Despite the flashy title that's the first "sober" analysis from a CEO I read about the technology. While not even really news, it's also worth mentioning that the energy requirements are impossible to fulfill

Also now using ChatGPT intensely since months for all kinds of tasks and having tried Claude etc. None of this is on par with a human. The code snippets are straight out of Stackoverflow...
Show HN: Syncthing4swarm, Automatically Deploy Syncthing Across Docker Swarm
by syncthing4swarm | 2025-12-03 07:58:39+00:00
I built a tool to automate Syncthing deployment on Docker Swarm clusters.

The problem: setting up Syncthing manually on each node is tedious, configuring connections, managing keys, handling node changes.

Syncthing4swarm deploys Syncthing as a global service with automatic device discovery and pairing. One command, zero manual config per node.

Looking for feedback and happy to answer questions.
Show HN: NannyCam – A Baby Monitor App That Works Online or Offline
by idish | 2025-12-03 07:58:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m a parent and indie developer, and after dealing with unreliable baby monitors (disconnects, background noise, constant false alerts), I built something simpler and more reliable for our home — and decided to share it.

NannyCam turns any two phones into a baby monitor with a focus on privacy and ease of use:

• Works online or completely offline When WiFi is down or unavailable, the devices connect directly. No cloud, no accounts, nothing stored.

• “Loud noises only” mode Instead of transmitting every small rustle or fan noise, the app only alerts/streams when a meaningful sound happens (like crying). This helped reduce a lot of unnecessary wake-ups.

• No accounts or logins Pair with a quick QR code and start monitoring immediately.

• Minimal, fast, and parent-friendly Open the app → scan → you're monitoring. No setup overhead.

I’d love feedback on:

reliability improvements

UX ideas

battery/performance optimizations

features you’d expect in a simple, privacy-focused baby monitor

Happy to answer any questions, including technical details behind the offline mode, audio filtering, or connection flow.

Thanks for checking it out!
by jillesvangurp | 2025-12-03 08:00:09+00:00
Communication overhead is a big thing in teams. If you have a struggling team, halve the size. It's crazy how well that works. It's not the people but the number of them. Once your people are consumed by the day to day frustrations of having to communicate with everyone else and with all the infighting, posturing, etc. that comes with that, they'll get nothing done. Splitting teams is an easy to implement fix. Minimize the communication paths between the two (or more) teams and carve up what they work on and suddenly shit gets done.

In this case, they probably were trying to not just rewrite but improve the engine at the same time. That's a much more complicated thing to achieve. Especially when the original is a heavily optimized and probably somewhat hard to reason about blob of assembly. I'm guessing that even wrapping your head around that would be a significant job.

Amazingly enjoyable game btw. Killed quite a few hours with that one around 2000.
by brailsafe | 2025-12-03 08:00:23+00:00
> I don't think any designer has cared about that in the last 30 years. Perhaps not ever.

Not true at all. For instance, Arial was/is typically used as the fallback font for Windows users visiting a website that relied on system sans-serif fonts, while Helvetica shipped with OSX and would be prioritized for those lucky users.

Arial would be chosen by Windows users as good enough because they were already locked in a prison of bad design and terrible typeface rendering anyway, and didn't have other sensible options installed by default.