MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lokar | 2025-12-18 22:08:11+00:00
Are we talking about the same thing?

The point of the terminal level rule is that there is a point, bellow which you are not actually contributing all that much more in output then it takes to supervise and mentor you. At some point you need to be clearly net positive. This generally means you can mostly operate on your own.

If it becomes clear you won't make it to that level, then something is wrong. Either you are not capable, or not willing to make the effort, or something else. Regardless, you get forced out.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-18 22:09:41+00:00
In my last job (engineering manager for a Japanese high-Quality hardware manufacturer), we were expected to deliver software that works.

In fact, if any bugs were found by the official "last step" QA Department, we (as a software development department) were dinged. If QA found bugs, they could stop the entire product release, so you did not want to be responsible for that.

This resulted in each software development department setting up their own, internal "QC team" of testers. If they found bugs, then individual programmers (or teams) would get dinged, but the main department would not.

Our software got a lot of testing.
by combyn8tor | 2025-12-18 22:09:50+00:00
I have three OS installs. Windows install for games. Another Windows for development (I have to for windows dev). And a Ubuntu install for anything not games/work. The windows drives use bitlocker and they can't access each other's files. It's not perfect.

Although with the amount of crap I have to install for windows development I'm starting to wonder if a base VM image that is used as a start point for each project would be cleaner.
by irrationalfab | 2025-12-18 22:09:56+00:00
Agent/MCP/Skills might be "Netscape-y" in the sense that today's formats will evolve fast. But Netscape still mattered: it lost the market, not the ideas. The patterns survived (JavaScript, cookies, SSL/TLS, progressive rendering) and became best practices we take for granted.

The durable pattern here isn't a specific file format. It's on-demand capability discovery: a small index with concise metadata so the model can find what's available, then pull details only when needed. That's a real improvement over tool calling and MCP's "preload all tools up front" approach, and it mirrors how humans work. Even as models bake more know-how into their weights, novel capabilities will always be created faster than retraining cycles. And even if context becomes unlimited, preloading everything up front remains wasteful when most of it is irrelevant to the task at hand.

So even if "Skills" gets replaced, discoverability and progressive disclosure likely survive.
by citizenpaul | 2025-12-18 22:10:16+00:00
Its not really just that AMD drivers are not that great (they are not) but they have been stable for a long time.

Its that nvidia relentlessly works with game developers to make sure their graphics tricks work with nvidia drivers. Its so obvious you miss it. Look in the nvidia driver updates they always list games that have fixes, performance ect. AMD never (used?) to do this they just gave you the drivers and expected developers to make their game work with it. The same strategy that MS used for their OS back in the 90's.

Thats at least how things got where they are now.
by yesfitz | 2025-12-18 22:10:36+00:00
What's the point?

Without any context, these transformations are pure spectacle. And it's bad when you take something that had meaning and turn it into a spectacle.

This site could be a commentary on the frivolity of AI, a takedown of "great" art, an attempt to make art more approachable, or a tech demo. But without knowing which, it's an impressive, forgettable spectacle.
by bccdee | 2025-12-18 22:10:37+00:00
> None. You're losing money by not living in a cheaper place and overpaying for transit.

Oo, totally wrong! Fun guess though. The average monthly cost of car ownership is $1,300. The cost of a one-month transit pass is $150. I'm not gonna save $1,150 on rent by moving to a shitty suburb.

> So you're in Manhattan?

Nope.

> Wrong. Hint: Manhattan is one of the most expensive places in the US.

Yeah, because there's a shortage of apartments—that's what I said. Manhattan Island (being a rather small island) has physically run out of room for buildings, but that's not true of other areas.

> And recently elected a socialist who was promising state-run grocery stores.

Ok? So what? Maybe they'll expose private-sector price fixing & maybe they'll just be grocery stores.

> Because toxic urbanism strangled the democracy with bike lanes.

I'm honestly baffled. What makes you think bike lanes are undemocratic? Bikes are super cheap and take up very little space. Bike lanes really cut down on traffic.

> This in turn makes housing near Downtowns more expensive because workers have to live there in order to get a job.

Have you heard of industrial parks? It's pretty common for offices in big cities to be outside the city centre—far more common on the whole than downtown offices are.

The big advantage of downtown offices is that a city's downtown is the nexus of its public transit: If you work downtown, you can easily live a ways outside the city on cheaper land and then come in by train. So no, the point of a downtown is that you don't need to live there to work there.

Do you actually live in a city? I feel like you don't have a very strong understanding of how they're structured.
by Alupis | 2025-12-18 22:10:37+00:00
Talk to a neurologist for a sleep study. But, first try reading a book ~1 hour before bed.

The racing mind is often your brain continuing to think/work on the day's problems. Using a screen (phone/tablet, computer, tv) right before bed has been proven to keep your mind active. Switch to something not involving a screen to allow your brain to wind down before falling asleep.
by johnea | 2025-12-18 22:10:44+00:00
I couldn't agree more with the sentiment.

If you, the development engineer, haven't demonstrated the product to work as expected, and preferably this testing is independently confirmed by a product test group, then you can't claim to be delivering a functional product.

I would add though, that management, specifically marketing management setting unreasonable demands and deadlines, are a bigger threat to testing than LLMs.

Of course the damage done by LLM generated code not being tested, is additive to the damage management is doing.

So this isn't any kind of apologism, the two sources are both making the problem worse.
by metadope | 2025-12-18 22:10:48+00:00
I am sad. I can't think of a single good thing that has been accomplished by the current administration. Not in its first year here and now, or in the previous four years (with training wheels and pandemic).

I would welcome a generous reassessment by a fair reporter: Is there a list of accomplishments somewhere? Some solid map of milestones?

Not the blathering superlatives of self-aggrandizement as displayed in the recent subhumane Rob Reiner TDS takedown, but a real list of genuine positive accomplishment that we can all agree on and comfort ourselves with when the night gets long and the darkness grows.

I find it hard to believe that we've accomplished nothing but the chaos in those five years.
by sombragris | 2025-12-18 22:11:18+00:00
> To me, the big aesthetic of early Qt/KDE1 is "Obvious Motif ripoff". Aside from the Win95/Warp style titlebars, if you don't have the big thick bevels and the distinct scroll bars, it's not quite right.

This is a KDE1 screenshot: https://diit.cz/sites/default/files/kde1-snapshot01.png

Is this really a Motif ripoff? For me it's much more like Win95 with a better titlebar in the window decoration. To each their own, but it seems quite right to me.
by janalsncm | 2025-12-18 22:11:28+00:00
I don’t agree with this. The only way this would make sense is if consumers were made aware of spying vs not spying prior to purchase.

But TV manufacturers can change the TV’s behavior long after it is purchased. They can force you to agree to new terms of service which can effectively make the TV a worse product. You cannot conclude the consumer didn’t care.
by autoexec | 2025-12-18 22:11:28+00:00
I'd be happy with a setup box giving me the ability to add apps for streaming services or whatever, but I don't want that STB spying on my either. I feel like even if all TVs were dumb monitors we'd just be moving the real problem of insane levels of data collection and spying to another device. We need strong regulation with real teeth to prevent the spying at which point all of our devices should be protected.
by canyon289 | 2025-12-18 22:11:45+00:00
I want to say so much right now but I can't :)

The most generic thing I can say is I really do like working at Google because its one of the few (maybe only) company that has models of all sizes and capabilities. Because of this research and product development is insanely fun and feels "magical" when things just click together.

Keep following the Google Developer channels/blogs whatever. Google as a whole is pushing hard in this space and I personally think is building stuff that felt like science fiction just 3 years ago.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-18 22:12:19+00:00
I'm constantly working on stuff I don't know (the Xcode window behind this browser window is full of that kind of code). I have found LLMs are a great help in pushing the boundaries.

It's humbling, but I do tend to pick up a lot of stuff.

https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
by Dma54rhs | 2025-12-18 22:12:34+00:00
What makes you say that Google claims it's not true? Google claims subdomains are completely two different domains and you'll lose all the linking/page rank stuff according to their own docs regarding SEO. Some SEO gurus claim it's not so black and white but no one knows for sure. The data does show having docs on subdomain is more harmful to your SEO if you get linked to then a lot.
by azemetre | 2025-12-18 22:13:28+00:00
Maybe there is a misunderstanding, I'm not saying that the NSA would be buying XSS scripts. I'm saying that if this was 35 years ago the NSA would be buying exploits with common user software. Back then the exploits were "lesser" but there still was a market and not every exploit that was bought was a wonder of software engineering. Nowadays the targeted market is the web and getting exploits on some of the most used sites would be worthy of buying.

Kid was simply born in the wrong era to cash out easy money.
by chasd00 | 2025-12-18 22:13:50+00:00
> I believe what we need to wake up to or come to terms with is that our industry (everything that would go into NASDAQ) is a farce.

the thing is, with software development, it's always been this way. Developers have just had tunnel vision for decades because they stare into an editor all day long instead trying to actually sell a product. If selling wasn't the top priority then what do you think would happen to your direct deposit? Software developers, especially software developers, live in this fantasy land where the believe their paycheck just happens automatically and always will. I think it's becoming critical that new software devs entering the workforce spend a couple years at a small, eat what you kill, consultancy or small business. Somewhere where they can see the relationship between building, selling, and their paycheck first hand.
by pksebben | 2025-12-18 22:14:09+00:00
if you look at that chart, there's a price spike between jan-march of '25, precisely when ICE started cracking down in CA.

Biden also famously did not do what you are saying he did. He continued the work on the border wall, much to the chagrin of everyone who sees immigration differently than you do. The idea that immigration was "10x historical levels" is not backed up by the data - see, I found a chart too [0]. True that we now have a greater percent of the population than any time in history [1] - around 16%. If that's "they're taking over the country" then I'd say you're just being dramatic. Since it also looks like we're talking about legal immigrants here, let's take a look at what they provide because you did mention taxes.

So we've already identified that 16% of our population is immigrants, more than ever before, sure. In 2023 we made about $2.2T from individual income taxes [2]. Of that, immigrants paid $651B [3]. So despite being 16% of the population, they paid nearly 30% of our total individual tax revenue. I'd say that's a pretty good deal!

0 -https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/imm...

1 - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/21/key-findi...

2 - https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59730

3 - https://map.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/locations/nationa...
by dxdm | 2025-12-18 22:14:21+00:00
This is a similarly bizarre claim, for the same reasons as before. You have not really thought about how representative democracy works, or you misunderstand or wilfully misrepresent it.

In the end, your argument can be used against the other levels of government. National governments of not directly elected officials and bureaucrats and remote parliaments dictating to whole regions, who lord it over cities and communities, who oppress individual people, who should not have to cede a bit of their sovereignty to anybody else to decide or act on their behalf.

Nothing is perfect, nor is the EU, but with your line of thinking, you effectively deligitimize every practical way of organizing government as "colonial".

Maybe that's what you want, maybe you misunderstand and don't care if you do. There are many reasons good and bad to dislike the EU. Yours just appears to be nonsensical.
by almosthere | 2025-12-18 22:14:52+00:00
Agree with all except for listening to anything from Netflix.

The Netflix blogs are EXTREMELY well written and convincing. The problem is, everyone that listens to them, ends up coding up a solution they don't need.

RX - suddenly you have one team member writing a bunch of RX stuff that used to be fairly simple. Now it's all RX flows and no one understands it.

Retrying like mad - Now you have random lock ups because something is slightly misconfigured and instead of revealing why, some process is busy exponentially backing off for 6 hours.

Chaos Monkey - Probably the most needed, but actually not used anywhere. lol

I'm not saying they are not good ideas, but half the time you end up with someone understanding 5% of the problem and applying it to everything.
by crote | 2025-12-18 22:14:58+00:00
That's still 518.400 requests per day. For static content. And it's a niche forum, so it's not exactly going to have millions of pages.

Either there are indeed hundreds or thousands of AI bots DDoSing the entire internet, or a couple of bots are needlessly hammering it over and over and over again. I'm not sure which option is worse.
by canyon289 | 2025-12-18 22:15:14+00:00
I've only just skimmed this blog post but if I'm reading correctly FunctionGemma can work just like what's intended here, a "contextless" tool router.

Going one level up you as a developer have a choice how much context you want to provide to the model. Philipp Schmid wrote a good blog post about this, titling this "context engineering". I like his idea because instead of just blindly throwing stuff into a model's context window and hoping to get good performance, it encourages folks to think more about how what's going into the context in each turn.

https://www.philschmid.de/context-engineering

Similarly I think the blog post you linked has a similar sentiment. There's nuanced approaches that can yield better results if an engineering mindset is applied.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-12-18 22:15:57+00:00
Let me put it this way...

In one of my penetration testing training classes, in one of the lessons, we generated a malicious PDF file that would give us a shell when the victim opened it in Adobe.

Granted, it relied on a specific bug in the JavaScript engine of Adobe Reader, so unless they're using a version that's 15 years old, it wouldn't work today, but you can't be too cautious. 0-days can always exist.
by lokar | 2025-12-18 22:16:01+00:00
But it seems like it should be clear that the account that failed to redeem the card is, if anything, the victim. No?

I could see doing a lot of card redemptions as a flag, but then I think the next step is "what are they spending the credits on?" I could see a scam where you launder cash by turning it into cards, and then buying shitty and expensive apps. Thus paying apple 30% to clean money for you.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-18 22:16:10+00:00
So! Much! Scraping! They were downloading every commit multiple times, and fetching every file as seen at each of those commits, and trying to download archives of all the code, and hitting `/me/my-repo/blame` endpoints as their IP's first-ever request to my server, and other unlikely stuff.

My scraper dudes, it's a git repo. You can fetch the whole freaking thing if you wanna look at it. Of course, that would require work and context-aware processing on their end, and it's easier for them to shift the expense onto my little server and make me pay for their misbehavior.
by dctoedt | 2025-12-18 22:16:26+00:00
> manual checklists [can be] unnecessarily inefficent and/or unreliable

Shoutout to Dr. Atul Gawande's excellent book The Checklist Manifesto, an expansion of his New Yorker article [0]. One of his main points is that even the most competent people forget stupid stuff. He illustrates with examples from surgery, from aviation, from the construction industry, and others. He quotes a saying that aviation checklists are "written in blood."

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the-checklist
by vessenes | 2025-12-18 22:16:34+00:00
Thanks - yeah, I'm capable of assessing for my own use cases. I guess I was trying to muse out-loud about whether there's a useful benchmark to be made or published out of these assessments. There are a number of architectures where there's a 'fast loop' and then a slow loop. Robotics comes to mind. I think training the ability to be like 'uh oh, better get over to slow good thinking' into the fast loop models is likely to be super useful.
by bluGill | 2025-12-18 22:16:43+00:00
Maybe not yet - but 5g was built with the idea of making them cheap. It takes a couple years to design the cheap modems and then a few more years to get them in TVs, so they could well be coming in the near future yet - only time will tell. And the modem will also be your wifi so you can't really rip it off without losing other useful things.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-18 22:16:56+00:00
> All this to say I think it makes book bans a bit muddier - in some instances they might be legitimate pushback on aggressive editorialization by librarians. But in most instances, they are self-obviously performative and unnecessary.

You could easily make those arguments on the book bans themselves.

One common argument I've seen floated in these conversations is that whatever this you call this behavior, it's not that bad because there are lots of other means to access the banned books.

But if that's the case - why bother in the first place? Is it all just performative virtue signaling that has no measurable effect on children's means to access these books? If not, shouldn't we be interrogating their reasoning?
by wtallis | 2025-12-18 22:16:56+00:00
I give apps a one strike policy on notification spam. If they do it at all, I'm uninstalling it until I actually need to use it next (if I can't find an alternative). And the same goes for getting in my way to beg for a review on the app store: that's a shortcut to getting a one-star rating.

The main exception to this is the notification spam from Google asking me to rate call quality after every damn call. I don't have my phone rooted, so I can't turn off that category of notification.
by yeahforsureman | 2025-12-18 22:16:59+00:00
This is so off in many ways.

In short, there are three core institutions, the "technocratic" European Commission, the European Parliament elected by direct popular vote, and the Council ("of the EU"/"of ministers") made up of the relevant (in terms of subject matter) ministers of the standing national govs. The law-making procedures depend on policy areas etc. but usually in the policy areas where EU is fully competent, the Commission — the democratically least accountable of the three bodies — by default makes the initiatives and negotiates/mediates them further along with the Parliament and Council, but only the last two together really have the power to finally approve actual legislation, usually either Regulations (directly applicable in member states as such — so an increasingly preferred instrument of near-full harmonisation), or Directives (requiring separate national transposition / implementation and usually leaving more room for national-level discretion otherwise as well).

While not fully comparable to nation-state parliaments, the powers of the EU Parliament have been strengthened vis-à-vis both the Commission and the Council, and it's certainly long been a misrepresentation to say that they, e.g., only have the power to "approve or turn down" proposals of the Commission and/or the Council.
by bilekas | 2025-12-18 22:17:16+00:00
I'm not sure why this is so downvoted given the climate.

I guess it's the AI driven approach. These things, critical infra, are always done better with a few eyes in it.. introducing irresponsible ideas of "I'll just remake it with Claude without knowing the underlying infra" can hit a few nerves, also add a few lower level bugs, exploits etc.

I don't think it's fair for the downvoted but I think it's worth discussing where we draw the line.

Edit: I think AI is a tool not a replacement.
by Someone | 2025-12-18 22:17:17+00:00
FTA: In our "Mobile Actions" evaluation, fine-tuning transformed the model’s reliability, boosting accuracy from a 58% baseline to 85%. This confirms that for edge agents, a dedicated, trained specialist is an efficient path to production-grade performance.

I would be wary of having a LLM with 85% accuracy call tools on my system. Isn’t that fairly far away from production-grade performance?

I also don’t see that the fact that accuracy can be boosted from 50% to 85% is any indication that it can be boosted further.
by wat10000 | 2025-12-18 22:17:19+00:00
Those hardware-level locks are typically not considered because they work quite differently. A standard software mutex can cause other threads to block indefinitely if, for example, the thread holding the mutex gets preempted for a long time. "Lock free" isn't really about the locks, it's about a guarantee that the system makes progress.

In this sense, the hardware locks used for atomic instructions don't really count, because they're implemented such that they can only be held for a brief, well defined time. There's no equivalent to suspending a thread while it holds a lock, causing all other threads to wait for an arbitrary amount of time.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-18 22:17:29+00:00
Ashley Home Furniture is an expert at this.

Throw in gift cards all over the place to incentivize purchases.

Go to use a gift card, "Sorry, gift cards can only be used to pay for full price items, not discounted or sale items".

Conveniently, effectively everything in the store is discounted or on sale.

That would be bad enough as-is. But you move houses, or are moving out for the first time, and someone buys you a gift card, with CASH?

They're the same gift cards. And the same "rules" which are nowhere to be found, just you arguing until you're blue in the face with a store manager who "understands, but policy".

"I could have bought this item with the cash it took to buy the gift card, but because that cash 'changed form', it's now unacceptable for payment?"
by delaminator | 2025-12-18 22:17:33+00:00
It really doesn't matter. The distinction is gone and there's no point fighting it.

There will be a new term for it, like it was Machine Learning rather than AI back in 2017.

Maybe Autonomous Control or something.

Or the "Once it works, no one calls it AI anymore."

or Tesler's Theorem :

"Intelligence is whatever machines haven't done yet."