MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by estimator7292 | 2025-12-01 23:20:25+00:00
Imagine an alternate reality where companies can do things like create voice assistants without the absolute, unquestionable requirement to not only be profitable, but to have infinite compounding growth forever.

We'd have working voice assistants by now. We're held up by the incessant need to game "engagement" and seek rent.

In reality users just want a goddamn voice interface to their phone. Set a timer, remind me of x next time I'm at location y. Turn on the lights. Set home air conditioning to 72.

Simple, trivial bullshit that has absolutely no monetizable worth. Because it's not profitable enough it's not worth developing at all. I'm half convinced the only reason siri and google assistant even still exist is solely and exclusively because the "other guy" has it.

People argue innovation is impossible without capitalism. I argue innovation is impossible with capitalism. If your idea isn't profitable enough it's not worth any amount of investment regardless of how beneficial the idea might be.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-01 23:20:49+00:00
I do it. I write[0], because it helps me to understand stuff better (tutorials), or because I work on "gut instinct," a lot, and writing it in a manner that explains it, forces me to "formalize" things.

My stuff is too TL;DR, for most folks, these days.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany
by kyledrake | 2025-12-01 23:20:50+00:00
This is exactly what I've done. I don't enjoy Rails very much but I love working with Ruby and Sinatra. The community has done a great job to keep Rails separated from Ruby when they release tools, so that they don't depend on or require Rails.

A lot of the aversion towards ruby I've gotten from people that have worked with it before mainly stems from complaints I share with the philosophy of Rails (making big changes to it when needed is like driving a freight ship instead of a small boat) and the complexity that can go with that, or with horror stories around poorly implemented metaprogramming, which are both valid points to me because I honestly share them. But Rails is not Ruby, and the community in general has been a lot more responsible with using metaprogramming carefully than it was in the early days.

Ruby becoming successful through Rails was a boon for it in the short term but I think also detracted from it's future growth at the same time as it became hard to untether developers' bad experiences with huge Rails apps with their experience using Ruby itself.

Personally, I love using Ruby so much for my own needs that if it ever was to fall into obscurity to the point of being unusable for modern tasks, I have decided that will be the point that I probably retire from programming and move on to other things in my life. It's not that I can't learn a new language for my daily driving, it's that I... don't really want to at this point.
by maccard | 2025-12-01 23:20:54+00:00
At a previous team, our ceo would send out a weekly 5 minute “catch up” video. This covered pretty much everything you needed to know in our company, it saved so many hours, until people complained it could be a message, and then people couldn’t find the message in the other updates and eventually it became a bimonthly hour long meeting for 60 people as they always do!
by ghc | 2025-12-01 23:21:11+00:00
There's a floor. If you sell a home for less than your mortgage amount you have to have enough cash to make up the difference.

Also, selling for significantly under the appraised price decreases likelihood of qualified buyers because it may be a red flag.

Renting until spring is a logical option when there's no buyers, since that's when the supply of buyers is much larger. I don't want to be a landlord but I also don't want to pay money to part with my house. One home in my neighborhood finally sold for 60% of what they bought it for after 6 months on the market. I think only rich people or people who've been in their homes 20 years can afford that.
by parliament32 | 2025-12-01 23:21:14+00:00
It works okay. I like that it's universal (the same assistant on my phone, on my home devices, in my car, in my earbuds). I like that it does tasks right, but you have to know how to phrase them (my most common is probably "remind me to X tomorrow at X time"). Setting alarms and timers, creating calendar events, asking about the weather on a specific day or in a specific place, asking how long it'll take to walk/drive somewhere -- all good. But anything more complicated than that and you get erratic behaviour. From what I've seen with my friends interacting with Siri, I'd say they're about equal in capability.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-01 23:21:41+00:00
I bet you'd love the GT40! It had a lunar lander game with an easter egg: a McDonalds on the moon.

I wonder if Lars got a GT40 emulator working with SIMH:

https://simh.trailing-edge.narkive.com/1AQn3HSi/simulating-a...

https://fritzm.github.io/gt40.html

This looks like it:

https://github.com/Isysxp/GT40

Playing Moonlander (LEM):

https://github.com/Isysxp/GT40/blob/master/PDP11/lunar11/lun...

The restoration of a GT40 to play lunar lander | VCFMW 18 (2023):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4lPE5Nytfc
by johnnyanmac | 2025-12-01 23:21:48+00:00
>Where are you going to draw the line?

How about we start with "commercial LLMs cannot give Legal, Medical, or Financial advice" and go from there? LLMs for those businesses need to be handled by those who can be held accountable (be it the expert or the CEO of that expert).

I'd go so far to try and prevent the obvious and say "LLM's cannot be used to advertise product". but baby steps.

>AI as a technology is almost impossible to stop.

Not really a fan of defeatism speak. Tech isn't as powerful as billionaire want you to pretend it is. It can indeed be regulated, we just need to first use our civic channels instead of fighting amongst ourselves.

Of course, if you are profiting off of AI, I get it. Gotta defend your paycheck.
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-01 23:21:54+00:00
Interesting— I use that functionality constantly and listen to a wide variety of artists, some of them pretty obscure. Do you use Apple Music or another service?

I can think of one time recently where no matter how I prompted it to play an album for (decades old but probably triple platinum,) it kept playing some cardi b song with the band’s name in the title instead… but that’s probably like a 1 in 2000 request problem. Maybe its a genre thing?
by ecommerceguy | 2025-12-01 23:22:01+00:00
Theres alot of forces tugging at American "healthcare" - lawsuits, uninsured non-payment, subsidiation of 3rd world drugs, heterogeneous population, over eating, under exercise... usa practices reactive medicine. and maybe part of that is due to hectic modern life, but it certainly adds to the cost, time and money, that could potentially be avoided or at least reduced in a more preventive, educated system.

that being said, one can certainly find cheaper insurance (a policy to limit liability) if one knew where to look.

for instance a self employed single male, 27, queens new york, healthy non smoker, can have a national network $300 deductible, aca qualified policy, $329 a month.
by tombert | 2025-12-01 23:22:40+00:00
systemd solves problems that are not easily solvable in the old SysV init way. If you need resources to load in a specific order, for example, it’s trivial to do this with systemd, but you have to muck with weird symlink stuff to get the same effect with SysV. There are lots of things like that. You can hand wave this away and act like it’s not important, but it absolutely can be important to correctly make sure services load in the right order, and being abke to designate dependencies if services.

Of course I have run non-systemd distros, like Ubuntu (back when it used upstart), Gentoo, and of course FreeBSD (yes I know it’s not a Linux distro but close enough for this particular point), so it’s not like non-systemd stuff is foreign to me, and I am just not convinced it is actually causing more headaches than other systems.
by npunt | 2025-12-01 23:22:44+00:00
I'm amazed more AI tools don't have reality checks as part of the command flow. If you take a UX-first perspective on AI - which Apple very much should - there's going to be x% failures to interpret correctly, causing some unintended and undesirable action. A reasonable way to handle these failure cases is to have a post-interpretation reality check.

This could be personalized, 'does this user do this kind of thing?' which checks history of user actions for anything similar. Or it could be generic, 'is this the type of thing a typical user does?'

In both cases, if it's unfamiliar you have a few options: try to interpret it again (maybe with a better model), raise a prompt with the user ('do you want to do x?'), or if it's highly unfamiliar, auto cancel the command and say sorry.
by drob518 | 2025-12-01 23:23:11+00:00
I agree that not falling for the hype and rushing in may have just saved them. Apple is typically not a first mover. They often hang back, rethink the problem, and deliver something really nice. But not in this case. They had Siri first and then squandered their lead, but may have avoided a huge write-down as a result.
Hack Club strikes a promotion deal with Hacker News
by Agreed3750 | 2025-12-01 23:23:16+00:00
> Hey everyone! I've seen sooo many cool projects (too many to count) and I really think some of them should get more recognition. We are partnering with Hackernews to make your projects go viral. We previously did this with Dvir and his project went from 0-200 stars overnight. All you have to do is make a small write-up, we will send it to be verified, then once you post your project, it will be manually boosted in the algorithm by them.

This was an announcement made within the Hack Club Slack about their hardware program Blueprint (https://blueprint.hackclub.com/)
by samdoesnothing | 2025-12-01 23:24:01+00:00
I don't know if it's about trying to do significantly better, but rather who these threads are for. If they're for the seekers, you would let them speak freely about their experiences. If it's for the companies, it makes sense to censor replies. Unfortunately you're put in a position to make this choice no matter if you want to or not.

Thanks for listening to feedback :)
by ianferrel | 2025-12-01 23:24:02+00:00
Honestly, my experience with Siri is that it works worse than it did 10 years ago. It's not clear to me if that's with Siri itself or just the general decrease in quality of Apple software over the past N years, but zero changes would have been an improvement.

Things that seemed to work reliably for me 10 years ago but now do not:

1. "Call mom". Siri has apparently forgotten who my mother is. I tried "Hey Siri <name> is my mother" and I got an error. I'm sure it's resolvable but come on.

2. "Directions to <destination>" This always used to fail when it couldn't find places, but lately, when I'm driving, Siri will respond "Getting directions to <destination>" and then... nothing. No directions come up. I have to do it 2-3 times to have the directions actually start.
by protocolture | 2025-12-01 23:24:25+00:00
A mate of mine (who allegedly has decent health insurance but that seems questionable) was trying to get a simple surgical procedure done, and the quotes he received ranged from anywhere between "We cant tell you" to multiple thousands, ultimately he found a small private hospital that sorted it out for him for 700 USD.

I actually think the 700 USD price is very reasonable. But I dont care how rich you are thats a terrible consumer experience.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-12-01 23:24:37+00:00
Did you read the article?

The author admits that the answer to his own question is no. Which, again, affirms Betteridge’s Law.

> A more plausible explanation for the present weak patch, and for companies’ reluctance to hire, is Trumpian uncertainty. That is now beginning to ease. The chaos of Mr Trump’s tariff roll-out seems to be receding. Deportations and changes to visa rules will remain disruptive, but businesses are starting to adapt. Although 2026 is unlikely to be a year of calm and clarity for America, it may well be a bit less frenzied. That would boost the labour market. American workers’ decade-long hot streak may have longer to run.

To paraphrase his conclusion: no. Things are soft, but in general, probably fine for 2026.

This is what I am saying - I’m sick of seeing sensational, clickbait, disaster-porn headlines, especially when the author timidly backs off and plays both sides once they have your attention. It’s such a lack of journalistic integrity.
by benoau | 2025-12-01 23:24:57+00:00
Because today they're racing against regulators for the privilege of setting their own service as the preinstalled, exclusive, default with APIs only they are allowed to use.

They already lost this superpower in the EU and I think Japan, India, Brazil too. Early next year they've got their US antitrust trial, and later in the year are some class actions challenging their control over app distribution, and at least two pieces of draft legislation are circulating that would require allowing competing apps to be defaults.

If they need another two years they might face an entrenched and perhaps even better competitor, while their own app needs to be downloaded from the App Store.
by jarjoura | 2025-12-01 23:25:20+00:00
Sad, because before COVID, no one at Meta cared where you worked as long as you were getting your shit done. There was never available meeting rooms, and the open floor plans were so loud, that people would spread out all over the campus and use single person VC rooms to communicate in.

Basically, everyone trusted everyone.

This is 100% just a soft layoff.
by hnfong | 2025-12-01 23:25:38+00:00
I don't think anyone seriously believes that the Chinese aren't capable, it's more like people believe no matter what happens, USA will still dominate in "high tech" fields. A variant of "American Exceptionalism" so to speak.

This is kinda reflected in the stock market, where the AI stocks are surging to new heights every day, yet their Chinese equivalents are relatively lagging behind in stock price, which suggests that investors are betting heavily on the US companies to "win" this "AI race" (if there's any gains to be made by winning).

Also, in the past couple years (or maybe a couple decades), there had also been a lot of crap talk about how China has to democratize and free up their markets in order to be competitive with the other first world countries, together with a bunch of "doomsday" predictions for authoritarianism in China. This narrative has completely lost any credibility, but the sentiment dies slowly...
by jopsen | 2025-12-01 23:26:12+00:00
An American PPO with a $10 co-pay is pretty awesome. The only downside is that it's too easy to get a procedure you don't need :)

I've tried tellings doctors in Denmark I wanted X, Y, Z test and getting told, nah, the outcome wouldn't change your treatment so we don't want to order those tests.

Generally, healthcare is decent, but no doubt a good PPO plan does not compare :)

Public health care seems more like HMO, you have to use a provider within network. Sometimes you need a referral from your primary physician, etc.

You can pick your doctor, but not everyone can take on more patients.
by swyx | 2025-12-01 23:26:16+00:00
the truth is ~none of us in the HN peanut gallery have any appreciation for what its like managing AI inside software inside Apple. it's less a technical role and more of an executive/politics/leadership role. im sure the disappointing progress shares a lot of blame and he was unfortunately the fall guy. estimated compensation $10-30m/yr for last 7 years tho...
by dotnet00 | 2025-12-01 23:26:46+00:00
Exactly, I was working on a little client for a self-hosted server app. Imgui is a rare mix of fast, lightweight, trivially cross-platform and stable, so I went with it and had the client easily compiling for Windows, Linux and browser, while being trivial to work with.

I have otherwise mostly given up on making GUI applications because I simply don't have time to pick up a bunch of UI toolkits for all the different platforms, pulling a massive dependency into my project and requiring constant maintenance to keep the program working.
by zolland | 2025-12-01 23:26:55+00:00
The only time I find Siri useful, or I should say ~potentially~ useful, is while driving text, call and to ask basic facts. The amount of times I've heard "I can't show you that right now" after basic questions is insane. I just stopped asking it questions. Recently I asked "what engine is in a 2022 f150". Trying it without Carplay now, it literally just displays text. It should be able to TTS those results. What on earth have they been working on if not things like that?
by murermader | 2025-12-01 23:27:36+00:00
> Siri does what I need it to do

Not true for me at all, it fails at the most basic tasks, sometimes even at tasks it has done before. Three examples:

- "Timer 5 minutes" -> Loading spinner is shown. Siri disappears after a few seconds. No error, no confirmation. I then have to manually check if the timer was set or not (it was not).

- "Turn on the lights in the living room" to which it responds "Sorry, I cannot do that". I have Phillips Hue lights that are connected to Apple Home, of course Siri can do that. It did that before.

- "Add tooth paste to my shopping list". The shopping list is a list I have in reminders. It then tries to search for the query on Google. I then tried "Add tooth paste to the list shopping list in reminders" which worked, but if I have to be this wordy, it is no longer any convenient.

There are many more simple cases in which Siri always / sometimes fails. I also have the feeling that it performs far worse if asked in my native language (German) than in English.
by cmiles8 | 2025-12-01 23:27:45+00:00
This comes after the incident where multiple drones crashed into a crane.

Given that prior incident and now this the FAA will likely not be too kind to Amazon. The permission on drone tech is predicated on very strong “see and avoid” technology. Given two pretty bad screw-ups now in as many months the FAA won’t be amused at the failures in the tech on these drones.
by AnnaPali | 2025-12-01 23:27:58+00:00
Christian healthcare sharers do precisely this. By restricting services and the population addressed (your pastor or priest must sign off on your application), everything's extremely affordable. In particular, as we don't drink, do drugs, use contraceptives etc. we don't pay for coverage of them or their side effects. Obesity's also less of an issue.

There's also the trick of telling the hospital you'll pay "in cash" and getting a 10x lower bill from the hospital, then getting that reimbursed/covered by your private or alternative insurance.
by autoexec | 2025-12-01 23:28:22+00:00
This is the truth of it. If you can unlock all the on-disc DLC or create and use your own maps, mods, skins, etc. it risks the money companies want to take from you after you've already paid the $60-$80 for the incomplete game itself.

Anti-cheat is about protecting DLC profits as much as it is anything else.

It's a shame too because we got so much good content from random people who just loved the games and wanted to create neat things for them. It was one way that some people started their careers in the video game industry and it spawned a lot of other websites and communities around sharing, reviewing, and creating all that free content.
by Paria_Stark | 2025-12-01 23:28:47+00:00
While I love their hardware, this is why I will always chose a Linux distribution over anything closed source. Being able to retrieve logs of pretty much anything and change pieces of the OS as time goes on is extraordinarily resilient.

Sure it's sometimes not as shiny as MacOS, and it will most likely never be polished enough for the mainstream market share, but there's something really awesome about not being reliant on a support engineer that does not have the financial incentive to spend the correct amount of time solving a one off problem.
by flashu | 2025-12-01 23:28:56+00:00
Location: Poland GMT+1 Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: AWS/DevOps, Python, SQL, Linux, Docker CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dV_jgsxzmxsylDurfIrOpua3W7hNnpAB/view Email: sebastian [at] nowak [dot] ninja Other: working on B2B contracts Summary: Hi, I am in IT for 20+ years, have development background and since 2013 I am focusing on AWS related projects, worked for big companies, managed 1000+ AWS accounts, migrated this and that and built greenfield projects. I am interested in tech/lead roles.
by ajkjk | 2025-12-01 23:29:28+00:00
What do you mean narrative? The narrative is that I hate them. If almost everyone else also does, we should ban them. Simple as that.

It is no different from passing legislation to ban spam or mandate that newsletters have one-click unsubscribe buttons. I hate living a world where corporations are unaccountably disrespectful to their users. Laws are how you hold them accountable. I don't care if the justification for the laws is competition or spam or what. It's simply the point of laws: to give society power over things that individuals can't easily have power over, so that they may improve their lives. To argue that we shouldn't improve our lives is absurd. The only justification for not doing it would be that it is immoral to do so, which it is not. Otherwise the only remaining question is whether we can rally the political will to do it. Not likely in the short term, but, the way things are going I expect it will happen eventually.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-12-01 23:30:30+00:00
People say that, but everyone, including enterprises, are constantly buying Chinese tech one way or another because of cost/quality ratio. There’s a tipping point in any excel file where risks don’t make sense, if the cost is 20x for the same quality.

Of course you’ll always have exceptions (government, military and etc.), but for private, winner will take it all.
by mort96 | 2025-12-01 23:31:48+00:00
Mozilla's position for some time now has been, "we aren't opposed to shipping JXL support, but we'd want to ship a decent implementation in a memory safe language, not the reference C++ implementation". That position hasn't been met with very much criticism.

Google's position, on the other hand, has been a flat-out "no, we will not ship JXL". That's what has been met with criticism. Not an imagined reluctance to shipping a C++ JXL implementation.