MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by wk_end | 2025-12-03 20:10:48+00:00
Managers everywhere love the idea of AI because it means they can replace expensive and inefficient human workers with cheap automation.

Among actual people (i.e. not managers) there seems to be a bit of a generation gap - my younger friends (Gen Z) are almost disturbingly enthusiastic about entrusting their every thought and action to ChatGPT; my older friends (young millennials and up) find it odious.
by strgcmc | 2025-12-03 20:10:51+00:00
I think it comes down to, having some insight about the customer need and how you would solve it. Having prior experience in the same domain is helpful but is neither a guarantee nor a blocker, towards having a customer insight (lots of people might work in a domain but have no idea how to improve it; alternatively an outsider might see something that the "domain experts" have been overlooking).

I just randomly happened to read about the story of, some surgeons asking a Formula 1 team to help improve its surgical processes, with spectacular results in the long term... The F1 team had zero medical background, but they assessed the surgical processes and found huge issues with communication and lack of clarity, people reaching over each other to get to tools, or too many people jumping to fix something like a hose coming loose (when you just need 1 person to do that 1 thing). F1 teams were very good at designing hyper efficient and reliable processes to get complex pit stops done extremely quickly, and the surgeons benefitted a lot from those process engineering insights, even though it had nothing specifically to do with medical/surgical domain knowledge.

Reference: https://www.thetimes.com/sport/formula-one/article/professor...

Anyways, back to your main question -- I find that it helps to start small... Are you someone who is good at using analogies to explain concepts in one domain, to a layperson outside that domain? Or even better, to use analogies that would help a domain expert from domain A, to instantly recognize an analogous situation or opportunity in domain B (of which they are not an expert)? I personally have found a lot of benefit, from both being naturally curious about learning/teaching through analogies, finding the act of making analogies to be a fun hobby just because, and also honing it professionally to help me be useful in cross-domain contexts. I think you don't need to blow this up in your head as some big grand mystery with some big secret cheat code to unlock how to be a founder in a domain you're not familiar with -- I think you can start very small, and just practice making analogies with your friends or peers, see if you can find fun ways of explaining things across domains with them (either you explain to them with an analogy, or they explain something to you and you try to analogize it from your POV).
by symbogra | 2025-12-03 20:10:56+00:00
I honestly expected this to be about sanctimonious lefties complaining about a single chatgpt query using an Olympic swimming pool worth of water, but it was actually about Seattle big tech workers hating it due to layoffs and botched internal implementations which is a much more valid reason to hate it.

My buddies still or until recently still at Amazon have definitely been feeling this same push. Internal culture there has been broken since the post covid layoffs, and layering "AI" over the layoffs leaves a bad taste.
by inferiorhuman | 2025-12-03 20:11:25+00:00
Last I checked even Apple migrated to LF. Perhaps it's time for Windows to stop being the odd man out? Regardless:

not work with every windows text editor

Last I checked both Visual Studio Code and Notepad++ can both make line endings configurable. That covers a plurality of use cases. Even the built-in Notepad supports using CR or LF only for going on eight years now.
by majormajor | 2025-12-03 20:11:33+00:00
Non-technical people that I know have rapidly embraced it as "better google where i don't have to do as much work to answer questions." This is in a non-work context so i don't know how much those people are using it to do their day job writing emails or whatever. A lot of these people are tech-using boomers - they already adjusted to Google/the internet, they don't know how it works, they just are like "oh, the internet got even better."

There's maybe a slow trend towards "that's not true, you should know better than to trust AI for that sort of question" in discussions when someone says something like "I asked AI how [xyz was done]" but it's definitely not enough yet to keep anyone from going to it as their first option for answering a question.
by pkasting | 2025-12-03 20:11:50+00:00
Ex-Google here; there are many people both current and past-Google that feel the same way as the composite coworker in the linked post.

I haven't escaped this mindset myself. I'm convinced there are a small number of places where LLMs make truly effective tools (see: generation of "must be plausible, need not be accurate" data, e.g. concept art or crowd animations in movies), a large number of places where LLMs make apparently-effective tools that have negative long-term consequences (see: anything involving learning a new skill, anything where correctness is critical), and a large number of places where LLMs are simply ineffective from the get-go but will increasingly be rammed down consumers' throats.

Accordingly I tend to be overly skeptical of AI proponents and anything touching AI. It would be nice if I was more rational, but I'm not; I want everyone working on AI and making money from AI to crash and burn hard. (See also: cryptocurrency)
by bccdee | 2025-12-03 20:11:50+00:00
> Engineers don't try because they think they can't.

This article assumes that AI is the centre of the universe, failing to understand that that assumption is exactly what's causing the attitude they're pointing to.

There's a dichotomy in the software world between real products (which have customers and use cases and make money by giving people things they need) and hype products (which exist to get investors excited, so they'll fork over more money). This isn't a strict dichotomy; often companies with real products will mix in tidbits of hype, such as Microsoft's "pivot to AI" which is discussed in the article. But moving toward one pole moves you away from the other.

I think many engineers want to stay as far from hype-driven tech as they can. LLMs are a more substantive technology than blockchain ever was, but like blockchain, their potential has been greatly overstated. I'd rather spend my time delivering value to customers than performing "big potential" to investors.

So, no. I don't think "engineers don't try because they think they can't." I think engineers KNOW they CAN and resent being asked to look pretty and do nothing of value.
by bleepblap | 2025-12-03 20:12:13+00:00
I've been in university research computing for 15 years, so large enough (~900 nodes) we need a dedicated DC, but not at the same scale as others around here.

Our racks are provisioned so that there are two independent rails, which each can support 7kW. Up until the last few years, this was more than enough power. As CPU TDPs increased, we started to need to do things like not connect some nodes to both redundant rails or mix disk servers into compute racks to keep under 7kW/rack.

A single HGX B300 box has 6x6kW power supplies. Even before we get to paying the (high) power bills, it's going to cost a small fortune to just update the racks, power distribution units, UPS, etc... to even be able to support more than a handful of those things
by vessenes | 2025-12-03 20:12:25+00:00
Thanks for the post - it's work to write and synthesize, and I always appreciate it!

My first reaction was "replace 'AI' with the word 'Cloud'" ca 2012 at MS; what's novel here?

With that in mind, I'm not sure there is anything novel about how your friend is feeling or the organizational dynamics, or in fact how large corporations go after business opportunities; on those terms, I think your friends' feelings are a little boring, or at least don't give us any new market data.

In MS in that era, there was a massive gold rush inside the org to Cloud-ify everything and move to Azure - people who did well at that prospered, people who did not, ... often did not. This sort of internal marketplace is endemic, and probably a good thing at large tech companies - from the senior leadership side, seeing how employees vote with their feet is valuable - as is, often, the directional leadership you get from a Satya who has MUCH more information than someone on the ground in any mid-level role.

While I'm sure there were many naysayers about the Cloud in 2012, they were wrong, full stop. Azure is immensely valuable. It was right to dig in on it and compete with AWS.

I personally think Satya's got a really interesting hyper scaling strategy right now -- build out national-security-friendly datacenters all over the world -- and I think that's going to pay -- but I could be wrong, and his strategy might be much more sophisticated and diverse than that; either way, I'm pretty sure Seattleites who hate how AI has disrupted their orgs and changed power politics and winners and losers in-house will have to roll with the program over the next five years and figure out where they stand and what they want to work on.
by fasterik | 2025-12-03 20:12:42+00:00
Procedural generation can be useful for finding new musical ideas. It's also essential in specific genres like ambient and experimental music, where the whole point is to break out of the traditional structures of rhythm and melody. Imagine using cellular automata or physics simulations to trigger notes, key changes, etc. Turing completeness means there are no limits on what you can generate. Some DAWs and VSTs give you a Turing complete environment, e.g. Bitwig's grid or Max/MSP. But for someone with a programming background those kinds of visual editors are less intuitive and less productive than writing code.

Of course, often creativity comes from limitations. I would agree that it's usually not desirable to go full procedural generation, especially when you want to wrangle something into the structure of a song. I think the best approach is a hybrid one, where procedural generation is used to generate certain ideas and sounds, and then those are brought into a more traditional DAW-like environment.
by it_is_beautiful | 2025-12-03 20:12:54+00:00
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll check them out.

> I highly recommend the book "To Sell Is Human" that reframes "sales" as something more, i.e. convincing a child they need to brush their teeth before bed is also "sales"

It sounds like there might be some overlap with my favourite book, Never Split the Difference (:s/sales/negotation). Quote:

---

Life is negotiation. The majority of the interactions we have at work and at home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge: I want.

“I want you to free the hostages,” is a very relevant one to this book, of course. But so is:

“I want you to accept that $1 million contract.”

“I want to pay $20,000 for that car.”

“I want you to give me a 10 percent raise.” and

“I want you to go to sleep at 9 p.m.”

---

> Another book recommendation, "The Now Habit"

I've heard of this one, and tried a few systems. Right now I'm reading Getting Things Done, and I really like it so far. It emphasizes simplicity and developing a system you can trust so you have less running around wild in your brain.

I think my two big problems are:

1. Lack of writing experience generally; and

2. It's hard to explain, but I'm very much stuck in my own head. I do put myself out there, in personal life and professionally, but I tend to have this sickly feeling that grows until I delete my public profiles (professionally) and let most relationships go (personally). I guess I'm "Prone to isolation". This is a big problem in life, but I know I can't just easily solve it, I need to solve it by taking action in my life, like trying to work in my field. I can't wait until I'm perfect to start living and taking action, it's the action itself that will change things. But emotionally, I'm so twisted up that it's hard to get anywhere at all.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-12-03 20:12:57+00:00
Every generation of musicians for the past 8 decades has had the same thoughts. What live coding tools for synthesis offers you is an understanding of the nature of generational technology.

Consider this: there are teenagers today, out there somewhere, learning to code music. Remember when synthesisers were young and cool and there was an explosion of different engines and implementations?

This is happening for the kids, again.

Try to use this new technology to replicate the modern, and then the old sound, and then discover new sounds. Like we synth nerds have been doing for decades.
by sramsay | 2025-12-03 20:13:09+00:00
There might be. And I certainly bear no ill will of any kind toward the project or its devs. But I am in terminals all day long, and I hesitate to use one that is written in a language that hasn't yet hit 1.0.

Foot is way more my speed. Fast, extremely stable, and (most importantly) barely noticed. When it comes to terminals, the slightest flicker -- the merest bug -- and I'm gone. And that happened to me with both ghostty and alacritty.
by rc1 | 2025-12-03 20:13:29+00:00
Cursor opened in config/ + HomeAssistant MCP is exceptionally good. I have blundered along with Home Assistant over the years, but it lit up with the above setup for me the other day.

For giggles, I had it set all the lights into a disco.

Next, we vibed a markdown file containing a to-do list of all my upstairs lights that are abstractly named by the different integrations. I put an x against a name and it turned the light off.

Once I identified it, I wrote a better name next to it. It updated the system.

We vibed dashboards and routines.

The problem with Home Assistant is that once it works, you don't touch it for a year and are back to square one with the layers of concepts. But I am left satisfied knowing I have backed up the conversation/context that we can pick up next year or whenever again.

A memorable computer experience.
by somekyle2 | 2025-12-03 20:13:35+00:00
I don't doubt that many love it. I'm just going based on SF non-tech people I know, who largely see it as the thing vaguely mentioned on every billboard and bus stop, the chatbot every tech company seems to be trying to wedge into every app, and the thing that makes misleading content on social media and enables cheating on school projects. But, sometimes it is good at summarizing videos and such. I probably have a biased sample of people who don't really try to make productive use of AI.
by butz | 2025-12-03 20:13:57+00:00
Sadly, nowadays very few, if any, game developers care about performance or optimizations. Look at recent headline about "Helldivers 2 devs slash install size from 154GB to 23GB" and it was done by simply deduplicating assets. Gone are the days of finding inredible ways to use less opcodes that game would feel smoother.
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-03 20:14:02+00:00
Oh, I will happily get in your face and tell you your AI garbage sucks. I'm not afraid of these people, and you shouldn't be, either. Bring back social pressure. We successfully shamed Google Glassholes into obscurity, we can do it again. This shit has infested entire operating systems now, all so someone can get another billion dollars, while the rest of us struggle to make rent. It's made my career miserable, for so many reasons. It's made my daily life miserable. I'm so sick and tired of it.
by nialv7 | 2025-12-03 20:14:26+00:00
Valve is estimated to make $16.2 billion from Steam alone in 2025 [0], and CS:GO loot boxes only netted them ~1bn in 2023 [1] (and CS:GO player count is only slightly higher now compared to 2023, so I expected the income number is similar).

Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak...

[1]: https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review
by shepardrtc | 2025-12-03 20:14:35+00:00
Ok so a few thoughts as a former Seattleite:

1. You were a therapy session for her. Her negativity was about the layoffs.

2. FAANG companies dramatically overhired for years and are using AI as an excuse for layoffs.

3. AI scene in Seattle is pretty good, but as with everywhere else was/is a victim of the AI hype. I see estimates of the hype being dead in a year. AI won't be dead, but throwing money at the whatever Uber-for-pets-AI-ly idea pops up won't happen.

4. I don't think people hate AI, they hate the hype.

Anyways, your app actually does sound interesting so I signed up for it.
by side_up_down | 2025-12-03 20:15:07+00:00
There's a great non-AI point in this article - Seattle has great engineers. In pursuing startups, Seattle engineers are relatively unambitious compared to the Bay Area. By that I mean there's less "shooting for unicorns" and a comparatively more reserved startup culture and environment.

I'm not sure why. I don't think it's access to capital, but I'd love to hear thoughts.
by orbital-decay | 2025-12-03 20:15:15+00:00
All of this is hard but solvable at least for some genres, with the help of the platform and game devs. A decade+ ago, I ran servers for several PvP sandbox games, we've been one of the major EU hubs. This was pretty complicated - tons of custom observability tooling, a community with 24/7 mods, investigations, mod transparency, etc. The IDs were partially solved by Steam, the rest was handled by player behavior tracking and reputation.

We also had skill-separated servers. Casual ones had votebans for teams and players that were too organized/skilled/abusive, with case by case mod approval. Anarchy servers had nearly zero rules and were absolutely cutthroat and toxic but fair, you always knew what you were signing up for. They even had mods temporarily banning players for whining.

Cheaters never lasted long in our servers, including returning ones. Running a dedicated server takes some dedication. Know the game and people you're doing this for.
Show HN: I built a trending books by month Bump Chart with Hardcover data
by dyogenez | 2025-12-03 20:15:34+00:00
Back when I was a kid, I'd get the monthly Nintendo Power magazine and check out the top games of the month to see what was popular (A Link to the Past was my default vote). I wanted to build something in Hardcover that would show that, but allow for understanding over time. A bump chart was the perfect data visualization for it.

The Y-axis indicates the rank during any month, while the X-axis is time. Originally this was just for the last year, but I added a slider when I wanted to see farther back.

The lines connect a book by month, and you can click on a book to highlight it's path. You can enter a title, series or author in the input box and I'll highlight all matching books and connectors.

The "Labs" side is inspired by Digg labs back in the day. They'd create tons of fun projects to understand and explore their data, and I'm excited to try doing more of that myself.

Under the hood, the backend is Ruby on Rails, using Inertia.js to a React.js front-end. All data is cached using Solid Cache in Postgres, so it loads pretty fast (except when the cache expires and it has to do a query for each month). On the front-end it uses D3.js for most of the logic, reusing some of the same foundational components as our Stats section.

This one was mostly created using Claude Code and Opus 4.5. I've been playing around with using Happy (remote claude runner) and CloudFlare zero-trust dev tunnels to be able to work on things from my phone on my computer. Most of this was "programmed" from my phone on Thanksgiving night during a Creatures Great and Small marathon on PBS.

If you have any feedback, bugs or suggestions on how to improve this I'd love to hear them! I'm a huge fan of data visualizations, and can spend entirely too long playing with them, so this has been a work of love.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-03 20:15:46+00:00
I like that you shared the insight. Feels like you shared a secret to the world that is not so secret if you work a Microsoft (I guess this is less about the city)

I feel bad for people who work at dystopian places where you can't just do the job, try to get ahead etc. It is set up to make people fail and play politics.

I wonder if the company is dying slowly but with AI hype qaand old good foundations keeping her stock price going.
by chankstein38 | 2025-12-03 20:15:50+00:00
Howdy! I personally don't really understand the "point" the article is trying to make. I mostly agree with your sentiment that AI can be useful. I too have seen a massive increase in productivity in my hobbies, thanks to LLMs.

As to the point of the article, is it just to say "People shouldn't hate LLMs"? My takeaway was more "This person's future isn't threatened directly so they just aren't understanding why people feel this way." but I also personally believe that, if the CEOs have their way, AI will threaten every job eventually.

So yeah I guess I'm just curious what the conclusion presented here is meant to be?
by devKnight | 2025-12-03 20:16:03+00:00
Based in: Latam Interested in: Full Time/Part Time/Contract Time Zone: US time zones

Technologies: React, Next, Remix, Vue, Typescript, Express/Node, Mongo, Mysql, AWS(Serverless), Laravel/PHP, Jest, Cypress, playwright, Shopify(liquid, Hydrogen)

Email: me+hn @ segoviacristian dot com

Have 6+ years of experience working at US based startups and small companies. Looking for full stack roles, though open to frontend or backend roles as well. Speak English at an advanced level
by munksbeer | 2025-12-03 20:16:50+00:00
> A lot of the anti WFH wave comes from companies discovering that they actually can't trust some employees to do much work from home.

Personally, I think a lot of the anti WFH types thrive in an office environment because either charitably, they get energy from being around people and work better, or less charitably, it helps them build their careers because they're great at being noticed in that environment.

In the charitable case, that's great for them, but could be harmful to WFH types, who thrive when they can work remotely and their focus times click more easily (for various reasons).

In the less charitable case, (which I suspect is a lot of people who are passionately anti-WFH), well, this needs no real explanation. They're just being selfish for their own career.
by rpastuszak | 2025-12-03 20:16:59+00:00
For me:

- easy to customise using a simple, easy to understand config

- supports non-native full screen so I don’t need to wait for the virtual desktop transition animation on Mac to finish…

- has a friendly community

- it’s a good model for building sustainable products/tools

and, with all of the above: it doesn’t feel like a compromise
by maxglute | 2025-12-03 20:17:07+00:00
Rail and fiber deprecates on multiple decade timescales. AI data centers close to tulips. Even assuming we manage to make data center stretch to 10 years, these assets won't be around long enough to support ecosystem of new companies if the economics stops making sense. Ultimately the only durable thing is any power infra that gets built, vs rail and fiber where inheritance isn't just rail networks or fiber but like 1000s of kilometers of earthwork projects to build out massive physical networks.
by purplezooey | 2025-12-03 20:17:21+00:00
The author says, "The operational resistance alone would be too much." True. But we need to continue reforms that clearly will improve the system. That effort seems to be stuck as we instead pause to relitigate the advances of the second half of the twentieth century. These would go a long way: mandate price transparancy, decouple insurance from employment, let Medicare negotiate prices broadly, and ban PBMs.