MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bityard | 2025-12-08 16:34:02+00:00
Maybe that's how it should work, but it's not how it actually works.

The culture makes the company. Everyone on the lower rungs of the org chart knows this, because it's what they live and breathe every day. A positive, supportive workplace culture with clear goals and relative autonomy is a thing of beauty. You routinely find people doing more work than they really have to because they believe in the mission, or their peers, or the work is just fun. People join the company (and stay) because they WANT to not because they have to.

Past a certain company size, upper management NEVER sees this. They are always looking outward: strategy, customers, marketing, competition. Never in. They've been trained to give great motivational speeches that instill a sense of company pride and motivation for about 30 seconds. After that, employee morale is HR's job.

I have worked in a company that got acquired while it was profitable. The culture change was slow but dramatic. We went from a fun, dynamic culture with lots of teamwork and supportive management, to one step or two above Office Space. As far as the acquiring company was concerned, everything we were doing didn't matter, even if it worked. We had to conform to their systems and processes, or find new jobs. Most of us eventually did the latter.

Somehow Red Hat seems to be a notable exception. Although IBM owns Red Hat, they seem to have mostly left it alone instead of absorbing it. The name "IBM" doesn't even appear on redhat.com. Because I'm an outsider, I can't say whether IBM meddled in Red Hat's HR or management, but I would guess not.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-08 16:34:09+00:00
I already said this to your fellow interlocutor who is also responding to nearly every comment of mine with the same thought process, but I'll say it here as well in different terms:

The product owners, customers, salespeople, supervisors, peers, etc. you interact with as part of the software development process on any project outside of a personal hobby don't care about your semantic games.

If functionality is needed in an application, and they ask you to implement it, and you agree, there is no real-world scenario where they just say "Cool, I'll sit idly by while you work at this until you declare it ready, and then and only then will I let anyone else know about it or take any action on its supposed existence," and repeat that for every piece of functionality you implement in perpetuity.

And if you keep failing to deliver required functionality over time, no one is going to accept your arguments that: "Oh sorry, our weekly deliveries to production aren't a deadline, it's a timeboxed iteration", "Oh that estimate wasn't a commitment to do anything, we work on our own schedule", and so on.

Yes, the relationship between developers and "other stakeholders" can turn toxic, but in most organizations the developers don't have much power, probably due to repeated attempts to play the games you've laid out above. The way to combat that is to be reliable and professional so your team has the authority to stand their ground on the difficulty of a given task, not effectively refuse to participate in what is a completely reasonable conversation about the relationship between your work and the objectives of the organization.
by ucmind | 2025-12-08 16:34:36+00:00
OP here

I wrote this piece to dig into the structural reasons why AI often feel “useless” despite model advancements. My thesis is that we’re missing a unified system layer to address the fragmentation in development and distribution.

We are building Charm to become that layer. We’ve just completed the initial architecture design and started implementation, and we plan to open-source it. Here’s our repo: https://github.com/CharmAIOS/Charm

I’d appreciate feedback from people who have built agents or worked across multiple frameworks, and I’m also actively looking to connect with people who are interested in exploring or building this together.
by dylan604 | 2025-12-08 16:35:23+00:00
That's interesting as the Champions League is the most compelling thing for me to consider P+ subscription. Unfortunately for P+ it just hasn't been compelling enough. I feel for the Peacock subscription to watch EPL, but even with that subscription there are matches only on USA and maybe also on Telemundo. I can only imagine P+ doing similar, and I'm just not here for it
by SirMaster | 2025-12-08 16:35:24+00:00
And the stock market isn't gambling? I view it as such.

Was this more or less risky than buying $1000 in scratch offs, or lottery tickets, or spending $1000 in Vegas?

In my opinion, crypto when I bought it had a lot more "potential" than any of those more "traditional" forms of gambling which is why I was willing to give it a try with a sum of less than 1% of my yearly income...

I am not saying it was a smart choice, just that I don't think it was a particularly stupid choice.
by i80and | 2025-12-08 16:35:31+00:00
The AI Overviews are... extremely bad. For most of my queries, Google's AI Overview misrepresents its own citations, or almost as bad, confidently asserts a falsehood or half-truth based on results that don't actually contain an answer to my search query.

I had the same issue with Kagi, where I'd follow the citation and it would say the opposite of the summary.

A human can make sense of search results with a little time and effort, but current AI models don't seem to be able to.
by hexaga | 2025-12-08 16:35:39+00:00
>> But we don't usually believe in both the bullshit and in the fact the the BS is actually BS.

> I can't parse what you mean by this.

The point is that humans care about the state of a distributed shared world model and use language to perform partial updates to it according to their preferences about that state.

Humans who prefer one state (the earth is flat) do not -- as a rule -- use language to undermine it. Flat earthers don't tell you all the reasons the earth cannot be flat.

But even further than this, humans also have complex meta-preferences of the state, and their use of language reflects those too. Your example is relevant here:

> My dad absolutely insisted that the water draining in toilets or sinks are meaningfully influenced by the Coriolis effect [...]

> [...] should have been able to figure out from first principles why the Coriolis effect is exactly zero on the equator itself, didn't.

This is an exemplar of human behavior. Humans act like this. LLMs don't. If your dad did figure out from first principles and expressed it and continued insisting the position, I would suspect them of being an LLM, because that's how LLMs 'communicate'.

Now that the what is clear -- why? Humans experience social missteps like that as part of the loss surface. Being caught in a lie sucks, so people learn to not lie or be better at it. That and a million other tiny aspects of how humans use language in an overarching social context.

The loss surface that LLMs see doesn't have that feedback except in the long tail of doing Regularized General Document Corpora prediction perfectly. But it's so far away compared to just training on the social signal, where honesty is immediately available as a solution and is established very early in training instead of at the limit of low loss.

How humans learn (embedded in a social context from day one) is very effective at teaching foundational abilities fast. Natural selection cooked hard. LLM training recipes do not compare, they're just worse in so many different ways.
by dotancohen | 2025-12-08 16:36:04+00:00
Right. That's a forgery - a lie. No blockchain could prevent that type of lie. What a blockchain could enable is honest transparency.

An attempt to pass off a lie as truth would be much more damaging to a company's reputation than would be just not addressing an issue. By addressing the issue and introducing a channel for transparency, the company is demonstrating that they are willing to put their reputation on the line.

I would agree that as a regulatory measure, this would not solve any problem. But as a self-imposed measure, it builds consumer trust.
by indigodaddy | 2025-12-08 16:36:19+00:00
Various scientists in this video. The video is a great watch btw.

https://youtu.be/HBluLfX2F_k

(stresses build up and are often released through many small, unfelt earthquakes (25:54). If these small movements don't dissipate the stress, it can accumulate and lead to a powerful chain reaction (26:25) * disclaimer I used YouTube's built-in AI to find/summarize the timestamps, as I couldn't remember offhand where it was when I previously watched this.
by jadbox | 2025-12-08 16:36:29+00:00
I worked in crypto for five years, and this resonates. Sure, you can make money hustling some hype coin, but chances are you are more likely to lose money/time in the process. Outside of very specific supply chain blockchains, 99% of the actual value I see in order of value: 1) Stablecoins [faster than ACH!], 2) Bitcoin, and in certain places, 3) Ethereum has its uses.

Even Bitcoin though is not a panacea though, as without REAL transactional use-cases, it is also prone to sudden major drops. Until people in your home state can buy a car, house, and groceries using bitcoin directly (WITHOUT a Visa bridge), the real value will be highly subjective to the whims of the market.
by AnonHP | 2025-12-08 16:36:50+00:00
> Excel is the best spreadsheet software in my experience when you have to move beyond the basics. I’ve even tried hard to use the open/Libre alternatives.

I strongly agree, but even for the basics! I use LibreOffice for personal use and put up with it only because it’s not Microsoft. It’s laggy, copy paste sometimes doesn’t work, the user interface is quite dated, the fonts are ugly…the list goes on. I donate to Document Foundation so that it can get better, but it moves very slowly.
by urspx | 2025-12-08 16:37:12+00:00
Forgetting authors, misspelling them or the journals, putting a wrong digit etc... could be citation typos. I don't see how you add 5 non-existing authors and put a different—but conceptually plausible—journal in the bibtex.

Besides, I would think most people are using bibliographic managers like Zotero&co..., which will pull metadata through DOIs or such.

The errors look a lot more like what happens when you ask an LLM for some sources on xyz.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-12-08 16:37:39+00:00
Indeed. Christmas lasts until Epiphany (January 6th) or even Candlemas (February 2nd).

Commercialism is likely the culprit for the current state of affairs. By putting the "Christmas season" and the commercialized variety of festivity before Christmas and making Christmas day the big finale, you create a situation during which you can get people to buy, buy, buy. And then it's over.

Compare that with the real deal and as it was traditionally celebrated. Advent is a period of contemplation, waiting, quiet, abstinence from meat -maybe even fasting - in anticipation for the birth of Christ. Then, on Christmas Eve and especially Christmas day, the festivities kick off, and they last until January 6th (the 12 days of Christmas) or Candlemas (40 days of Christmas). And that's when people used to pack up their trees and decorations (either Jan 6th or Feb 2nd).

People today suck at festivity. We're boring.
by chrischen | 2025-12-08 16:38:44+00:00
Actually I found the coding models to work really well with these languages. And the type systems are not actually complex. Ocaml's type system is actually really simple, which is probably why the compiler can be so fast. Even back in the "beta" days of Copilot, despite being marketed as Python only, I found it worked for Ocaml syntax and worked just as well.

The coding models work really well with esoteric syntaxes so if the biggest hurdle to adoption of haskell was syntax, that's definitely less of a hurdle now.

> Instead, you're writing non-trivial proofs about all possible runs of the program.

All possible runs of a program is exactly what HM type systems type check for. This fed into the coding model automatically iterates until it finds a solution that doesn't violate any possible run of the program.
by jbm | 2025-12-08 16:38:47+00:00
https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...

This article? If it caused consternation it boggles the mind. These are all completely normal reactions to Apple's AI missteps.

If detailed but milquetoast criticisms are grounds for excommunication, maybe the company really does have serious management issues.
by SirMaster | 2025-12-08 16:39:28+00:00
I don't see how that relates to me. I made a singular choice. I am going to put in $1000 one time and leave it alone because there seems to be some potential here.

I made the choice basically saying OK this $1000 I am putting in will either be worthless in 10+ years or it will be worth a lot.

I am not continuing to buy, I am not dumping loads of money into it. I spent less than 1% of my yearly salary one time knowing full well it could go to 0. The potential seemed well worth the tiny risk.
Show HN: Record the perfect demo video for your SaaS site
by admtal | 2025-12-08 16:39:28+00:00
I built Demo Scope because I couldn't find an app that did this.

I wanted to record demos of my web game with my face on screen. Desktop tools like Loom exist, but nothing worked on mobile. iOS screen recording doesn't support face cam overlay, and I was tired of fighting OBS. So I built it myself.

Demo Scope is an iOS app for recording and streaming mobile websites with a face cam overlay and touch indicators. The trick: instead of recording the whole screen, it records a built-in browser — which lets me composite your face and touch indicators in real time without needing system-level access Apple doesn't allow. You can also narrate over videos and photos from your camera roll.

Built with Swift and ReplayKit. Free to try, $9.99 one-time to unlock everything. No subscriptions.

Genuinely looking for feedback. How's the app? How's the name? I'm a dev, not a marketer — if you have ideas on how to get this in front of people who'd actually use it, I'm all ears.
by jordanb | 2025-12-08 16:39:43+00:00
The servile stuff was trained into them with RLHF with the trainers largely being low-wage workers in the global south. That's also where some of the other stuff like excessive em-dash stuff came from. I think it's a combination of those workers anticipating how they would be expected to respond by a first-world employer, and also explicit instructions given to them about how the robot should be trained.
by eCa | 2025-12-08 16:39:53+00:00
Laziness is one of the three virtues (of a good programmer), but I think Larry didn’t anticipate the current situation when he wrote it:

”The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it.”
by awad | 2025-12-08 16:40:02+00:00
While totally unaware of the underlying economics, I do find it interesting how the major LLM providers found a way to get a non-trivial portion of consumers to actually pay for the consumer service. Of course, ads are still coming, but it was objectively impressive to go from 20+ years of "search is free" to "search is free, but capped, unless you pay us."
by __s | 2025-12-08 16:40:02+00:00
Seems like it, & each rank is 30x more energy than the last[1]

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-probability-earthquake-a-fore... Suggests 5% for larger quake to follow within week. But overall most sources I could find suggested it's hard to know, needs more research

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10wecl8/do_litt...
by scbzzzzz | 2025-12-08 16:40:04+00:00
I respectfully disagree my friend. When Investors , board, wall street is chasing second order and third order delta increase in a stock enshitification is bound to happen. If there is a board that wants return higher than previous year and when you can't optimize costs by improving tech, You find new avenues like showing 2 ads, showing 3 ads. Increasing subscription price or cheekly modifing terms of service and selling your data to 3rd party data brokers. it has nothing to do with subscription cost.
by iffigues | 2025-12-08 16:40:15+00:00
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by dangoldin | 2025-12-08 16:40:20+00:00
I led the engineering team of a large adtech company (TripleLift - order of hundreds of billions of events/day) and we evolved from self hosting Kafka, to paying a vendor (Instacluster), to migrating to RedPanda.

RedPanda was a huge win for us. Confluent never made sense to us since we were always so cost conscious but the complexity/risk of managing a critical part of our infra was always something I worried about. RedPanda was able to handle both for us - cheaper than Kafka hosting vendors with significantly better performance. We were pretty early customers but was a huge win for us.
by kccqzy | 2025-12-08 16:40:22+00:00
It’s slightly different for groceries. I am not poor but I also don’t want to buy perishables in bulk. I can choose to buy one week’s worth of lettuce to be eaten in a week, but by the seventh day the lettuce has visibly degraded. I want fresher produce, so I am willing to buy smaller amounts every two days.
by avrionov | 2025-12-08 16:41:05+00:00
The biggest difference is not the morality of the management of the two types of companies, but the type of business they are into.

Many private companies are growth businesses. On the opposite side, private equity targets businesses which are stable, but not growing or declining. PE looks for products which have high cost to switch or products with no alternatives.

So when private equity buys the business they extract money in 3 ways: - Raise their prices. This is similar to the public companies, but they do it more aggressively, because their customers don't have a choice. For reference see, what VMWare did after it was bought by Broadcom (Broadcom is a public company which acts as a private equity). - Reduce costs, via layoffs and cutting smaller products. Also done by public companies, but the difference here is the magnitude. It is quite common for Private equity owned companies to have several years of 20% layoffs, until the original workers are completely replaced by workers in cheaper locations. Or not replaced at all which leads to a worse service. - And finally the third way a private equity extracts money from the acquired company by providing "services". Employees from the PE company are elected on the board of directors of the acquired company. A PE executive can become a CEO of an acquired company. PE companies have satellite companies, which provide legal, administrative and financial services to their companies.

On top of that the acquired company has to pay the loan which was used to be acquired.
by hermitcrab | 2025-12-08 16:41:45+00:00
"People who experience sleep paralysis sometimes hallucinate a demon-like creature sitting on their chest"

Interestingly, the experience of sleep paralysis seems to change with the culture. Previously, people experienced it as being ridden by a night hag or some other malevolent supernatural being. More recently, it might account for many supposed alien abductions.

The experience of sleep paralysis sometimes seems to have a sexual element, which might also explain the supposed 'probings'!
by ecshafer | 2025-12-08 16:42:11+00:00
What's the largest company you've worked for? A lot of big, older companies, are just so messed up that its just not worth it. How do you do this? Well you have to find the specific form, or specific person who does the thing, who is that? no one knows. So that provisioning of a vpn and getting in jira might literally be like a month of work.
by jayd16 | 2025-12-08 16:42:27+00:00
Looking at the comment, I would argue that it's fairly vague. Maybe it's clear if you have done it but not clear to others type thing.

Then you undercut the advice by adding "I've always wondered if <confident suggestion> would work", making it unclear how much of the advice is a shot in the dark and how much you've actually seen results from that advice.

Claims like "you might even one shot it" also make it seem like simple hype and not the war story of someone who's actually taken the advice.

But you know, people are down voting me for engaging with your question as well so I don't know. Maybe it's all bots these days :p
by ModernMech | 2025-12-08 16:42:47+00:00
I feel like we are talking about different levels of nondeterminism here. The kind of LLM nondeterminism that's problematic has to do with the interplay between its training and its context window.

Take the idea of the checklist. If you give it to a person and tell them to perform with it, if it's their job they will do so. But with the LLM agents, you can give them the checklist, and maybe they apply it at first, but eventually they completely forget it exists. The longer the conversation goes on without reminding them of the checklist, the more likely they're going to act like the checklist never existed at all. And you can't know when this is, so the best solution we have now is to constantly remind them of the exitance of the checklist.

This is the kind of nondeterminism that make LLMs particularly problematic as tools and a very different proposition from a human, because it's less like working with an expert and more like working with a dementia patient.
by MarsIronPI | 2025-12-08 16:42:50+00:00
Well, if by "operating system" you mean "the layer of the computer that runs my applications" then I'm already there. ;) EXWM + Gnus + misc. other Emacs-based apps FTW.

In all seriousness though, I've used two different machines and three different distros with my current setup on top and it all feels the same. I didn't even notice in my daily interactions with the system.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-12-08 16:43:11+00:00
Nearly every woman I know who is an English as a second language speaker is leaning hard into these things currently to make their prose sound more natural. And that has segued into them being treated almost as a confidant or a friend.

As flawed as they are currently, I remain astounded that people think they will never improve and that people don't want a plastic pal who's fun to be with(tm).

I find them frustrating personally, but then I ask them deep technical questions on obscure subjects and I get science fiction in return.