MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Muromec | 2025-12-09 00:38:14+00:00
Nah, they are fine. They ate head of presidents office alive last week.

Add: it's also not one anticorruption agency, but the whole bunch of them -- law enforcement one (think of FBI, but investigating corruption in government), special prosecutors office, another agency monitoring assets of anyone close enough to government (including immigration officers on a country level) and their family and a whole separate court with judges vetted by independent panel.

It's elections of Doge of Venice level of indirection.
by KerrAvon | 2025-12-09 00:38:38+00:00
Do a quick web search for "lasseter harassment" before posting stuff about it, maybe?

Topmost link on DDG starts with:

"John Lasseter was accused by multiple former employees and reports of a pattern of unwanted sexualized behavior at Pixar and Disney Animation, including persistent unwelcome touching, kisses, and leering that made staff uncomfortable"
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-12-09 00:40:01+00:00
Did you read the paper? The paper is arguing the exact same point I was arguing. To quote the paper:

> Finally, assuming that the parties are rational agents and the smart contract language is Turing complete, we argue that it is impossible to implement the basic sales escrow as a smart contract without trusted third-parties or vulnerability to extortion. In other words, any escrow smart contract has one of the following three demerits:

> – Assuming irrational agents who are willing to punish the other side, even if it is not in their own interest; or

> – Relying on a third-party; or

> – Enabling at least one of the two parties to extort the other.

> In summary, we illustrate that the smart contract and Dapp community is wrong in assuming that the current implementations of two-party escrows have a well-designed mechanism that incentivizes rational actors to be truthful. More shockingly, we show that the smart contracts on programmable blockchains have inherent limitations that make it impossible to implement such a contract. In a sense, this can be considered the first incontractability result on programmable blockchains.

----------

This is exactly what I was arguing.

I never claimed that two party escrow is ideal. I was explicitly saying that two party escrow is an intractable problem and that you must formalise your trust assumptions instead and either accept some level of trusted third parties OR without third parties accept some level of risk of exploitation by one party or the other. Even with third parties there is still risk for exploitation but depending how it is implemented that risk is lesser.

Again this is a matter of formalising trust assumptions and explicitly outlining who you are trusting, what you are trusting them to do, and how much you trust them to do it. And in doing so up front both parties can evaluate their risk tolerance based on the agreed upon contract before progressing.
by mksinclair | 2025-12-09 00:40:35+00:00
Thanks everyone for taking a look — happy to answer anything about the build, the approach, or the decision-making behind it.

A couple notes up front: Mitigate is currently in pre-launch. The live demo goes up in a couple weeks — I’ll update this thread the moment it’s ready.

If anyone wants to try it early (or help break it), I opened a waitlist on the site. There are also a few early-access spots for people who want to explore the earliest working version. Tech details: Right now the backend is a mix of structured communication modeling, sentiment/tone classification layers, and an LLM-driven mediation pipeline. The hardest parts so far have been:

• keeping the AI strictly neutral (it loves to “fix” the wrong person) • calibrating tone detection so it doesn’t overreact or underreact • deciding when to rewrite vs. when to educate • preventing “therapy drift” — this isn’t meant to replace mental health professionals

Current limitations: It sometimes errs on the side of too gentle, and nuance in long chains of messages is still tricky. Multi-person conversations (family, teams, etc.) are on the roadmap but not stable yet.

What I’d love feedback on:

• Are the core assumptions here reasonable • Where could the mediation logic be improved • Any obvious product traps I’m not seeing • Ethical/safety concerns around real-time mediation • Features you wish existed in conflict-resolution tools?

I’m here and will respond as quickly as I can. Appreciate the time and the critique — genuinely.
by al_borland | 2025-12-09 00:41:08+00:00
I watched a show over 20 years ago that showed a fully automated robotic kitchen at McDonalds. I can only assumed they have continued to evolved it and perfect it as the technology has improved. I think it’s simply a question of when it hits the tipping point on cost.

There may also be an issue with logistics when it comes to making sure the machines keep running if there is a problem. They can barely keep the ice cream machines running.
by hackingonempty | 2025-12-09 00:41:50+00:00
>i just want parity, i.e. the law should allow me to outfit my car with similar (or may be for the old time sake of being a human - with better) sensor and mechanical capabilities and to allow me to for example cut the same way in front of humans and robots like those robots do.

Human drivers kill ~40,000 people a year in the USA. The last thing we need to do is enable humans to drive even more aggressively. Soon it wont make any sense to allow humans to drive at all, just like we currently don't allow them to drive while impaired.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-09 00:41:54+00:00
Thanks for the additional info, I’m interested in learning more technical details about the electrical grid, like conductor size/ampacity but it’s hard to dig up information about it. I work in commercial construction and the highest voltages I ever deal with are 4160V and sometimes 5kV and 15kV, so I know a bit about medium voltage equipment and conductors but I’d like to know more about the utility side.
by kerkeslager | 2025-12-09 00:42:29+00:00
This problem is actually even worse than the article identifies, because broad definitions of what a "risk" is, result in broad exclusions.

The most pernicious of these problems is that women--yes, more than half the earth's population--are considered a high risk group because researchers fear menstrual cycles will affect test results. Until 1993 policy changes, excluding women from trials was the norm. Many trials have not been re-done to include women, and the policies don't include animal trials, so many rat studies, for example, still do not include female rats--a practice which makes later human trials more dangerous for (human) female participates.

[1] Sort of one citation: https://www.aamc.org/news/why-we-know-so-little-about-women-... There's more than this--I wrote a paper about this in college, but I don't have access to jstor now, so I'm not sure I could find the citations any more.
by socketcluster | 2025-12-09 00:42:29+00:00
It's not the same because who controls the algorithms matters here. The algorithms work for some entities and against other entities. They are not neutral at all. They are aligned through shared monetary incentives, so well aligned that they would probably be less aligned if it was a literal conspiracy.

TBH. I'm kind of shocked I still have to explain this. When you get on the wrong side of the algorithms you will understand, you will understand viscerally. And I do mean 'when' not 'if'.

Maybe the algorithms have been working for you so far and you're not feeling them but just give it a few years. Unfortunately, once you understand, you won't have a voice anymore and those still in the game won't have enough empathy to help you.
by DonHopkins | 2025-12-09 00:42:39+00:00
> Two other gentlemen have expressed different opinions on what the space between words should be.

Yeah, that's just weird. Just two, both gentlemen? Is having an opinion about laying out text a chivalrous aristocratic old boy's club? Are there other alternative styles of laying out text that are more "ladylike"? Does this em-dash make me look fat?
by danpalmer | 2025-12-09 00:43:45+00:00
This is a failure of business model and logistics, not a failure of the robotics.

> Fenyo added that Kroger’s decision to locate the Ocado centers outside of cities turned out to be a key flaw.

They over-spent on automating low-volume FCs. You could draw comparisons to Amdahl's law, they optimised the bit that wasn't the issue, the real issue was delivery distances and times.

Ocado has had good success with the robotics approach in the UK, because the UK is very high density compared to a lot of the US. Plus Ocado put a lot of work into creating good delivery routes, whereas it sounds like that wasn't a component of the automation stack that Kroger bought.
by DrewADesign | 2025-12-09 00:43:47+00:00
Aside from having like 9 managers, 8 of whom are totally purposeless in your professional life, then yeah it’s not bad. The benefits are good.

I worked with some pretty talented and dedicated people at IBM. The “hop on a 2am call to put out a fire because they happened to check their email and they owed the person on pager duty a beer” kind of people.

That company was a red tape rats nest, but that’s management’s fault. And you get lazy people or shit departmental culture at various points in nearly every company, but painting a tens-of-thousands strong workforce with that brush is ridiculous.
by jpadkins | 2025-12-09 00:44:02+00:00
Your model of "selling out" is wrong. He did change his values for a holidays or a Winnebago. He has been aligned with a certain set of values for a long time, and has not really changed. He got the position he is in because of those values and other attributes. People give him gifts, do favors, etc not to curry favor with him or attempt to change his rulings. They are saying "thank you for upholding our values in the Supreme Court".

Also, you should be careful of the sources you get info about Justice Thomas, as you are propagating racist coded tropes.
by parliament32 | 2025-12-09 00:44:05+00:00
I'd prefer if Spotify just labelled AI-generated music. They already label all explicit songs with the boxed E so a boxed AI would work well. They'll need to anyway to comply with the EU AI Act: Section 4, if I'm reading it correctly, in force August 2026: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/50/
by morgan814 | 2025-12-09 00:44:18+00:00
> Here is an unpopular opinion, how about Craig Federighi replaced with Scott Forstall.

I'm with you there.

Forstall's skeuomorphism gets a lot of hate. It certainly got pretty weird visually. Especially on OS X where a leather-bound Calendar had to interact with other normal windows. But unlike what Ive and Dye have given us, Forstall's UX remained functional overall. I'm glad skeuomorphism is gone, but much of it was done to help the user. Just maybe a bit misguided.
by reducesuffering | 2025-12-09 00:44:42+00:00
> The China thing is broadly just Nationalism rather than an actual threat at the moment

No the China thing is an imminent invasion of a 20 million person democracy. Should the US not defend the World Order in this case, we'll have completely thrown off world police role and the rest of the scores of irredentist countries around the globe are now free to conquer others as they see fit, and all the chaos that follows.
by lrsaturnino | 2025-12-09 00:45:15+00:00
The cost of building the first version of FB has dropped 90% The cost of building the next FB stays the same

More sophisticated tools mean more refined products.

If an easier and cheaper method for working carbon fiber becomes broadly available, it won't mean you get less money; it means you'll now be cramming carbon fiber in the silverware, in the shoes, in baby strollers, EVERYWHERE. The cost of a carbon fiber bike will drop 90%, but teams will be doing a LOT more.

You could say the cost per line of code has dropped 90%, but the number of lines of code written will 100x.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-09 00:45:54+00:00
Yes, agile is a reaction to spreadsheet driven development and some very dumb ways of tracking progress towards completion and managing work in general.

In my experience, people don't forget they're estimates, they just want to force developers to meet whatever they agreed to that's most convenient for management.

If you want to fight back against that, my experience has been that giving terrible estimates or refusing to give them at all will not result in more autonomy or authority.
by markus_zhang | 2025-12-09 00:46:24+00:00
In the dream customers just walk around and make orders. It’s actually old style I think, but with robots. Yeah it’s a bit like cash and carry, but customers didn’t move into the sections. They just get to browse the samples robots carried to them.

TBH, now that I think about it, the dream was way more vague than what I described in the reply. My brain probably reasoned about the idea subconsciously.
by brookst | 2025-12-09 00:46:45+00:00
Weird headline, totally unsupported by the article.

According to the article, there were several strategic blunders, including trying the model outside of cities where lack of density cut against it. Plus the apparent dismissal any value their 2700 retail locations could provide.

As far as I can tell, Kroger didn’t acknowledge anything except a change in strategy.
by pomponchik | 2025-12-09 00:47:06+00:00
In the Python ecosystem, there are many tools dealing with source code: linters, test coverage collection systems, and many others. Many of them use special comments, and as a rule, the style of these comments is very similar.

But you know what? There is no single standard for such comments. Seriously.

The internal implementation of reading such comments is also different. Someone uses regular expressions, someone uses even more primitive string processing tools, and someone uses full-fledged parsers, including the Python parser or even written from scratch.

This is exactly the problem that this library solves. It describes a simple and intuitive standard for action comments, and also offers a ready-made parser that creators of other tools can use.
by ubertaco | 2025-12-09 00:47:37+00:00
I'm struggling to figure out how you really believe this.

Even if you didn't bother to actually read reporting or see images from the ground of children being shot in their mothers' arms by the IDF and such real horrors perpetrated against civilians who are obviously and visibly non-combatants, it's puzzling how nothing in the hyperbolic, propagandic tone of the alleged quote leads you to question its veracity (or even makes you look twice at taking Russia Today TV as a trustworthy source).
by the_biot | 2025-12-09 00:47:56+00:00
> we are hearing so many terrible stories about travellers being harassed or unwelcome when trying to enter the US

There have been a few stories like that, but that is not a new thing. The US has been horrible to incoming tourists for a long time. You get treated like a criminal just for wanting to visit. I've got a few of stories of my own like that, going back decades.

Chalk this up to revulsion with the US president and his actions, across approximately the rest of the world.
by perilunar | 2025-12-09 00:48:09+00:00
If you think of 'tech' as computers and the internet, then yeah, it's hard to be optimistic. It's no longer the shiny new thing and has become boring. But it's an overly limited view of tech.

I think one of the reasons people are drawn to Elon Musk (despite his political views) is that he's an optimist, with big goals and vision. Self-driving cars, reusable rockets and cheap space travel, cities on Mars, etc. Even if only some of it becomes real it will be amazing. So no, not a pessimist.
by refurb | 2025-12-09 00:48:29+00:00
But you’re stating the obvious? It’s not like physicians don’t know trials are designed this way, and for good reasons.

Frail patients confound results. A drug may work great, but you’d never know because your frail patients die for reasons unrelated to the drug.

Second is obvious as well. Doctors know there are treatment alternatives (with the same drawback to trial design).

And I already touched on your third point. The alternative to excluding frail patients is not being able to tell if the drug does anything. In many cases that means the drug isn’t approved.

Excluding frail patients has its drawbacks, but it has benefits as well. This paper acts like the benefits don’t exist.
by zzo38computer | 2025-12-09 00:48:30+00:00
I might use audio cassettes if I want to record my own audio temporarily (and later copy it to a CD if I decide to keep it; I have done this before), especially if the higher quality of CDs is not needed. For most uses I would probably not use audio cassette tapes; I prefer to use CDs.

(One feature of audio cassettes is that it will stay where it was left off (even if it is removed and used in a different player), although this can be both an advantage and a disadvantage (for one thing, each cassette has only one position). At least, you can easily rewind it back to the beginning. There are other advantages and disadvantages as well)
by wpm | 2025-12-09 00:48:35+00:00
And if you go do the work of tracking down newer HIG versions, they say the exact same thing.

2014:

"Avoid displaying an icon for every menu item. If you include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read."

Newer versions seem to have escaped being properly archived anywhere, so Apple can gaslight us all into believing the HIG has never changed, that we have always been at war with East Asia, that giving a bad icon to every single menu icon has always been good, and that rule was never arbitrarily changed at the whims of a cardboard box designer and his liquid glarse aesthetics.

It works out though because it does give me ammo when people use these guidelines to thoughtlessly defend poor design as if they are axiomatic rules. For 20+ years having lots of icons in a menu was bad...but now...it's good! Why? I dunno! It just is!
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-12-09 00:48:42+00:00
Sounds like the old general store model, you didn’t browse yourself, the shop keep would bring out what you wanted, it was always behind the counter. I experienced this in China when I started visiting in 1999/early 2000s, it’s mostly not like that anymore though. You still have department stores where you need to buy things first before touching them, though.
by meatmanek | 2025-12-09 00:48:51+00:00
For me as a Japanese language learner, it works fine so long as the text uses enough kanji. I've tried reading some Japanese-language books meant for kids around age 10, and the sentences that have 20 hiragana in a row can be killer. If a sentence uses both grammar you don't know and vocabulary you don't know, then how the heck are you supposed to figure out where each word begins and ends so you can look things up in a dictionary?

E.g. さっきまでは、心ぼそくてなきだしそうなのを、ひっしにこらえていたリナだったが、いまはまいごにまちがえられたことに、はらをたてていた。

With e.g. まちがえられた you could parse it as 間違えられた or 町が得られた and you can only tell the difference through context and intuition, which a learner of the language might lack. Even being able to recognize は and に as particles, rather than parts of the nearby words, requires context and/or guessing.

Kanji makes it a lot easier to figure out where words begin and end. Nouns are often written entirely in kanji, while adjectives and verbs are usually written with kanji at the beginning and hiragana for the parts that are conjugated (the ends, in both cases). A switch from hiragana to kanji usually means a word boundary, while kanji to hiragana can go either way.
by colonCapitalDee | 2025-12-09 00:48:52+00:00
I don't know why that matters? The city selection and routing is a part of the overall autonomous system. People get to where they need to be with fewer deaths and injuries, and that's what matters. I suppose you could normalize to "useful miles driven" to account for longer, safer routes, but even then the statistics are overwhelmingly clear that Waymo is at least an order of safer than human drivers, so a small tweak like that is barely going to matter.
by saxenaabhi | 2025-12-09 00:48:59+00:00
Not the OP but we use LLMs to build a restaurant pos system with reservations, loyalty, webshop etc. Almost at feature parity with bigwigs like lightspeed/toast.

> I find having a back-end-forth with an agent exhausting, probably because I have to build and discard multiple mental models of the proposed solution, since the approach can vary wildly between prompts

Just right now I had it improve QR payments on POS. This is standard stuff, and I have done it multiple time but i'm happy I didn't have to spend the mental energy to implement it and just had to review the code and test it.

```

Perfect! I've successfully implemented comprehensive network recovery strategies for the OnlinePaymentModal.tsx file. Here's a summary of what was added:

Implemented Network Recovery Strategies 1. Exponential Backoff for Polling (lines 187-191) 2. Network Status Detection (lines 223-246, 248-251) 3. Transaction Timeout Handling (lines 110-119) 4. Retry Logic for Initial Transaction (lines 44-105) 5. AbortController for Request Cancellation (lines 134-139, 216-220) 6. Better Error Messaging (lines 85-102, 193-196) 7. Circuit Breaker Pattern (lines 126-132) All strategies work together to provide a robust, user-friendly payment experience that gracefully handles network issues and automatically recovers when connectivity is restored.

```

> An agent can easily switch between using Newton-Raphson and bisection when asked to refactor unrelated arguments, which a human colleague wouldn't do after a code review.

Can you share what domain your work is in? Is it deeptech. Maybe coding agents right now work better for transactional/ecommerce systems?
by tempest_ | 2025-12-09 00:49:08+00:00
The thing with those guys, as you have rightly pointed out is for all their problems they do get out of the way and filter through traffic (dangerously as you point out)

A single startup with cooler sized robots tottering down the sidewalk is fine. When every single delivery company gets on board then we have a shit load of those things kicking around and in the way. I have the same issues in cities with those scooters that get left all over the place.
by manquer | 2025-12-09 00:49:18+00:00
Yes, but for experienced engineers that is still a huge huge change .

Even 12 months ago simplifying tasks alone was insufficient, you still needed a large group engineers to actually write, review and maintain a typical product for solid startup offering. This came with the associated overhead of hiring and running mid sized teams.

A lot of skilled people (y)our age/experience are forced into doing people management roles because there was no other way to deliver a product that scales(in team and complexity not DAU).

A CTO of mid-stage startup had to be good architect, a decent engineering manager, be deeply involved in product and also effectively communicate with internal and external customers.

Now for startups setting up new you can either defer the engineering manager and people complexity lot latter than you did before. You could have a very senior but small team who can be truly 10x level and be more productive without the overhead of communication, alignment and management that comes with large teams.

----

tldr; Skilled engineers can generate outsized returns to orgs that set them up to be successful(far more than before), I can't say if compensation is reflecting this yet, if not it soon will.
by motoboi | 2025-12-09 00:49:36+00:00
If the car in question were the probably most hot software in town and the user wants to change the photos on their profiles, I'd find it very interesting if they kept the discipline to focus the whole team away from such a low-priority change and into the priority of keeping it the most hot software in town.

Let's keep in mind that OpenAI is a small company (in people terms), and they are fighting toe to toe with Google.

Heck, if they mess up a quarter they are probably dead.