MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by chii | 2025-12-09 04:00:20+00:00
You are looking from the perspective of a user of the software - sure, these have enough feature parity to "compete".

But that's the butt end of the equation. The real issue is enterprise administration. A user never thinks about this problem, because they do not ever encounter it as a problem in their private lives.

How does permission work? How does a new hire get an account? How does account/permission revoking work? How does audit work? And that's just the surface.

Needs for large enterprises, where you cannot just have John from HR make a new account for the new hire, are often not met by the opensource world.
by raldi | 2025-12-09 04:00:24+00:00
Food and clothes are much cheaper. People used to have to walk or hitchhike a lot more. People died younger, or were trapped with abusive spouses and/or parents. Crime was high. There was little economic mobility. It really sucked if you weren’t a straight white man. Houses had one bathroom. Power went out regularly. Travel was rare and expensive; people rarely flew anywhere. There was limited entertainment or opportunities to learn about the world.
by horsepatties | 2025-12-09 04:01:09+00:00
I hope that this leads to more efficient models. And it’s intuitive- it seems as though you could find the essence of a good model and a model reduced to that essence would be more efficient. But, this is theoretical. I can also theorize flying cars- many have, it seems doable and achievable, but yet I see no flying cars on my way to work.
by gorgoiler | 2025-12-09 04:02:40+00:00
”The Cooper Hewitt is a design museum and, like all design museums, it basically has all the same things that every other design museum has.”

Hah, touché.

Cooper Hewitt also happens to be inside Andrew Carnegie’s 19th century mansion on the Upper East Side, E 91st St. It reopens later this week with new exhibitions alongside the amazing house itself, the first floor of which is free entry while installation works are ongoing.

Hearst Castle but with an OG blue-candy iMac in it looking over the Jackie O reservoir instead of the Pacific.
by derektank | 2025-12-09 04:03:40+00:00
I think you’re right that liability concerns are probably what motivated companies to design for sidewalks instead of roads. That being said, I think it’s very unlikely that a robot weighing 100 lbs and moving 15 mph is going to kill anyone. Could certainly cause some property damage or break a bone, but is that worse than blocking a disabled person on a sidewalk or pushing deliveries into full cars?
by shaka-bear-tree | 2025-12-09 04:03:50+00:00
Funny the original post doesn’t mention AI replacing the coding part of his job.

There seems to be a running theme of “okay but what about” in every discussion that involves AI replacing jobs. Meanwhile a little time goes by and “poof” AI is handling it.

I want to be be optimistic. But it’s hard to ignore what I’m doing and seeing. As far as I can tell, we haven’t hit serious unemployment yet because of momentum and slow adoption.

I’m not replying to argue, I hope you are right. But I look around and can’t shake the feeling of Wile E. Coyote hanging in midair waiting for gravity to kick in.
by nurettin | 2025-12-09 04:04:20+00:00
> nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble

Sounds like index futures. I understand wanting to buy fresh corn in one year at a constant price, so you get corn contracts for december 2016 and it gets delivered at that price when the contract expires. You know the cost beforehand and you plan for it.

Index futures? They just dump the equivalent dollar amount to your account when it expires. Who benefited? What happened? No physical commodity got exchanged. You've played with numbers, paid commissions, probably some spread and had around 6x leverage. Pretty much checks every box for gambling.
by tom_ | 2025-12-09 04:05:21+00:00
Are CDs more fragile? All of mine still seemed to work last I checked. I gave up on tapes years ago, because they'd always fuck up one way or the other. The sound quality was also annoyingly bad, and track search was a faff.

(I think I prefer measles to tapes. Neither killed me, but at least nobody reminisces fondly about that time they had measles!)
by snuxoll | 2025-12-09 04:06:21+00:00
A 5% increase is still a sizable when you consider the number of licenses that even an SMB may have. I don't deal with our MS licensing directly at $DAYJOB, but we've got something like 1300+ employees most (all?) of whom have M365 E5 licenses, that adds up to (roughly) an extra $4K/mo or $48K/yr when it comes time to renew our annual licensing.

Is it going to break the bank and send us into a financial death spiral? Absolutely not. But, you get enough companies deciding to jack up pricing at around the same time and it comes out to a significant increase in our lights-on budget - death by a million cuts hurts just as much as Broadcom raking us over the coals with VMWare license increases.
by trollbridge | 2025-12-09 04:06:23+00:00
Astute observation. From where I sit, the market (at least for business software; I am not very familiar with the consumer market) seems to be wide open, and businesses in the 5 - 200 employee range seem to be particularly underserved.

The marketplace for software for single-owner shops or 1-5 employee size places does seem to be quite strong, and then there's enterprise software, but small business seems to have a software marketplace that is atrociously bad. Here is the typical thing a prospective customer asks me to fix for them:

- They are using some piece of software that is essential to their business. - There really isn't much good competition for that software, and it would be a large cost to convert to another platform that also has all the same downsides below. - The software vendor used to be great, but seems to have been sold several times. - The vendor has recently switched to a subscription-only model and keeps on raising subscription prices in the 12% or so range every year, and the cost of this has started to become noticeable in their budget. - They were accustomed to software being a capital investment with a modest ongoing cost for support, but now it's becoming just an expense. - Quality has taken a nosedive and in particular new features are buggy. Promised integrations seem quite lacking and new features/integrations feel bolted on. - Support is difficult to get ahold of, and the formerly good telephone support then got replaced by being asked to open tickets/emails and now has been replaced by an AI chatbot frontend before they can even open a ticket. Most issues go unresolved.

There are literally millions of software packages in existence, and the bulk of them by numbers are niche products used by small businesses. (Think of a software package which solely exists to help you write custom enhancements for another software package which is used by a specific sector of the furniture-manufacturing business, to get an example.) The quality of this sector is not improving.

This is a field that is absolutely ripe for improvement. If the cost of building software really were dropping 90%, this would be a very easy field to move into and simply start offering for $6,000 a year the product that your competition is charging $12,000 a year for, for an inferior product. Before you bring up things like vendor lock-in or the pain of migration... why can't you write software to solve those problems, too? After all, the cost of writing a migration tool should be 90% cheaper now, too, right?
by TacticalCoder | 2025-12-09 04:07:44+00:00
> I have never experience reel-to-reel. That is the format I would like to get into.

I remember some people, back in the late 80s (?), using VHS Hi-Fi as some kind of a poor man's reel-to-reel. Audio quality was leaps and bounds above the compact cassette from TFA.
Tell HN: Do not do business with Kraken I've had a support case open for 15 days
by colechristensen | 2025-12-09 04:07:52+00:00
After 11 years my MtGox bankruptcy refund came through which is a small but nontrivial amount of money. My attempt to withdraw was put on hold and the support case has been open for 15 days, despite several attempts they have not responded to an email thread in 5 days and their other support method is an AI chat bot who helpfully closes the session repeatedly because I already have an email case open. (next step: SEC, attorney general, lawyer) A stock brokerage or bank pulling this would be absolutely stomped by regulators.
by trollbridge | 2025-12-09 04:07:56+00:00
CRUD apps are ridiculously simple and have been in existence my entire life. Yet it is surprisingly difficult to make a basic CRUD and host it somewhere. The bulk of useful but simple business apps are just a CRUD with a tiny bit of customisation and integration around them.

It is true that LLMs make it easier to build these kind of things without having to become a competent programmer first.
by Mathnerd314 | 2025-12-09 04:08:06+00:00
But in contrast, web communities run on moderation, i.e. a sort of intolerance of bad content. The lesson is that technical issues and social issues really don't mix. You can't conclude anything from one versus the other. Case in point, cryptocurrency was supposed to be the anarchist's dream, but now it's being adopted by some central banks.
by abustamam | 2025-12-09 04:08:51+00:00
I think icons aren't a bad idea, if they are visually distinct and make sense. For the longest time, the icon for "link" and "attachment" in Gmail looked almost identical.

They changed it recently for attachment to look like a paperclip on a document which is much better. But before, I almost always clicked on one when I wanted the other (or hovered my mouse over it for longer than I'd care to admit).
by owenversteeg | 2025-12-09 04:09:54+00:00
I’ve driven a lot of different cars around the world and nearly all check engine lights are orange. Almost all the Google image search results are orange. To be sure I checked the most popular ICE car models worldwide: Toyota Corolla, Toyota Rav4, Ford F-series, Honda CR-V, Chevrolet Silverado. All of those use orange. In fact, the only red CEL that I’ve ever seen is on Minis and BMWs - not the actual physical indicator (which is orange!) but the mini-LED screen warnings.
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-09 04:11:17+00:00
> Israel came to Palestine, not the other way around.

Palestine wasn't ever an independent state. Israel was formed by the division of a British Mandate.

> If someone took over your home, and offered even 90% of it to you, and invader keeps 10%, you would reject it.

Jews immigrated often by purchasing land in the region from landowners(often absentee) and then sometimes evicting the tenants, so it's a bit more complex. Characterizing it as a foreign invasion is somewhat misleading, Palestinians also rejected the UN partition plan and started a war to try and remove all the Jews as well, with many Jews subsequently being driven from their homes throughout the middle east, so it's not like they have any other homes to go back to either. Being on the losing side of a war also tends to result in people losing land/homes in any case, I have grandparents that lost their home due to living in country that was on the losing side of a war as well and they made no attempts to get their homes/land back at all, sometimes you just have to move on.

> Hopefully we can get rid of the evil parts of both governments, and make a new single state for everyone.

This is basically unworkable from both sides for various reasons. Israel will essentially never give up their Jewish majority by giving citizenship to all Palestinians, especially given the security threats to Jews historically. That's one reason a two state solution is widely considered the only viable option.

> All peace interested parties can be a part of the new government, ridding Netanyahu/Hamas types from the process.

This seems pretty unlikely to ever work in practice, at least not without massive changes in opinions amongst both Palestinians and Israelis.

> Also by any chance if you have a response to the Netanyahu quote I gave.

What about it? I'm not much of a fan of Netanyahu in general for various reasons, but Israel is a democracy so he can be replaced.
by crabmusket | 2025-12-09 04:12:03+00:00
I think there's a serious related issue which is that icon packs (font awesome, feather, material icons, whatever you prefer) encourage you to just pick the "closest" icon for a given menu item, rather than an icon that is actually what you want.

At work we do sometimes design custom icons for specific things, but that's very rare and relatively costly. Most developers on our team don't have that capability, and we are left trawling through Google's admittedly-large icon library to find something that seems plausible.
by abixb | 2025-12-09 04:12:12+00:00
>" One interpretation is that the extra $10 billion from the price increases will offset some of the red ink Microsoft is bleeding because of the investments they’re making in datacenter capacity, hardware, and software needed to make Copilot useful"

Saying the quiet part out loud. Looks like O365 folks will have to subsidize MSFT's losses in giving Azure compute away for its LLM customers. Not great.
by reel2reel | 2025-12-09 04:13:09+00:00
My family had a reel-to-reel player, which was definitely not compact. My dad would record tapes from Vietnam and send over the recordings so that our family could hear him. I was afraid to touch it growing up. Instead, I played records on our turntable, and 8-tracks tapes in our car and a couple of 8-track players we had. As a teenager, I played cassettes, which was awesome. Vinyl sounded great and had the best overall experience for things like Christmas records, but cassettes had a warm feel and you could listen to them in your car, a friend’s car, on a boombox, etc. and if you had two tape decks, you could make mix tapes and share them! Or you could just copy a tape for a friend. Those were the days.
by nazgul17 | 2025-12-09 04:13:51+00:00
That's not an interesting difference, from my point of view. The box m black box we all use is non deterministic, period. Doesn't matter where on the inside the system stops being deterministic: if I hit the black box twice, I get two different replies. And that doesn't even matter, which you also said.

The more important property is that, unlike compilers, type checkers, linters, verifiers and tests, the output is unreliable. It comes with no guarantees.

One could be pedantic and argue that bugs affect all of the above. Or that cosmic rays make everything unreliable. Or that people are non deterministic. All true, but the rate of failure, measured in orders of magnitude, is vastly different.
by malux85 | 2025-12-09 04:14:36+00:00
But the problem is the tight coupling of prompts to the models. The half-life of prompt value is short because the frequency of new models is high, how do you defend a moat that can half (or worse) any day a new model comes out?

You might get an 80% “good enough” prompt easily but then all the differentiation (moat) is in that 20% but that 20% is tied to the model idiosyncrasies, making the moat fragile and volatile.
by thekid314 | 2025-12-09 04:14:38+00:00
I’m curious to know which you believe is overvalued. Is it the model creators, who are essentially producing a commoditized product that will never generate the current inflated values? Or is it the individuals who build useful tools that are only incrementally better than previous solutions? Or is it the companies that are attempting to develop groundbreaking products, but they are perpetually six months to two years away from delivery?
by shiroiuma | 2025-12-09 04:15:13+00:00
They are right, but they're too slow in realizing this. I of course switched to Linux decades ago, but for ages now, I've constantly heard people swearing "this is the last straw Microsoft! I'm going to switch to Linux!" because of some transgression and then they never do.

A few people might convert, but tightening the screws on the rest of them will by far more than make up for the ones they lose. MS needs to make the most of this and raise prices enormously, 10-100 times what they are now. Even if 5% of users defect, a 10x price increase will still mean a 9.5x increase in profits.

And they might as well bake some more ads and other malware into Windows and Office too, while they're at it, to increase profits even more. They're missing out on a lot of profit by not putting more ads into their corporate products especially. Sure, people will complain, but so what? The users don't make the purchasing decisions at companies anyway, so who cares about pissing them off?
by yumaikas | 2025-12-09 04:15:24+00:00
Depends on what you mean by power, I suppose. Nova is Turing complete, so there's that.

One big difference between Nova and -most- logic languages is that "forgetting" things is a normal part of operation. Nova is also forward chaining, rather than backtracking.

The end result ends up with Nova programs being something closer to an interpreter in a lot of cases, and writing inputs for said interpreter.

So, Nova doesn't do as much on your behalf as Prolog does, deliberately trying to be easier to reason about, and to have more predictable performance characteristics.
by loandbehold | 2025-12-09 04:17:20+00:00
The reason is because we are a Microsoft shop and our company doesn't have Claude account. I'm using my personal Claude Max account. My manager does know that I use Claude Code and I requested the person responsible for AI tooling in our company to use Claude Code but he just said that management already decided to go with GitHub copilot. He thinks that using Claude model in Copilot is same as using Claude Code. Another issue is that we are a Microsoft shop and I use Claude Code through WSL but I'm the only person on our team with Linux skills.
by schmichael | 2025-12-09 04:17:52+00:00
Productivity gains are more likely to be used to increase margins (profits and therefore value to shareholders) then it is to reduce work hours.

At least since the Industrial Revolution, and probably before, the only advance that has led to shorter work weeks is unions and worker protections. Not technology.

Technology may create more surplus (food, goods, etc) but there’s no guarantee what form that surplus will reach workers as, if it does at all.
by didgetmaster | 2025-12-09 04:18:55+00:00
This guy lost me when he started talking about diversity issues instead of tech. I couldn't care less about the race, gender, or sexual orientation of the person(s) who created the hardware or software that I use. Does it work? Is it easy to understand and use? These are the things I am interested in.

I am reminded of an early cartoon of a dog sitting at a computer saying 'On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog!'
by jrowen | 2025-12-09 04:19:49+00:00
> If we assume that large language models are being used to generate these texts and if those models are able to faithfully and believably parody our long-standing assumptions of what those texts are expected to sound like then does it call in to question the entire practice of intellectualizing an artist's work in their unique voice?

I would say no. Authenticity is always in question. If the artist pasted LLM output wholesale, that was the choice they made to represent their work. Maybe they felt they expressed themselves in the prompt. What if they used a thesaurus, or a ghostwriter, or plagiarized something, or overheard someone say something they liked? It's up to the viewer to decide whether they find it meaningful or resonant.

That's the beauty of art. Intent matters, in that it can affect the interpretation, but ultimately any interpretation is valid.
by __mharrison__ | 2025-12-09 04:20:34+00:00
I'm teaching a course in how to do this to one of my clients this week.

Also, I used this same process to address a bug that is many years old in a very popular library this week. Admittedly, the first solution was a little wordy and required some back and forth, but I was able to get to a clean tested solution with little pain.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-12-09 04:22:04+00:00
I'm optimistic.

Banks used to have rooms full of bank clerks who manually did double-entry bookkeeping for all the bank's transactions. For most people, this was a very boring job, and it made bank transactions slow and expensive. In the 50's and 60's we replaced all these people with computers. An entire career of "bank clerk" vanished, and it was a net good for humanity. The cost of bank transactions came down (by a lot!), banks became more responsive and served their customers better. And the people who had to do double-entry bookkeeping all day long got to do other, probably more interesting, jobs.

There are a ton of current careers that are just email + meetings + powerpoint + spreadsheet that can go the same way. They're boring jobs (for most people doing them) and having humans do them makes administration slow and expensive. Automating them will be a net good for humanity. Imagine if "this meeting could have been an email" actually moves to "this meeting never happened at all because the person making the decision just told the LLM and it did it".

You are right that the danger is that most of the benefits of this automation will accrue to capital, but this didn't happen with the bank clerk automation - bank customers accrued a lot of the benefits too. I suspect the same will be true with this automation - if we can create and scale organisations easier and cheaper without employing all the admin staff that we currently do, then maybe we create more agile, responsive, organisations that serve their customers better.
by brillcleaner | 2025-12-09 04:22:28+00:00
My first thought was that this was somehow distilling universal knowledge. Platonic ideals. Truth. Beauty. Then I realized- this was basically just saying that given some “common sense”, the learning essence of a model is the most important piece, and a lot of learned data is garbage and doesn’t help with many tasks. That’s not some ultimate truth, that’s just optimization. It’s still a faulty LLM, just more efficient for some tasks.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-12-09 04:22:49+00:00
> Isn't the logical endpoint of this equivalent to printing out a Stackoverflow answer and manually typing it into your computer instead of copy-and-pasting?

Not in my case (I never used SO like that, anyway). I use it almost exactly like SO, except much more quickly and interactively (and without the inference that I’m “lazy,” or “stupid,” for not already knowing the answer).

I have found that ChatGPT gives me better code than Claude (I write Swift); even learning my coding and documentation style.

I still need to review all the code it gives me, and I have yet to use it verbatim, but it’s getting close.

The most valuable thing, is I get an error, and I can ask it “Here’s the symptoms and the code. What do you think is going on?”. It usually gives me a good starting point.

I could definitely figure it out on my own, but it might take half an hour. ChatGPT will give me a solid lead in about half a minute.