MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stingraycharles | 2026-01-28 09:39:25+00:00
It’s largely true. I believe Steve Jobs had some talk about this phenomenon; basically, at some point, the scale of an organization means the product people make less of an impact than the sales / finance people, and they slowly take over.

Then over the span of a few decades, what’s left is a shallow organization without real innovation.

Intel and Boeing are good examples of this.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-28 09:41:04+00:00
I can see usefulness if the flow was "the device is unlocked by default, there are no keys/certs on it, and it can be reset to that state (for re-use purpose)"

Then the user can put their own key there (if say corporate policies demand it), but there is no 3rd party that can decide what the device can do.

But having 3rd party (and US one too!) that is root of all trust is a massive problem.
by ZpJuUuNaQ5 | 2026-01-28 09:41:40+00:00
>I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out

I just think it's silly to obsess over words like that. There are many words that take on different meanings in different contexts and can be associated with different events, ideas, products, time periods, etc. Would you feel better if they named it "Polyhedron"?
by soulofmischief | 2026-01-28 09:41:48+00:00
My monorepos have become increasingly multilingual over the years, often due to dependencies, and it's not uncommon to find a make file, cargo.toml, package.json, deno.json, venv + requirements.json, etc. all living in the same root.

Coming from a web background, my usual move is to put all scripts in the package.json, if present. I'd use make for everything, but it's overkill for a lot of stuff and is non-standard in a lot of the domains I work in.
by beng-nl | 2026-01-28 09:42:29+00:00
He's building Eureka Labs[1], an AI-first education company (can't wait to use it). He's both a strong researcher[2] and an unusually gifted technical communicator. His recent videos[3] are excellent educational material.

More broadly though: someone with his track record sharing firsthand observations about agentic coding shouldn't need to justify it by listing current projects. The observations either hold up or they don't.

[1] https://x.com/EurekaLabsAI

[2] PhD in DL, early OpenAI, founding head of AI at Tesla

[3] https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos
by ben_w | 2026-01-28 09:43:11+00:00
Excerpt from link:

For the rest of the news, I am considering subscribing to a magazine that covers important events in Germany, the EU, or the world every few months. This kind of format filters out short-term noise and fear-driven stories.

Elections happen even less frequently than this. If your democracy disintegrates with less than a few months of warning, you were probably invaded and noticed even without the news; At this point, that would probably lead to a civil emergency notification on your phone, and by design that happens even without any apps installed.

As we said in the UK in my childhood, "Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip* paper".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_and_chips
by honzabe | 2026-01-28 09:43:33+00:00
> The story of the United States is one of genocide, racism, imperialism, and oppression of the working class.

I do not think it is. The story of the US contains all those things. And just as the story of the US contains Abu Ghraib, it also contains functioning courts sending Abu Ghraib perpetrators to jail. You can call it the permanent struggle between good and evil. There is no country in the world without evil. But there is a difference between evil being present and evil dominating. When functioning courts are dismantled, the perpetrators rewarded, you are forbidden to even talk about it, and there is no recourse left, it will be different. People who have not lived through a totalitarian regime sometimes miss that distinction. I also grew up in a communist Czechoslovakia, and I did not idolize the US because I was blind to the bad parts. I idolized it because you had evil, but not evil fully controlling the game. Even now, you can still simply move out of the US. Sure, there might be some bureaucratic hurdles, but you can fly away on a plane - your only way out is not to try to crawl under barbed wire and risk getting shot.

I will be honest - when people say something like “it’s all the same, Russia, the US, all are bad”, I think to myself... óóóh, you have no idea what you are talking about. Unfortunately, the current US is going in that direction, so you might find out. Not that I wish that on anyone.
by articulatepang | 2026-01-28 09:43:59+00:00
Three things:

1. From the perspective of shareholders, and for the moment ignoring taxes, buybacks and dividends are exactly economically equivalent. If a dividend happens, you get some cash. If a buyback happens, the value of your shares goes up. Crucially, the amount by which each share's price goes up is equal to what the per-share dividend would have been. It's a useful exercise to work this out and convince yourself that it's true.

2. Now let's stop ignoring taxes. If a dividend happens, you get taxed that year. If the value of your shares goes up, you don't get taxed that year. Instead, you get taxed whenever you sell, which might be later when you retire and are in a lower tax bracket, or after a period of some years when you get a lower capital gains tax rate.

3. Now let's think about the effect of dividends vs buybacks on the allocation of your portfolio as a shareholder. Neither changes the total value of your portfolio -- that was point number 1, plus just plain old conservation of dollars, modulo taxes -- but a dividend increases the proportion of your investment that's in cash, while a buyback keeps it constant. Let's say you auto-invest all dividends in the S&P 500 or equivalent index fund. Then dividends reduce your ownership stake in the company, while buybacks keep it constant.

For these reasons, most investors prefer (or ought to prefer) buybacks: they have the same economic effect as dividends but allow you to defer taxes to whenever is optimal for you. Also, and this is a smaller point, if a company does a dividend then you have to actively do something (that is, buy stock) in order to maintain the same proportion of your portfolio in that company. In other words, if you want 10% of your savings to be in X, and they do a dividend, then you have to take the cash and buy shares of X. The reason this is a smaller point is that at least in theory you can get your brokerage to do this for you automatically.

There are some nuances where point number 1 fails to hold: signaling, bad execution of the buybacks, and principal-agent conflicts. The big example of that final point is executive compensation tied to specific share prices. I'm not an expert in this area so I don't know, off the top of my head, if there's real evidence either way that this effect is very large, but it's one that people will bring up so everyone who thinks about this ought to know about it.
by account42 | 2026-01-28 09:44:56+00:00
> Have you heard the constant blowing of whistles in these videos? Did you know that protesters have organized the mass 3d-printing and distribution of these whistles (https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2025/12/not-just-a-toy-how-wh... ; https://www.startribune.com/whistle-symbol-ice-protest-minne... ; https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2026/01/21/chicagoa...)? Can you imagine how this level of noise interferes with a job that involves verbal communication with both coworkers and civilians?

Not to mention that the point is also to alert illegals of the LEO presence so that they can get away.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-28 09:45:22+00:00
Has anyone in the last 10 years praised Google for anything, ever? They've been engaged in enshittification the entire time. Search is getting worse, Youtube is getting worse, Android is getting worse, Chrome is getting worse. They are indeed a hollow shell of the company that originally established themselves, but now that they have such a wide-ranging monopoly they can freely debase the value of their products to extract as much from customers as they can.
by keybored | 2026-01-28 09:46:04+00:00
> Except if you spend quality time with coding agents you realize that's not actually true.

Agent engineering seems to be (from the outside!) converging on quality lived experience. Compared to Stone Age manual coding it’s less about technical arguments and more about intuition.

Vibes in short.

You can’t explain sex to someone who has not had sex.

Any interaction with tools is partly about intuition. It’s a difference of degree.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-28 09:46:20+00:00
> My monorepos have become increasingly multilingual over the years, often due to dependencies, and it's not uncommon to find a make file, cargo.toml, package.json, deno.json, venv + requirements.json, etc. all living in the same root.

Same!

Usual move used to put everything in Makefile, but after getting traumatized time and time again from ever-growing complexity, I've started to embrace Just (https://github.com/casey/just) which is basically just a simpler Make. I tend to work across teams a lot, and make/just seems easier for people to spot at a glance, than scripts inside of a package.json that mostly frontend/JavaScript/TypeScript people understand to take a look at.

But in the end I think it matters less specifically what you use, as long as you have one entrypoint that collects everything, could be a Makefile, Justfile or package.json, as long as everything gets under the same thing. Could be a .sh for all I care :)
by einr | 2026-01-28 09:46:43+00:00
Nazis were systemic against a religion and disabilities. They made systemic ways of exterminating those deemed "unpure". The concentration camps had gas chambers to kill people. Is this really what is happening in the US?

It is often useful to differentiate between "concentration camps" and "death camps" or "extermination camps". The Nazis had both. Some of their concentration camps were focused on concentrating and detaining people, some of them also systematically killed them -- they are not the same. If you fail to make this distinction, then saying "America has concentration camps" could make it sound like they're running extermination camps.

The US does to my knowledge not yet have those, nor as large-scale application of concentration camps as Germany did, and whether you even want to use the term "concentration camp" rather than something more like "detention facility" is up to you, but the federal government certainly has camps where people detained by ICE are being concentrated. Sometimes they are also subject to human rights abuses and/or die there.

Here's one of these camps, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_East_Montana

Here is a list of people dying under ICE detention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deaths_in_ICE_detentio...
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-28 09:48:23+00:00
Oops, https://bigthink.com/the-well/why-joy-is-stronger-than-happi... is 404ing for me this morning...

I think fencing may well become a spectator sport before maths! (they try, with plexi masks, but I don't think adding faces will help at all: the basic problem is it's a different way of observing and a different way of acting to almost all peoples' experience) Koerner doesn't believe maths is a spectator sport even for professional mathematicians: https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~twk10/Lecture.pdf#page=5

> The first and most important thing is to remember that most mathematicians are lost most of the time during lectures. (If you do not believe me, ask around.) Attending a mathematics lecture is like walking through a thunderstorm at night. Most of the time you are lost, wet and miserable but at rare intervals there is a flash of lightning and the whole countryside is lit up.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-01-28 09:48:36+00:00
What products ?

They lost battle for office software, they can't even exist in chat space, despise trying to make chat that sticks for 2 decades now, they squandered on video chat space and office space too.

IF Alphabet was actually efficient they should own office space, but 365 ate their office productivity and even the utter turd that is MS teams is beating them out on chat.

Even their search gets worse and only places where they actually have progress is AI.
by account42 | 2026-01-28 09:48:57+00:00
> I'm quite aware of the intentionally annoying whistles. You're taking a pretty broad interpretation of "interference." I didn't realize that feds had a protected right to a calm and quiet work environment.

This kind of behavior would not be tolerated any more if it targeted other work environments. Harassment (and that's the most generous interpretation) is not free speech.
by lnsru | 2026-01-28 09:49:11+00:00
I work for a small German company. Some time ago the owner sold it to big bloated company. At the time under the owner the management circle was 6 people, now it’s 17!!!!! And the revenue is lower with bigger headcount, because managers manage and do not work.

I almost cry at work from sadness. So much potential wasted, the company has great market access and still good name. Polishing old products would make this hockey stick revenue growth. But with management explosion everything is being wasted. Meetings about meetings, no product upgrades and total stagnation. While managers fight over parking spots near front door for VIPs.
by fredley | 2026-01-28 09:50:11+00:00
Once you start noticing how often you see content that references e.g. anything that's happening in the US right now (I'm in the UK), you realise how 'news' is everywhere.

If you go on reddit, unless you've curated your subreddits and never touch /all or /popular, it's very heavy with 'news'. The Google app, a left-swipe by default on your Android phone is all 'news'. Twxtter/Bluesky/etc. are full of news. Avoiding news entirely is almost impossible on today's internet.

I have had success with this approach too, but key to all this is being careful about where you go online to minimise exposure. These days I don't use any 'social media' platforms, but I do visit HN and BBC news (both of which are of higher quality than most places, and crucially only have a few stories on a typical day - the rate of new content is low). This way I stay informed without falling down rabbit holes about every twist and turn of every (mostly awful/depressing) thing happening in the World.
by SilverBirch | 2026-01-28 09:50:11+00:00
This is fascinating. Whenever I heard about matrix management it always seemed a bit weird that you have essentially two organisational structures in tension with each other - the function group lead is always going to be in tension with the product managers over how their products are resourced. I guess an obvious failure mode is you end up just stripping on direction out which is what they're doing here. One thing that goes unsaid in these situations is often the decision making for how that's done is quite political.
by 4ggr0 | 2026-01-28 09:50:23+00:00
> It's the Europeans who want us to ship more weapons to Ukraine.

well, you chose the one "good" example, where weapons are actually used for defense against a different Imperialist. what about the money going towards the Palestinian Genocide? what about other wars/invasions/operations, started or backed by Democrats/Bi-Partisan support.

> California is considering a wealth tax

a one-time tax of 5%, bunch of commies!
some decades ago, wealth tax was a high, double-digit number.

even so, do you think a one-time 5% wealth tax is enough to be called very left-wing?
by alias_neo | 2026-01-28 09:53:37+00:00
> Qimonda

Sorry for the tangent, I haven't heard this name in over 15 years, I interviewed with them the summer before the final year of my BEng, and was offered a job in China to allegedly built a real-time voice/video communications system between what they said were their three facilities in beautiful looking part of China I can't remember the name of now.

Looking through my Gmail, it was 2008 they offered my the position; and looking at the Wiki page, I'm glad I didn't take the offer, as it appears it didn't last much longer?
by scotty79 | 2026-01-28 09:53:49+00:00
How is it legal to have a chemical product on the market with not publicly disclosed contents in 2026?

There is no scarcity of the products. Capital, means of production, labor and innovation are all abundant now.

The most valuable thing now is access to customers. We should demand a lot from the business for the privilege of having access to customers. A lot more than we do now.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-28 09:53:56+00:00
I know. I work for a mid sized German company in the auto industry, and when our SW project was going to shit due to mismanagement, what they did to address it was add two new managers to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute meeting, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale.
by anonymous908213 | 2026-01-28 09:54:45+00:00
Youtube and Android particularly are completely garbage and are not the "best" on any technical merits. To the extent they are used, it's solely because people are locked into using them by network effects. If you as a viewer use a technically superior video website, you will have no content to watch. If you as a content creator use a technically superior video website, you will have no viewers to watch your content. Similarly, if you as an OS developer want to make a new phone OS -- tough luck, nobody will produce hardware that is open and accepts anything other than an existing OS, and you can't sell a phone people will buy without modern hardware. This is why monopolies are terrible for humanity, and why Google's ongoing success has absolutely nothing to do with its technical capabilities or complete lack thereof.
by srean | 2026-01-28 09:54:46+00:00
I used to be skeptical about this and would try and find alternative explanations, for example, cognitive biases, coincidences, search requests from another device routed through a common wifi.

However, I have changed my mind through a lengthy process of attrition of possible explanations.

Recently my wife was around her friend who was having a vertigo spell. We talked about it when we met. None of us searched about it. Lo and behold my YouTube feed has videos on how to mitigate vertigo.

It's possible that they transferred information across two phone devices that came in close proximity, the owner of one who has a history of vertigo. But even that is a stretch, why transfer 'vertigo' specifically ?
by sureglymop | 2026-01-28 09:54:46+00:00
Agreed. The shell is great for chaining together atomic operations on plaintext. That is to say, it is great for one liners doing that. The main reason probably isn't how it all operates on plain text but how easy it makes it to start processes, do process substitution, redirections, etc.

As soon as you have state accumulating somewhere, branching or loops it becomes chaotic too quickly.
by flomo | 2026-01-28 09:54:52+00:00
> of those 3000, they are moving 1400 to an engineering position

Interesting. In old companies the only way to climb the ladder (get a raise) was to get into management. And then if they were a bad manager, they might get 'sidemoted' into some position where they could still contribute. Anyway, back in the old days, it was not uncommon to see 'managers' or even 'directors' with no direct reports.
by davidst | 2026-01-28 09:55:52+00:00
I don't have insight into what ultimately transpired at Amazon Go so take the following as speculation on my part.

It is unlikely the tech would be frozen when an acceptable accuracy threshold is reached:

1. There is a strong incentive to reduce operational costs by simplifying the hardware infrastructure and improving the underlying vision tech to maintain acceptable accuracy. You can save money if you can reduce the number and quality of cameras, eliminate additional signal assistance from other inputs (e.g., shelves with load cells), and generally simplify overall system complexity.

2. There is business pressure to add product types and fixtures which almost always result in new customer behaviors. I mentioned coffee in my prior post. Consider what it would mean to add support for open-top produce bins and the challenge of complex customer rummaging. It would take a lot of high-quality annotated data and probably some entirely new algorithms, as well.

Both of those require maintaining a well-staffed annotation team working continuously for an extended time. And those were just the first two things that come to mind. There are likely more reasons that aren't immediately apparent.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2026-01-28 09:57:11+00:00
Conspiracy to impede and obstruct criminal behaviour is not a crime, it's legitimate self-defence.

The fact that federal agents are breaking the law doesn't change that. At all.

In spite of what you've been told federal LEO are bound by the law.

Executing random bystanders on a whim, operating without visible ID, failing to allow congressional oversight of facilities, failing to give those captured access to a lawyer - among many, many others - all put this operation far outside of any reasonable claim to proportionality or legality.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-28 09:57:26+00:00
mathsplaining: A rebuttal from a place of experience allows for the 2nd rebuttal (are re-buttals implicitly bi-assed?) to use a well-known dyadic sales technique, feel-felt-found:

(objection X having been asserted based on experience)
- I know you feel X
- I felt X, too
- But what I found was, Y...
(which makes an argument from a[n artificially?]
shared PoV, inviting the X-believer to "follow"
the Y-asserter's signposted putative path to Y)

[exercise: explicate this trope in terms of "same same but diffelent"]

d(Y,T) < d(X,T), where T is the truth
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-28 09:57:31+00:00
Thanks for sharing. You know what's ironic about Qimonda? China bought their IP after they went under, and used it to build two domestic DRAM companies that are set to become giants.

Funny how China has the vision to use, finance and monetize where western governments keep failing.

That's what hurts the most to see. Europe says the want a strong domestic electronics industry, but with the exception of ASML, they really don't do nearly enough to grow it or even to support it.
by crnkofe | 2026-01-28 09:57:39+00:00
I also joined the club recently. Global newsfeeds from social media have become infested with AI slop, near constant Trump/ICE BS spam in addition to existing clickbait vids and ads. News media front pages are essentially Trump outlets and this guy puts out an insane amount of BS thrash that only ennervates and creates discord. There's not that much happening so blank pages are just filled with something to make it look like news. I'm no longer informed from all of this. It just feels like being a living spam folder.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-28 09:57:50+00:00
Presumably because people expect to be promoted periodically, so they pile up on the high end until the symptom gets corrected all at once. A realistic (but quite controversial) solution might be to emulate other companies that have done away with most of the promotion hierarchy. Different roles but more or less standardized pay across all employees and an understanding that promotions aren't a thing. Rather than climbing a ladder you're there to get shit done.
by pjmlp | 2026-01-28 09:58:35+00:00
Fast forward to 2026 and after 15 years, the browser vendors have not yet provided anything remotely similar to RenderDoc, only SpectorJS survives, barely usable.

Also this game remains the exception, Infinity Blade was released in 2010 to show what iPhone could do with OpenGL ES 3.0, the base for WebGL 2.0, and yet most Web games are basically Flash like remakes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_Blade

"Infinity Blade: iPhone Trailer", 15 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDvPIhCd8N4