MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by to11mtm | 2026-01-23 01:13:39+00:00
> Can you elaborate on how the communication style changed after this? Like they were more willing to seek clarification/discussion?

More willing to seek clarification and less likely to try to defend choices with 'This is what the scope of work said'. And also more willing to jump in on colleagues and my own PRs to provide feedback.

Which was also an important part of how to frame the communication "I'm not telling them they are doing their jobs wrong, I am telling them how to do it better to make all the stakeholders happier."

> Do you mean that they were dinged if a PR they opened received too many comments?

It was never explicitly said at first, however the communication was inspired by past work experiences where yes, too many comments on a PR or similar review could get held against you for far longer than was productive or even healthy, and yes it was something the whole team had to deal with (i.e. very much a shared experience amongst colleagues.)

In fact I'd argue that the time I've been at shops where people weren't afraid to give feedback has been about 50-50, while also noting that the shops that had a culture shift where giving feedback became OK and safe for all parties, quickly became more productive.

Cause, the other thing to consider, is that people don't necessarily want to risk causing animosity by jumping into a colleague's PR and pointing out a problem, they don't want to be the guy that makes their colleague "look bad". Which is of course unhealthy, but again by re-framing the context of PR feedback for Taylorist robot management, you get better response from their management as far as buy in.
by Twisol | 2026-01-23 01:13:51+00:00
Setting your incredulity aside, I'm curious why you think using a debit card would be so shocking. I effectively don't use a credit card at all: I use a debit card (or an equivalent Apple Pay representation thereof) exclusively. From my perspective, if I want something and I have the money, I'll pay for it. If I want something and I don't have the money, I won't pay for it. I don't often want things outside my budget (and I am not well-off, as a grad student), so I don't often feel any pressure to amortize the purchase over time with a credit card. And I prefer that state of affairs, because I don't want to get in the habit of using someone else's money if I can't afford to pay them back.

This isn't a value judgment on people who do use credit cards. There are plenty of reasons why using a credit card by default would be appropriate, and I'm not shocked to hear of someone who does so. But I am curious where your shock comes from, so I shared my story as a data point.
by eszed | 2026-01-23 01:15:05+00:00
Ask for novocain around your external sphincter - there's a high likelihood that the doctors won't think of it, because they're used to doing the procedure on sedated patients - unless, you know, you're otherwise prepared for that experience. That'll take care of ~75% of the discomfort. I otherwise endorse everything you say - it's a fascinating procedure to watch while awake!
by schopra909 | 2026-01-23 01:15:26+00:00
T5 Encoder is ~5B parameters so back of the envelope would be ~10GB of VRAM (it's in bfloat16). So, for 360p should take ~15 GB RAM (+/- a few GB based on the duration of video generated).

We can update the code over the next day or two to provide the option for delete VAE after the text encoding is computed (to save on RAM). And then report back the GB consumed for 360p, 720p 2-5 seconds on GitHub so there are more accurate numbers.

Beyond the 10 GB from the T5, there's just a lot of VRAM taken up by the context window of 720p video (even though the model itself is 2B parameters).
by d1l | 2026-01-23 01:16:30+00:00
I’d imagine there’s an extremely long tail of features and quirks that will take time to iron out even after SQL compatibility is achieved. Looks like it’s still missing some important features like savepoints (!!!), windows and attach database.

I’d be more excited and imagine it would be more marketable if it focused instead on being simply an embedded sql db that allowed multiple writers (for example), or some other use case where SQLite falls short. DuckDB is an example- SQLite but for olap.
by baby | 2026-01-23 01:16:34+00:00
I don't think Kamala or Biden collapse was due to what you're talking about at all. Dems are always running on centrist/right ideas as far as we've seen. On the contrary it's because they prevented real left ideas (Sanders) from running that they lost trust in their camp. They're about to repeat this next elections with Buttigieg or Newsom
by 0xbadcafebee | 2026-01-23 01:17:27+00:00
The incentive for sending in patches was that you needed to fix a bug in software you were using for your own use case, so you might as well send the authors the patch, and they'd keep maintaining it all for you. But if you can vibe-code your own solution, you don't need to use somebody else's software, so the patch doesn't get made, much less submitted.

The other thing is, LLMs tend to generate terrible code that pisses off open-source maintainers. So I'm not sure even LLM-made patches will make it into open source much.

This might be the death of traditional open source. Vibe-coded-only open source may be the next generation. Which I'm fine with, as long as we can start regulating software, so that vibe-coded tools are banned for safety/privacy uses unless they follow a software building code.
by nl | 2026-01-23 01:17:58+00:00
> hire a PhD to crack a tough problem for me, I don't need to go back and forth prompting him at a PhD level. I can set him loose on my problem and he'll come back to me with a solution.

In my experience with many PhDs they are just as prone to getting off track or using their pet techniques as LLMs! And many find it very hard to translate their work into everyday language too...
by strken | 2026-01-23 01:18:37+00:00
It seems like the introvert/extrovert split, where few people are near the poles and there's a lot more going on in the middle.

E.g. I might check if someone has weekend plans before asking if I can stay with them. Or, I might ask outright, but specify it's not important, I just want to catch up, and the nearby hotel looks nice.

These seem like important differences even though they're both in the middle of ask and guess.
by MrDunham | 2026-01-23 01:18:56+00:00
Well... crap.

Capital One's credit card system is BY FAR the worst of any I use... mainly because they report credit spend to your personal SSN/credit report.

I have credit cards with Capital One, Chase, Amex, Brex, and Ramp (for a number of different companies to help mitigate banking risk).

With reporting to my personal score, the ~$25k per month that we put on the Cap One card (and fully pay off) gets reported on MY PERSONAL score, showing a total credit utilization of as much as 40%+.

TL;DR? My credit score can swing a FULL 100 points month to month due purely on timing of Capital One credit usage and I'm not excited to potentially have Brex cards reporting on my personal credit reports now, too
by futuraperdita | 2026-01-23 01:18:59+00:00
But the thing is that they really aren't rigorous economic studies. They're a sort of UX research-like sociological study with some statistics, but don't actually approach the topic with any sort of econometric modeling or give more than loose correlations to past economic data. So it does appear performative: it's "pop science" using a quantitative veneer to push a marketing message to business leaders in a way that looks well-optimised mathematically.

Note the papers cited are nearly all ones about AI use, and align more closely with management case studies vs. economics.
by vunderba | 2026-01-23 01:19:12+00:00
Lol, you read my mind. I’ve been wanting a generic-looking, wood-grained “tablet display” covered with a dozen PHYSICAL faders, sliders, and knobs that you can leave permanently hooked up to a DAW that interfaces with virtual synths for over a decade now!

When you switch to a different VST, the hardware’s display would dynamically update all the text around each dial and button to match the corresponding virtual control.

Slightly related, there was a programmable guitar pedal based on the Pi Zero called the Pedal-Pi a little while back that might interest you:

https://www.electrosmash.com/pedal-pi
by mothballed | 2026-01-23 01:19:26+00:00
36 people dead is a rounding error compared to mortality from people on the streets due to lack of access to housing. Every time I bring up this topic, someone trots out the Ghost Ship like a broken record, ignoring what I said about the mortality rate of people on the streets because shit rolls downhill when people higher up the socio-economic pyramid go the next rung down in available housing. Bastiat has an excellent writing on this fallacious logic you use, titled "That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen."

Not having housing didn't work out great for 700+ dead homeless people per year that are estimated to die of hypothermia.

The code inspectors have blood in their hands. You may be morally or ethically against bypassing the codes, but bypassing it can save lives.

Black market housing is done for a reason, a very good one, and one that saves lives. Fortunately where I live, I built a house without any inspections whatsoever, so none of the code psychopaths were even around to make their absurd case about the ghost ship, and that is the only reason why I was even able to afford to own a house.
by rekabis | 2026-01-23 01:20:10+00:00
Oh, ggoooooodddd I got f**king lucky. 4×4Tb Samsung 990 Pro for a RAID-10 array, $399.97 CAD each on Amazon this last fall. It now looks to be out of stock at almost $800 CAD apiece. And I wouldn’t doubt that it’ll double again before summer.

Nuts. Absolute insanity. Can’t wait for this bubble to pop.
by kennywinker | 2026-01-23 01:20:20+00:00
I hate it.

A pedal you can define with code? Kinda cool, definitely already exists, but kinda cool.

A pedal where you buy tokens to feed the ai monster to generate code to customize your pedal? Ugh. I want off this ride.

Edit - other hackable pedals:

https://www.electrosmash.com/pedalshield

https://www.op-electronics.com/en/dsp-multieffect/696-diydsp...

https://clevelandmusicco.com/hothouse-diy-digital-signal-pro...
by CaptainNegative | 2026-01-23 01:20:28+00:00
What's a concrete threat model here? If you're sending data to an ssh server, you already need to trust that it's handling your input responsibly. What's the scenario where it's fine that the client doesn't know if the server is using pastebin for backing up session dumps, but it's problematic that the server tells the client that it's not accepting a certain timing obfuscation technique?
by RickS | 2026-01-23 01:20:56+00:00
I've done some of this using the daisy seed. For time based effects like reverb, the memory/hardware constraints can be spicy. Definitely maxed out the seed hardware before achieving the (very long) level of reverb I wanted.

The hardware descriptions here seem on the light side. I'd want to be confident that it can handle intense time based effects.

It's promising that they seem to allow arbitrary write to the device, and only charge for tokens for the people that require the prompt playground.

Looking forward to see where this goes.

As an aside: building an ear-pleasing FDN reverb on an obscure-ish board with intense hardware optimization needs has been one of my favorite barometers for the abilities of new LLM models.
by ocdtrekkie | 2026-01-23 01:21:12+00:00
The current FIPS-approved OpenSSL module was released in 2023. FIPS compliance does not even allow security patches to address issues.

In my opinion, FIPS compliance is bad security practice and I suspect if a government agency called you on not meeting it, the justification of patching to address known vulnerabilities should hold up to scrutiny.
by throwup238 | 2026-01-23 01:23:03+00:00
Single 9 would be 90%, which is roughly what I’m experiencing between CC for Web and the Claude iOS app. About 1 in 10 messages fail because of an unknown error and 1 in 10 CC for web sessions die irrecoverably. It’d probably be worse except for the fact that CC’s bugs in the terminal aren’t show stoppers like they are on web/mobile.

The only way Anthropic has two or three nines is in read only mode, but that’s be like measuring AWS using the console uptime while ignoring the actual control plane.
by amoorthy | 2026-01-23 01:24:46+00:00
Yes I think possible.
1. sales aptitude assessment tools like Objective Management Group (the one I took) help you identify core weaknesses that are critical to understand and work on.
2. Recording your sales calls (assuming you're on the phone) and then asking AI to critique it and coach you, with the above assessment as context, could be very helpful.

If you're disciplined I think the above approach may be a pretty good stand-in for a real coach. Or at least help you evaluate a coach better should you choose to pony up for one later.
by kevinlu1248 | 2026-01-23 01:25:08+00:00
^ these were pretty much the main reasons.

The other one is that constrained decoding only works on CFGs (simpler grammars like JSON schemas) since only these ones can produce automatas which can be used for constrained decoding. Programming languages like Python and C++ aren't CFGs so it doesn't work.

Also constrained decoding generally worsens model quality since the model would be generating off-policy. So RL helps push corrected syntax back on-policy.
by jackconsidine | 2026-01-23 01:26:37+00:00
> Why do I even need to do sales?

> When looking specifically at bootstrapped (self-funded) SaaS startups, this is a valid question. There are many profitable startups in the low-end B2B space ($10-$50/mo) that exclusively rely on marketing. These are the perfect lifestyle businesses that the indiehacking community is dreaming of. But they’re very hard to pull off, and leave a lot of money on the table.

Fellow technical co-founder-turned-salesperson. I'd like to add something here.

In previous businesses I relied on marketing, SEO etc.I thought "they're the gift that keep on giving" whereas sales is effort in value out. Not only is that wrong, but SEO / ads take time. For an early-stage company / product where iteration is key, sales is the fastest way to get signal.

Imagine using web conversions as the driver for iteration. It takes at least a week to kick off some campaign, months to build up, and months to have interpretable data. Plus no one's going to just tell you "no"! With sales, you can send 100 emails and in one night get some real signal. You might even get an inkling of "that's not going to work" or "ok I'm interested". In a compounding feedback loop, that is often the difference between a company that pops off and one that fizzles
by danudey | 2026-01-23 01:26:40+00:00
Gemini hallucinated a method on a rust crate that it was trying to use and then spent ten minutes googling 'method_name v4l2 examples' and so on. That method doesn't exist and has never existed; there was a property on the object that contained the information it wanted, but it just sat there spinning its wheels convinced that this imagined method was the key to its success.

Eventually it gave up and commented out all the code it was trying to make work. Took me less than two minutes to figure out the solution using only my IDE's autocomplete.

It did save me time overall, but it's definitely not the panacea that people seem to think it is and it definitely has hiccups that will derail your productivity if you trust it too much.
by cal_dent | 2026-01-23 01:26:54+00:00
The problem for him and other leaders in the AI ecosystem is that they ran ahead of themselves to overpromise and that has muddied the water from a consumer perspective. That ultimately increases the risk that we throw the baby out with the bathwater as people get sour with it. I have no doubt LLM will be a feature of society going forward, but they have been reckless with the way they've gone about messaging it
by jabwd | 2026-01-23 01:27:47+00:00
Sounds like blaming a tool on a problem it did not cause. Either way, solvable and encryption is important. Badly designed systems and or lack of tooling isn't really an encryption problem.

Anyway, VMs should not have authentication, it makes access sooo much easier. Also drop your IPs while you're at it. Might be useful for debugging later.
by noxs | 2026-01-23 01:27:52+00:00
All names are Asian and mostly Chinese

> Author Bohan Zhang

> Acknowledgements Special thanks to Jon Lee, Sicheng Liu, Chaomin Yu, and Chenglong Hao, who contributed to this post, and to the entire team that helped scale PostgreSQL. We’d also like to thank the Azure PostgreSQL team for their strong partnership.
by asdaqopqkq | 2026-01-23 01:27:54+00:00
As for me, ChatGPT and Claude were able to diagnose and fix health issues that multiple doctors failed to fix. I trust LLMs more than random doctors and blogs.

Cause they are able to search the web deeply, search for up to date info/research and synergize all that. You can have back and fourth for as long as you need.

The issue is that using LLMs properly requires a certain skill that more people lack.
by mattnewton | 2026-01-23 01:28:11+00:00
It’s a joke because they do not see themselves as an organization, they bought a personal account, were banned without explanation and their only communication refers to them as a “disabled organization”.

Anthropic and Google are organizations, and so an “un disabled organization” here is using that absurdly vague language as a way to highlight how bad their error message was. It’s obtuseness to show how obtuse the error message was to them.
by elorant | 2026-01-23 01:28:15+00:00
There’s an abundance of public data on people’s interests (their comments and reactions to posts), which we evaluate with our in-house AI agent to build high-intent contact lists.

That's fishy and depending on the jurisdiction it could also be illegal. I wouldn't want to receive a personalized e-mail from someone who scraped my public comments on some platform. It would seem too fucking intrusive.
by genewitch | 2026-01-23 01:28:21+00:00
I'm curious if anyone has logged the number of thinking tokens over time. My implication was the "thinking/reasoning" modes are a way for LLM providers to put their thumb on the scale for how much the service costs.

they get to see (if not opted-out) your context, idea, source code, etc. and in return you give them $220 and they give you back "out of tokens"
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2026-01-23 01:29:11+00:00
> I’ve been wanting a generic-looking, wood-grained “tablet display” covered with a dozen PHYSICAL faders, sliders, and knobs that you can leave permanently hooked up to a DAW that interfaces with virtual synths for over a decade now!

https://faderfox.de/

Just one of several. These have existed for at least two decades, save for "dynamically update all the text around each dial", which has a variety of complications that I won't go into here.
by netsharc | 2026-01-23 01:29:13+00:00
I wonder if there needs to be an "NDA for feedback"... or at least a "non-disparagement agreement".

Something along the lines of "here's the contract, we give you feedback, you don't make it public [is some sharing ok? e.g. if they want to ask their life coach or similar], if you make it public the penalty is $10000 [no need to be crazy punitive], and if you make it public you agree we can release our notes about you in response."

(Looking forward to the NALs responding why this is terrible.)
by altairprime | 2026-01-23 01:29:29+00:00
I don’t understand the basis for your hostility here to charging more money and making a profit, especially given that Hacker News is founded and run by a venture capital firm whose goal is repeatedly that in hundreds of attempts at once. At minimum, Vimeo should have been raising prices by inflation% per year, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t doing that. Better the platform continue and thrive doing what works than founder uselessly on the zero-price pivot shoals like most startups these days. And there’s a sense of cosmic irony that both Vimeo and Dropout are now run by a very small team rather than a large one. Perhaps Vimeo will learn the lesson of Dropout and switch to the boring but effective 100% paying-customers-only model that other successful businesses use. I’m rooting for them.
by al_borland | 2026-01-23 01:29:31+00:00
Somehow I managed to make it to just last year with only seeing the first Harry Potter movie. I decided this would be a good opportunity to read the books, then watch the movie… something I had never done before. I’m currently part way into the 4th book.

While watching The Prisoner of Azkaban, I finally understood by book readers hated movie adaptations so much. Massive, meaningful, plot lines were completely missing from the movie. Places where the movie deviates from book create issues of believability that didn’t exist in the book.

I’m now excited to read the rest of the books, but less excited for the movies, lol. And here I thought the carrot of the movie at the end would help drive me to finish the books.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-23 01:30:05+00:00
It's not that people are taking things in absolutes. I think everyone agrees that stock price siding so far is a very bad sign.

You specifically made a direct comparison between your employer's and Ubisoft's absolute stock prices. That's what people are calling out, and for good reason. It is fundamentally not possible to compare stock price directly like that. Literally meaningless.

Stock prices as lone numbers are completely arbitrary. If a company feels that the price per unit is too high or too low they can even do merges and splits, ie multiplying the number of shares by an arbitrary value of their choosing.
by tharkun__ | 2026-01-23 01:30:21+00:00
What I find the most "enlightening" and also frightening thing is that I see people that I've worked with for quite some time and who I respected for their knowledge and abilities have started spewing AI nonsense and are switching off their brains.

It's one thing to use AI like you might use a junior dev that does your bidding or rubber duck. It's a whole other ballgame, if you just copy and paste whatever it says as truth.

And regarding that it obviously doesn't apply to small fixes: Oh yes it does! So many times the AI has tried to "cheat" its way out of a situation it's not even funny any longer (compare with yesterday's post about Anthropic's original take home test in which they themselves warn you not to just use AI to solve this as it likes to try and cheat, like just enabling more than one core). It's done this enough times that sometimes I don't trust Claude with an answer I don't fully understand myself well enough yet and dismiss a correct assessment it made as "yet another piece of AI BS".
by Twisol | 2026-01-23 01:30:33+00:00
I have heard this, and it is probably a flaw in my approach to purchases. But is that really justification to ask "who in the world uses debit cards"? I still feel more comfortable not being on the hook to somebody, and the organizations that extend lines of credit don't do so as a prosocial program, certainly. (Just because some people can safely make use of credit doesn't mean everyone can. I know someone who has unfortunately made poor use of their credit card, and I don't necessarily trust myself to avoid a similar fate.)
by _pdp_ | 2026-01-23 01:30:59+00:00
We realised early in 2025 that SQL is just better for 99% of the data retrieval tasks. AS a result of that, we wrote dedicated SQL translation layers for common APIs. The agent writes SQL which gets converted to API calls. There are some basic docs here https://go.cbk.ai/agentic-sql. It works great.
by elevation | 2026-01-23 01:31:15+00:00
I can't wait to be able to run this kind of software locally, on my own buck.

But I've seen orgs bite the bullet in the last 18 months and what they deployed is miles behind what Claude Code can do today. When the "Moore's Law" curve for LLM capability improvements flattens out, it will be a better time to lock into a locally hosted solution.