MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by simianwords | 2026-02-26 23:00:46+00:00
> Thanks to LLMs, each worker can do twice the work they could before. Naturally we are firing half the company because ... business is good and ... too much productivity is bad

this is an incorrect take. The company needs a certain amount of productivity at each point.

If not, how would you explain that they had only 10,000 employees and not 20,000? They could still remain profitable.

LLM's increased productivity and each person could do approximately 20% more work so it follows that they need fewer people. If not, they should have had 12,000 to begin with.
by mmooss | 2026-02-26 23:00:51+00:00
> the return of history

The idea that somehow the current actions are 'real' history and what people were doing before is fake just feeds the claim of inevitabiility, a basic psyops maneuver - you can't win; our victory is inevitable.

People have made history for centuries of Enlightenment - the whole idea is that we can control our fates as individuals through reason and compassion (humanism), and we have done it. We have transformed the world. The only problem is people giving up - despite the incredible success of this idea over centuries - and accepting that they can't control their fate. Certainly MAGA-ish conservatives believe they can make history.
by calgoo | 2026-02-26 23:00:56+00:00
I see it as the opposite, its a lousy excuse of a message trying to get people not to think that they are giving in. Instead they list the horrible uses that they are already helping the government with. Dont worry, we only help murder people in other countries not the US. They also keep calling it the "Department of War" which means that this message is not for "us", its them begging publicly to Hegseth.
by pizzly | 2026-02-26 23:02:12+00:00
I never considered that. When I change LLM models its usually due to two reasons.

1. the current AI model is producing answers that do not met my needs so I try multiple others at the same time and the one that produces the best answer I stick with until I have this problem again.

2. there is a new model released and advertises a new capability that I want to try out.

I can imagine that for many people the answer that ChatGPT generates is adequate enough that they never need to try another model even if better answers exists from another model. For people with less complex needs this is a very real stickiness. Why make the effort to try something new if the answer is adequate.

In this case, OpenAI would only f*k up if they change the pricing significantly, add intrusive ads or their answers become significantly worse.
by michaelt | 2026-02-26 23:02:46+00:00
> I always wonder having worked in a lot of startups with 10-50ppl, what on earth a business does with 10000.

If a small business needs to send a replacement widget to a customer in a foreign country, they label it "$0 value" (as it's a free replacement part) and mail it with a swipe of a corporate credit card.

If a large business needs to do the same thing, the sender asks the mail room, giving them a budget code and delivery address; the mail room contacts the widget designer for a HTS code, size and weight; then contacts their shipping broker for a quote; then contacts the finance department to raise a purchase order; the finance department contacts the budget code owner for spend approval; then raises a purchase order; then forwards it to the sender who forwards it to the post room who forwards it to the shipping broker who arrange a collection. Later the shipping broker will send the post room an invoice against the purchase order, which they'll send on to finance, who'll query the sender who'll approve paying the invoice.

> Even if the AI piece isn't really true - smaller flatter teams will move faster anyway.

Quite possibly - but you have to remember to remove the bureaucracy, not just remove the people who operate the bureaucracy. If you try to do the large business process with the small business team, it'll be even slower.
by ildar | 2026-02-26 23:02:59+00:00
Follow-up to my earlier comment: the agent-to-agent trust problem is arguably bigger than the host security problem.

Moltbook has 101K+ registered agents. It was hacked within days of launch (Wiz found 1.5M exposed API keys). When agents interact with each other - on Moltbook, in multi-agent pipelines, through shared APIs - there's zero verification of security posture.

It's like the web before TLS. No certificates, no verification, hope for the best.

We're working on a trust protocol for ClawMoat: agents publish signed attestations of their security posture (permission tier, forbidden zones, audit status, skill integrity). Other agents verify before sharing data.

Think of it as mTLS for the agent economy. Blog post with the full design: https://clawmoat.com/blog/agent-trust-protocol.html
by IG_Semmelweiss | 2026-02-26 23:03:04+00:00
Yes, but also remember where they came from.

They don't have any brand poison, unlike nearly everyone else competing with them. Some serious negative equity in tha group, be it GOOG, Grok , META, OpenAI, M$FT, deepseek, etc.

Claude was just being the little bot that could, and until now, flying under the radar
by scottyah | 2026-02-26 23:03:09+00:00
Everyone just says F the permits and becomes a youtube academy engineer. Then you start seeing all the issues that the permit system was designed to fix.

Half my house was built less-than-safely by the previous owner because getting the permits for the structures would be too expensive, time-consuming, and maybe not even possible.

The increased costs (time and money) of permits really changes the risk-reward.
A Phase-Ordered Pre-Geometric Projection Framework (Physics)
by RichOnFire | 2026-02-26 23:03:18+00:00
I’m an engineering leader in the tech industry, but my primary research focus outside of work is theoretical physics. I recently published an independent paper formulating a Phase-Ordered Pre-Geometric Projection (POPGP) framework.
As the computational world hits the limits of discrete mathematics, I wanted to explore how continuous physical systems—specifically thermodynamic and continuous field equations—natively resolve spatial topologies and boundaries.
I would love to get feedback from the physics and math communities here on the boundary conditions I used in the derivations. Happy to answer any questions or take brutal critique on the math.
You can read the paper via the DOI here: https://zenodo.org/records/18728240
by walterbell | 2026-02-26 23:03:19+00:00
Apple recently spent $2B to bring subvocalization inference to iPhones, from the inventor of FaceID and Kinect, https://www.newsweek.com/apples-2b-ai-acquisition-could-have...

> users [could] interact with Siri and future Apple devices without speaking out loud.. AI systems capable of interpreting facial expressions and subtle muscle movements to understand so-called “silent speech.”
by dylan604 | 2026-02-26 23:03:53+00:00
"I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries."

That opening line is one hell of a set up. The current administration is doing everything it can to become autocratic thereby setting themselves up to be adversarial to Anthropic, which is pretty much the point of the rest of the blog. I guess I'm just surprised to have such a succinct opening instead just slop.
by itmitica | 2026-02-26 23:04:15+00:00
Currently, A-C, A-D routes are not making any sense to me.

If the goal was to complete the circuit, arriving at start point A, that means you have to travel both tundra and hike the mountain, no matter the order.

If B was the goal, then yes, it makes sense to choose C over D or vice versa.
by mathattack | 2026-02-26 23:04:21+00:00
40% actually seems reasonable for a flip into maintenance mode. That’s what PE firms do when then buy cash cow businesses. Dramatically cut engineering on new functionality, cut back on sales and marketing, remove all redundancy in operations.

Anyone who has counted on a vendor that went private or was bought by a rollup firm has felt this pain.

Better to do it all at once than repeated declines.
by varispeed | 2026-02-26 23:04:31+00:00
> First off, IR35 does not apply to self-employed workers, it only applies to a worker contracting via a limited company.

You are using class-loaded language. Nobody says a worker is “operating via” a Big Four consultancy, but when it is a one-person company, suddenly it is framed as some artificial wrapper.

It is a recognised form of self-employment under UK law, where a person runs their own company to contract for work in their own right, on the same legal footing as any other incorporated business.

And IR35 is not confined to one-person outfits either. Its scope extends beyond the caricature of a lone contractor “gaming” the system.

IR35 is not determined by how many clients you have. It is driven by the ownership structure of the company providing the services. The legislation applies where the individual delivering the work has a material interest in that company, typically 5% or more.

> Thirdly, IR35 companies are allowed but they must operate in a specific way (that makes them not worth the hassle for the most part).

It amounts to saying you are free to run your own company, right up to the point where doing so allows you to retain the full commercial value of your labour rather than routing it through an approved intermediary.

Those restrictions are designed around companies owned by the worker delivering the service. The same structural suspicion is not applied to firms owned by external shareholders supplying labour in similar conditions.

When the rule set specifically constrains worker-owned businesses while leaving non-worker-owned ones operating freely, that is not accidental. It is a deliberate design choice that limits upward social mobility.

It is also not accurate to say IR35 has nothing to do with wider labour trends, because tax rules shape how work is structured in practice; many gig and platform workers are required to set up limited companies, and once labour is channelled into that model, the IR35 framework directly affects them, so drawing a hard line between “tax” and “Uberisation” ignores how policy design influences the real-world organisation of work.
by just-the-wrk | 2026-02-26 23:04:33+00:00
I think the AI angle is a fig leaf for perpetual mismanagement. Managers at Block privately complained there were a lot of people doing almost no work. Recently, teams have lost people one at a time, sometimes laid off the day after each other.

If they can organize employees to make more money, they will. But they can't and admitted it.
by gambiting | 2026-02-26 23:05:08+00:00
>>when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence."

A computer playing GO is intelligent now? Is this the kind of conversation we're having?

>>I sure wish I had.

And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?

>>The next best time to start paying attention is now.

I am paying attention, I use these tools every day - the whole idea that they are intelligent and if only you gave them a robot body they would be just normal members of society is absurd. Despite the initial appearance of genius they are just dumb beyond belief, it's like talking to a savant 5 year old, except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
by simianwords | 2026-02-26 23:05:22+00:00
Their headcount was around 10,000. Before AI, do you think each additional employee after 10,000th would increase the profit?

- if yes, then why didn't they hire more employees?

- if no, then isn't it obvious that they don't need more than 6,000 employees who are approximately 20% more productive? if the 6,001th employee can add profit then surely 10,001th could've also added right?
by ytoawwhra92 | 2026-02-26 23:05:22+00:00
Nah.

There are corners of the industry where people still write ASM by hand when necessary, but for the vast, vast majority it's neither necessary (because compilers are great) or worthwhile (because it's so time consuming).

Most code is written in high-level, interpreted languages with no particular attention paid to its performance characteristics. Despite the frustration of those of us who know better, businesses and users seem to choose velocity over quality pretty consistently.

LLM output is already good enough to produce working software that meets the stated requirements. The tooling used to work with them is improving rapidly. I think we're heading towards a world where actually inspecting and understanding the code is unusual (like looking at JVM/Python bytecode is today).

Future liabilities? Not any more than we're currently producing, but produced faster.
by david_allison | 2026-02-26 23:06:25+00:00
If used/implemented correctly, they don't.

* This is an optional feature via git config, with a further GitHub setting to reject commits pushed using your personal email address.

* If the GitHub setting is disabled, some GitHub-generated commits/fixups use your personal email (e.g. squash merge in the GitHub UI).

* I use my personal email in file-level copyright headers, even if the commits use the GitHub noreply email.

* I have my personal email on my GitHub profile, visible to logged in users.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-26 23:07:14+00:00
UK taxes are gathered centrally to London and then redistributed to the so called regions. The bulk of British government infrastructure is based in and around there, as is the BBC and a big chunk of royal spending (as royals and their employees live in Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle (just outside London) for much of the year).

None of that will counted as "public subsidy" but collectively that will run into the billions. All those politicians, civil servants and BBC employees based there are spending UK public money to eat, sleep and travel within the city.

If a place like Liverpool had all that instead of London, then it would be Merseyside mysteriously generating a high surplus.
by ssnistfajen | 2026-02-26 23:07:53+00:00
You are trying to see employees as more than just statistics which is not what CEOs are doing. They are not empathising with 4k employees because they are not seeing 4k human beings through multiple layers of abstraction. To survive at their job they have to choose abstraction. The human brain doesn't have the capacity to simultaneously comprehend the complex needs and emotions of 4000 other human beings without burning out.

Yes this sucks, but this mode of operation for our society was repeatedly chosen through centuries of experimentation. We all asked for this, literally.
by rvz | 2026-02-26 23:07:58+00:00
> Props to Dario and Anthropic for taking a moral stand.

For now. They will turn evil anyway. Just like the rest of Big Tech did.

When it IPOs it will be in the hands of pension funds, asset management companies and hedge funds who will be above the CEO and do. not. care. about "morals".

Then, eventually no matter what administration, Anthropic will betray you for a multi-year government contract worth tens of billions of dollars.

Do not believe any of them.
by dvh | 2026-02-26 23:08:17+00:00
I was thinking about this and came to conclusion that the only correct type is UK style socket because it has fuse.

In our houses, there are circuit breakers. They don't protect you or devices, they can only protect wires in the wall, those who installed the wires knew how much current they can take and installed appropriate circuit breakers.

When you plug the plug in the wall socket, the circuit breaker has no idea what you plugged in so it cannot protect it, so there has to be a fuse in the plug, like in the UK plug. Whoever chose the wires for this device choose appropriate fuse.

There is one more case possible, the wire is not permanently attached to the device but via another socket, for example C14 socket like in PC. In that case manufacturer of the PC should know what kind of currents it is capable of handling and should put fuse inside it.

Now everything is protected (at least for over-current, if you touch live and neutral with two hands, 30mA through heart is enough to kill you but that's something that cannot be avoided, not even GFCI can do it).
by simianwords | 2026-02-26 23:08:28+00:00
at every productivity point there's an optimal number of employees needed.

at the previous productivity it was 10,000 employees. not 10,001 nor 9,999.

at the current productivity it is 6,000.

why are you so sure that the 6,001th employee can increase profits but not the 10,001th employee before AI?
Brave New Smart Phone Dependence World and Google Support
by bar_de | 2026-02-26 23:08:38+00:00
tl;dr: I've spent countless hours with Google Support, but the support process has completely failed.

I was originally offered a mail-in repair (RMA) to my old address in Germany, but I've left that country and cannot receive the package there. Maybe I am the first digital nomad with Google products? I don't know... :(

Despite confirming my new location in Turkey, I was told by a supervisor that an Advance Exchange replacement cannot be shipped to me because the Pixel 10 was not launched in Turkey. But the supporter before told me to delete my payment profile from Germany. Now, what?!

Google does not offer a loaner device, meaning I am left without a necessary smartphone for critical functions (payments, travel, communication) while the device is sent for a 7+ day repair (if I could even send it in). The issue is just a small crack which made the fingerprint sensor unusable. Apple can repair such things on the spot in the whole world...

My health and livelihood are being severely impacted by the lack of a working phone and Google's inability to service a legally purchased, warranted device outside its country of purchase. I am not asking for a free upgrade but I need a working device and a resolution path that acknowledges I am a paying customer living in the modern, globalized world.

I need a Google employee or heavenly intervention after countless hours with the notoriously bad Google Support who can override the system to either:

Ship an Advance Exchange replacement to my current address in Turkey.

Arrange a direct, one-time repair or replacement from a German/EU service partner that accounts for my current Turkish location. No store in Turkey can repair the screen as nobody owns such a phone, here. I asked in 5+ stores in Istanbul, Ankara and now Izmir.

Please help get this in front of someone with the authority to resolve this logistics/policy deadlock. Thank you.

If not: can somebody in Turkey lend me a working current gen Pixel phone so I can at least survive in this brave new world? I am somewhat under the weather due to unemployment, lost home due to lacking money and now my last pierce of freedom, my smart phone, is broken for months and Google is letting me suffer.
I wonder why but like Hiob in the Old Testament I will continue praying to the flying spaghetti monster as I cannot lose faith.

Thank you for reading.
by arjie | 2026-02-26 23:08:54+00:00
Redirects are fun but there are way more than I actually routinely use. One thing I do is the file redirects.

diff <(seq 1 20) <(seq 1 10)

I do that with diff <(xxd -r file.bin) <(xxd -r otherfile.bin) sometimes when I should expect things to line up and want to see where things break.
by mikepurvis | 2026-02-26 23:09:38+00:00
As someone who has worked in the space for a while and been heavily exposed to nix, bazel, cmake, bake, and other systems, and also been in that "passion project" role, I think what I've found is that these kinds of systems are just plain hard to talk about. Even the common elements like DAGs cause most people's eyes to immediately glaze over.

Managers and executives are happy to hear that you made the builds faster or more reliable, so the infra people who care about this kind of thing don't waste time on design docs and instead focus on getting to a minimum prototype that demonstrates those improved metrics. Once you have that, then there's buy-in and the project is made official... but by then the bones have already been set in place, so design documentation ends up focused on the more visible stuff like user interface, storage formats, etc.

OTOH, bazel (as blaze) was a very intentionally designed second system at Google, and buildx/buildkit is similarly a rewrite of the container builder for Docker, so both of them should have been pretty free of accidental engineering in their early phases.
by raddan | 2026-02-26 23:09:55+00:00
It really depends on what your goal is. Some people just like "play." For example, I am terrible at video games--when somebody tells me that they "beat" a game, this usually seems unfathomable to me. The last video game I finished was Riven, back when Riven was new. I still do play now and then. I play Skyrim poorly. I like walking around and discovering things in the Skyrim world. If my goal had been to beat the game in some way, then I would be going about it terribly. But that's not my goal. It does not have to be because egotism.
by walterbell | 2026-02-26 23:10:16+00:00
Not sure. Some AI audio pendants are always on. The Apple device is rumored to adapt its interface to the user based on facial recognition. They could choose to start monitoring audio when it thinks a known human wants to interact with the device, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145201

Apple is developing a tabletop robot as the centerpiece of its artificial intelligence strategy, with plans to launch the device in 2027.. The robot resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel to follow users around a room..The company is also exploring other robotics concepts, including a mobile bot with wheels similar to Amazon’s Astro, and has discussed humanoid models..
by dangus | 2026-02-26 23:10:29+00:00
Oh yeah, I accidentally implied the switch lite cut down RAM when it didn’t.

Of course the Thor Max will have a price increase, but also, obviously 16GB/1TB is a massively bigger bill of materials than the Switch 2’s 12GB/256GB configuration.

And I forgot to mention that Nintendo has far more pricing leverage in terms of their volume.
by AgentOrange1234 | 2026-02-26 23:10:35+00:00
Influencer seems like an insufficient word? Like, in the glorious agentic future where the coding agents are making their own decisions about what to build and how, you don't even have to persuade a human at all. They never see the options or even know what they are building on. The supply chain is just whatever the LLMs decide it is.
by fragmede | 2026-02-26 23:10:51+00:00
I'm not convinced. I don't want to rack servers and diagnose bad RAM like it's still the 90's, so I'm paying someone else for the privilege, especially to get POPs closer to customers than I want to drive or fly to setup, especially in foreign countries where I don't speak the language or know the culture. Fun for vacation but a recipe to waste time and money setting up a local corporate entity and a whole team when I can just pay GCP or AWS and have a server on the other side of the planet from me faster than I can book a plane flight and hotel reservation there.

There's also the maintenance of the server to be considered. Vercel or other PaaS/Lambda/GCP functions/etc serverless means there's just less crap for me to manage, because they're dealing with it, and yeah, they charge money for that service. Being able to tell Claude code, I setup ssh keys and sudo no password for you, go fix my shit; like, that works, but then the hard drive is full so I have to up size the VPS, and if you're stupid/brave, you can give Claude Code MCP access to Chrome so it can click the buttons in Hetzner to upsize for you, but that's time and tokens spent not working on the product so at the end of the day I think Vercel is gonna be fine. AI generating code means there are many many more people trying out making some sort of Internet company, but they'll only discover cheaper options only after paying for Vercel becomes painful.