MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Template for telling the truth on layoffs like at Block
by nutanc | 2026-02-27 08:53:22+00:00
For the people who have been laid off, I think the letter by Jack is a disservice. So I crafted a more direct letter. Hope future letters follow this approach.

Today we are making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we are reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. This means over 4,000 of you will be leaving the company.

I want to be incredibly direct with you about why this is happening.

The Reality of the Decision

First, let’s be clear: you are not being replaced by AI. The technology is not better than you, and it didn't "outwork" you. The truth is simpler and more frustrating: we planned a specific strategic direction, and it didn't work out. We over-extended, and we now need to course-correct to keep the business viable.

However, we operate in a market that demands a specific kind of "success" story. If we simply announced that we missed our targets and need to cut costs, the market would react with volatility, punishing our valuation and jeopardizing our remaining operations.

The "AI-Enabled" Narrative

To protect the company’s standing, we are framing this transition as an evolution into an AI-enabled organization. By attributing these cuts to the "unprecedented efficiency" of intelligence tools and flatter team structures, we signal to the market that we are cutting losses not out of failure, but out of a futuristic lean toward profitability.

This is a strategic "win-win" for the company’s narrative and its shareholders. It allows us to cut costs while being perceived as an industry leader in the AI revolution.

I recognize, however, that this is not a win for you. It is a bitter irony that we are using a narrative of "technological replacement" to mask a human-led planning error.

Support for Departing Team Members

Because this decision is a result of our planning—not your performance—we are providing the following transition package:

Salary: 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure.

Equity: Vested through the end of May.

Healthcare: 6 months of continued coverage.

Hardware: You may keep your corporate devices.

Stipend: $5,000 USD (or local equivalent) for your transition.

Closing Thoughts

To those leaving: I am deeply sorry. You built this company, and you remain world-class talent. Any organization would be lucky to have you, and I hate that the "market-friendly" version of this story implies otherwise.
To those staying: We are going to "own" this AI-first identity moving forward. It is the core of how we will talk to our customers and our investors from this moment on. We will build with "intelligence" at the center, because that is the future the market has decided to reward.
Does journaling help people understand themselves long-term?
by ashutoshbhatia | 2026-02-27 08:53:27+00:00
I’ve been thinking about journaling as a long-term practice and wanted to ask people here about their real experiences.

Many people journal regularly — writing about daily events, emotions, decisions, or reflections. Writing itself often feels helpful in the moment, but I’m curious about what happens over longer periods of time.

After months or years of entries:

* Do people actually gain new self-understanding from journals?
* Do you revisit old entries and notice patterns in thinking or behavior?
* Has journaling ever influenced a later decision in a meaningful way?
* Or does it mostly function as a temporary mental release?

One thing I’ve noticed personally is that journals tend to become archives rather than tools for insight. It made me wonder whether the missing piece is reflection across time rather than individual entries.

I’ve been exploring this idea conceptually and put together a very early explanation page while organizing my thoughts (not a product launch — just context for the question):

https://ai-jounal-website.vercel.app/

Curious how people here think about journaling — especially those who have kept journals for years.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2026-02-27 08:54:01+00:00
The interesting part as more to do with the ideological fundation than with the electoral reality. It's not about winning a few percentage points, it's about the ground work for their political vision.

Like the Great Rus and Kirill give a cultural justification for Putin war and anchors them in an historical framework where they make sense, Trump (I mean Vance really) is using the evangelists and the threat of a perceived shift in what makes America America has a justification for his policies.

It's pervasive throughout Project 2025.
by randoramax | 2026-02-27 08:54:54+00:00
Possible answers: Maybe because the Apache Software Foundation spent over two years debating a feather versus a leaf? see https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/11/native_american_apach...
Or because the Open Source Initiative wasted over a year debating election rules? https://lwn.net/Articles/1056376/
Or because the Document Foundation has been locked into a fight with its own members? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47157999
Looks like a pattern, doesn't it?
by kofdai | 2026-02-27 08:56:38+00:00
Title:
[Show HN] Verantyx Update: 22.7% on ARC-AGI-2 using Human-Logic + OpenClaw Loop

Body:
Following up on my previous post (where I was at 18.1%), I’ve just reached 22.7% (227/1000) on the ARC-AGI-2 public evaluation set.

I want to address the skepticism regarding my development speed. As an undergraduate student in Japan, I have limited manual coding time. To overcome this, I’ve established a "Human-Architect / AI-Builder" research loop.

How the 24/7 loop works:

Human (Me): I analyze failed tasks to identify underlying geometric patterns and design new DSL primitives (e.g., the new gravity_solver and cross3d_geometry in v62).

AI Agent (OpenClaw/Claude Code): Based on my architectural design, the agent scaffolds the implementation, performs rigorous regression testing across all 1,000 tasks, and refines the code for performance.

This synergy allows for a high-frequency commit cycle that a single developer could never achieve alone, while ensuring the inference engine remains 100% symbolic and deterministic. At test-time, there are zero LLM calls; it's pure structural reasoning.

V62 Key Updates:

Gravity Solver: 4 distinct strategies for object sliding/gravity-based transformations.

Cross3D Geometry Engine: Improved handling of 3D-projected cross structures.

Score: 22.7% (monotonically increasing from 20.1% and 22.4% earlier this week).

I believe this hybrid development model—where human intuition drives logic and AI agents drive implementation—is the fastest path to 80%+ on the "Humanity's Last Exam".

I'm eager to hear your thoughts on this "System 2" approach and the role of AI agents in building symbolic AI.

GitHub: https://github.com/Ag3497120/verantyx-v6
Project Site: https://verantyx.ai
by qsera | 2026-02-27 08:57:21+00:00
No no, an intelligent person looking at a crude steam engine could see what potential it has. This is not hindsight.

It is generating large amount of power on demand.

From that one can imagine what it could do. But more importantly in this context, one could also imagine what it could NEVER do. If someone say "Oh, the mighty steam engine! It lets us print 100x more books than we were doing before. Who knows, may be some day it will even start writing new books!"

And at that point, if you understand anything about the steam engine, or writing, you can call bluff. But if you don't understand what the steam engine is doing, and if you don't actually know what it takes to come up with a story, one could take a look at the engine printing the books, and blunder into the conclusion that it printing an entirely new book is only a question of time.

So in short, it is not "hate", just the acknowledgement about what it is not.
by happymellon | 2026-02-27 08:58:35+00:00
> windows 98 / windows 2000 / snow leopard

I don't know if I would group those together. Windows 98/2k were visually similar, but OSX by that point was looking quite refined.

It had toned down the blue, but still had some visual flare.

95/98/2k had a very utility appearance. Just compare the recycle bins between each to see how much more effort went into OSX look and feel.
by scott_w | 2026-02-27 08:59:00+00:00
> 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.

This is not classist, you're conflating 2 very different things.

A one-person company who consults for multiple clients, provides their own equipment and sets their own working hours (I have literally worked with people like this) do not fall into IR35. Whether they speak in RP, Cockney, Geordie or Scouse has no bearing on this. How much money they earn has no bearing on whether they fall into the scope of IR35.

> 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.

This is only part of it. Other criteria include right of substitution, ability to set working hours and location. Clearly a consultancy firm that provides services by multiple workers for multiple clients is very different from an individual who:

- Provides services to one client for 4 years

- Has to (in your own words) sit at the same desk as an employee

- Has to follow set hours

- Has to use equipment provided by the client

- Cannot ask another person to take over their work.

When the facts are different, the rules that are applied are different.

> 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.

Because they're two completely different types of contract and working arrangements.

> 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

I didn't say that they don't. Law and working arrangements obviously feed back into each other, it's the reason IR35 came about in the first place.

> 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”

They're two different topics that sometimes have overlap, depending on the nature of the working arrangements.
by gambiting | 2026-02-27 08:59:21+00:00
>> No one talented will then go work for a government-run LLM building org.

I think you massively underestimate how many people would have no problem working for their government on this. Just look at the recent research into the Persona system for ID verification, where submitting your ID places you on a permanent government watchlist to check if you're not a terrorist. There's a whole list of engineers and PhDs and researchers present who have built this system.

>> “top talent won’t accept meager government wages” angle

Again, that's wishful thinking - plenty of people want to work in cybersecurity in AI research for the government agencies, even if the pay isn't anywhere close to the private sector. This isn't exclusive to the US either - in the UK MI5 pays peanuts compared to the private companies for IT specialists, yet they have plenty of people who want to work for them, either because of patriotism for their country and willingness to "help".
by District5524 | 2026-02-27 08:59:32+00:00
They both work in the same market but they have a pretty different careers and understandings.
I simply can't believe why on Earth would people choose Altman over Amodei to trust in these kind of pretty important questions.
This is not about who is the more savvy investor maximizing shareholder value. I personally don't care whose company grows bigger or goes bust first, OpenAI or Anthropic.
The real stakes are different, and Amodei is better suited to be trusted in his decision.
Unfortunately, the best choices do not seem to fit well with either the federal political climate or the mainstream business ethics in Silicon Valley.
Not that our opinion would matter...
by rob74 | 2026-02-27 08:59:51+00:00
What I don't understand: why should anyone use characters that are (barely) distinguishable when they could just as well use characters that are 100% identical, like the Cyrillic characters? If the text contains a Latin "p", they can use Cyrillic "р" and no one will notice. Or is there some browser/extension/tool/whatever that guards against one but not the other?
by joakleaf | 2026-02-27 08:59:59+00:00
Enhanced mode was already in 3.0 (and I think allowed for flat addressing)

However, Win32s was introduced in 3.11 which a subset of the Windows 32-bit API from NT.

3.11 also introduced 32-bit disk access and 32-bit drivers.

Microsoft did 32-bit in steps -- it was confusing already back then.
by hdgvhicv | 2026-02-27 09:00:11+00:00
Areas of the economy suffered this time and time again. Even if there are new jobs, even if those new jobs are better paid and better conditions than the ones they replace, how does that help the 55 year old coal miner who has seen his industry vanish. Can he realistically retrain?

It’s not unprecedented however the scale and speed that it will come at is. Things like the spinning jenny came along and replaced spinners, but weavers stayed for another generation.

Selfishly though I am more concerned about losing my job and industry than I was concerned about others suffering from the 80s, or during the pivot to the intenet. To quote Dr McCoy

> We're all sorry for the other guy when he loses his job to a machine. When it comes to your job, that's different. And it always will be different.
by garybake | 2026-02-27 09:00:35+00:00
As LLM providers ship breaking changes on a near-monthly cadence, the difference between a 10-minute .env swap and a 400-line PR comes down to architecture. This post introduces seam-driven design for Python LLM apps - five narrow interfaces (provider, prompt, tools, config, observability) that can each be replaced independently - illustrated with a working FastAPI + LangChain reference app. Readers get a concrete checklist and two hands-on drills they can run against the open-source code immediately.
by keeda | 2026-02-27 09:00:48+00:00
Actually, AI's do need code to be pretty. It's becoming widely accepted that whatever is good for humans -- modular code, tests, docs, linters, fast feedback loops -- is good for agents.

I keep repeating this, but the latest data from large-scale dev reports like DORA 2025 and DX find that AI is simply an amplifier of your engineering culture: Teams with strong software engineering discipline enjoy increased velocity with fewer outages, whereas teams with weak discipline suffer more outages.

About the only thing they need (for now) is architectural guidance and spot-checking of results. But then how many architects does any given company need?
by marcus_lam | 2026-02-27 09:01:08+00:00
The "clear room" framing is the most interesting part of this to me. It's essentially using the AI as a way to rebuild something from spec without looking at existing implementations, which has legal implications for emulation but also tells you something about the model's capabilities.

If Claude can produce a working Z80 emulator from documentation alone, it means the model has internalized enough about processor architecture, instruction sets, and timing behavior to reconstruct a functional implementation. That's qualitatively different from pattern-matching on existing emulator code.

From antirez's writing what comes through is that the value isn't "AI wrote my code" — it's that AI made it practical to attempt a project that would have been a multi-week time investment as a weekend experiment. The bottleneck for many side projects isn't knowledge or skill, it's calendar time. Compressing that changes what's worth attempting.
by jackbventures | 2026-02-27 09:01:13+00:00
Professional photography. I spent two weeks last year trying to book a headshot session — schedule coordination, studio booking, outfit prep, editing turnaround. 3-4 hours of actual effort plus 2 weeks of calendar back-and-forth.

Now with FLUX-based image generation you can go from one decent photo to a studio-quality professional headshot in about 30 seconds. The technology has gotten good enough that the results are genuinely suitable for LinkedIn, email signatures, professional bios.

I ended up building a small tool around this (headshotai-mvp-jb.netlify.app) — it's the first thing I've built where I can clearly articulate the time saving: what used to take hours of scheduling + a half-day session is now 30 seconds and GBP4.99.

The broader point: AI is quietly killing entire categories of professional service overhead, not just making existing workflows faster.
by marcus_lam | 2026-02-27 09:01:31+00:00
The particularism vs universalism distinction the paper draws is the mechanism I see play out in engineering orgs all the time. A team develops its own internal logic — "we ship fast, we don't write tests for that, we work around the architecture review" — and within the team that behavior feels rational and even virtuous. It's only corruption relative to the broader organization's stated values.

What makes it hard to fix in tech specifically is that the same behavior that looks like corruption from one angle (circumventing process) looks like execution speed from another. The person who bypasses code review to ship a hotfix is either a hero or a liability depending on who's telling the story.

The paper's point about normalization through socialization is the part that should concern anyone who manages engineers. By the time you notice the pattern, new hires have already been taught that "this is just how we do things here." The corruption reproduces itself through onboarding.
by mrweasel | 2026-02-27 09:01:32+00:00
My in-laws have probably discarded at least five or six Apple devices on that account. Typically they get used devices, with a good number of years of updates remaining, but the updates are pointless when iOS grabs 50% for it self and the actual update, resulting in a device that you may not be able to update even if you uninstalled everything.

The devices themselves are fast enough to run everything, you just can't update and eventually apps stop being available to the old iOS version they run.
by volleyball | 2026-02-27 09:01:53+00:00
I wrote the following comment 4 months ago when Larry Ellison bought Tiktok (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45267643 ). Reposting it here, verbatim since it is part of the same story (imo) and everything in it has been confirmed in the last 4 months except for the last paragraph. I guess we will find out eventually :

So Larry Ellison just took over Paramount group which is now looking to bid for Warner Brothers and CNN. And now Ellison is going to take over TikTok.

Paramount(being run by Larry Ellison's son) is looking to install the pro-israel-propagandist who has variously masqueraded as a liberal, a conservative and anti-woke free-speech champion, Bari Weiss[1] as CBS's editor-in-chief or co-president[2]. It also bears mentioning that Ellison is a life-long zionist, friend of the IDF and close personal friend of Netanyahu to whom he even offered a post at Oracle.[3]

This very much looks like a hostile take-over of the American mind by a tech billionaire who just overtook Elon Musk to become the world's richest man. People should be talking about whether they want to go through this all over again.

[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/03/08/the-nyts-bari-weiss-fals...

[2] - https://archive.is/20250916040811/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Larry_Ellison&old...
by andriamanitra | 2026-02-27 09:01:56+00:00
If you need to deal with matrices Julia's built-in support for that kind of stuff is the best out of any language I've ever seen (and I've tried dozens of different languages). It's like having first-class numpy arrays without installing any third party packages, and the syntax is even more convenient than Python. The standard library is reasonably comprehensive (not quite as big as in Python or Ruby or Go, but it's usually more well-designed).

It is also an excellent language for messing about because the language and especially the REPL have tons of quality-of-life features. I often use it when I want to do something interactively (eg. inspect a data set, draw a graph, or figure out what's going on with an Unicode string, or debug some bitwise trickery).

What Julia is not great at is things where you need minimal overhead. It is performant for serious number crunching like simulations or machine learning tasks, but the runtime is quite heavy for simple scripting and command-line tools (where the JIT doesn't really get a chance to kick in).
by jdranczewski | 2026-02-27 09:02:13+00:00
The article mentions this only briefly, but browsers already do this kind of heuristic protection! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack#Defending... or https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/i... for a Chrome-specific blog post.

I think the lack of exploration of the context around the problem and current mitigations is an issue with the article - it spends a lot of time talking about the possible threat, but very little time on whether the attack is actually practical with modern mitigations.
by ralferoo | 2026-02-27 09:02:19+00:00
The problem is that it will have been trained on multiple open source spectrum emulators. Even "don't access the internet" isn't going to help much if it can parrot someone else's emulator verbatim just from training.

Maybe a more sensible challenge would be to describe a system that hasn't previously been emulated before (or had an emulator source released publicly as far as you can tell from the internet) and then try it.

For fun, try using obscure CPUs giving it the same level of specification as you needed for this, or even try an imagined Z80-like but swapping the order of the bits in the encodings and different orderings for the ALU instructions and see how it manages it.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2026-02-27 09:02:42+00:00
What a headache!

My practical view is to avoid spaces in directories and filenames, but to write scripts that handle them just fine (using BASH - I'm guilty of using it when more sane people would be using a proper language).

My ideological view is that unix/POSIX filenames are allowed to use any character except for NULL, so tools should respect that and handle files/dirs correctly.

I suppose for your usage, it'd be better to put the virtualenv directory into your path and then use #!/usr/bin/env python
by ChrisSD | 2026-02-27 09:02:51+00:00
> It does mention Windows NT but honestly nobody really cared about that until NT 3.0/3.5 and it soon thereafter became Windows XP and laid the foundation for modern Windows.

Fun fact: NT 3.1 was the first version of NT, released in 1993. It was versioned like that to match Windows 3.1 which had been released the previous year.

And it really took off with Windows 2000. Not just business people but more ordinary people were using it as a more stable alternative to Windows 95/98 (albeit lacking some compatibility, especially with games).