pyman

Excellent. Men in black :D

Statistically speaking, everything points to human interference.

My theory is that the government was planning to cut funding, and to stop that from happening someone deliberately created the interference. That's more likely than aliens going extinct after sending one single message.

Or the government was planning to cut funding, and to stop that from happening someone deliberately created the interference.

Statistically speaking, that's more likely than aliens going extinct after sending one single message.

Not sure about radiation, but I once tried to boil an egg in the microwave and the microwave exploded. For a second, I thought the chicken had secretly developed human-level intelligence and planted an explosive inside the egg to get back at those stealing its babies. That was my "wow" moment. Then my dad confirmed it was my fault and compared my intelligence to the chicken's.

Although I'm sure @stinkbeatle was joking, I should clarify that most LLMs are trained on books and online articles written by professional writers. That's why they tend to have a rich vocabulary and use things like hyphens.

I agree, HN is an amazing community with brilliant people and top quality content, but it's not enough to train an LLM.

Last thing. An LLM is just a tool, it can clean up your writing the same way a photo app can enhance your pictures. It took a while for people to accept that grandma's photos looked professional because they had filters. Same will happen with text. With ChatGPT, anyone can write like a journalist. We're just not used to grandma texting like one, yet :)

The best PMs are like mini-CEOs, and many of them go on to become CPOs. But there's a lot of confusion in the software industry about what the role of a PM should be. For example, I see companies putting too much emphasis on usage metrics, while very few focus on the far more important skill of asking the right questions. PMs look at dashboards to make informed decisions, but most of them aren't even asking the right questions. And they don't know if the questions they're asking are the right ones, because they have no real knowledge of product development, just a bit of experience which is limiting. That's what happens when engineers, designers, or musicians end up in PM roles, reacting to data or using it to validate their own or someone else's assumptions.

The real problem, I believe, starts with companies hiring anyone with people skills as a PM. They don't understand their role and responsibilities, it's common to hear PM say "I own the product." But that's not really true. According to successful founders and CEOs, they are the only ones who truly own the product, and that's an important point for leadership to establish. PMs thinking they own the product creates power struggles with leadership, engineering and design, while a title like "Customer Experience Manager" makes it clear the role is about representing the customer's needs, aligning them with the CEO's vision, and making the right trade-offs.

Business people with knowledge and experience always put the customer at the centre and focus on aligning customer value with business value. In other words, if you're the CEO of Uber and your PM isn't driving a taxi once a week, then, IMO, you hired the wrong person.

It does sound a bit weird, I have to admit. Customer Experience Manager sounds better or just CX Manager.

For me, the title Product Manager sets the wrong expectation, it makes it sound like they own the product, which clashes with other roles. In reality, they don't own the product, they own alignment: customer needs, business goals, and engineering feasibility.

I've heard many YC founders say that the CEO (or CPO) is the only one who truly owns the product, and I agree. The PM should never own it, they are interpreters who take the CEO's vision, combine it with customer insight, and help the team make the right trade-offs.

I think the role of Product Manager should be renamed Customer Manager to avoid confusion and conflicts of interest. Some companies like Airbnb tried switching to Program Manager, but that only adds to the confusion.

Right now, the Product Manager is seen as the CEO's delegate, making sure the product follows business strategy, while the Engineering Manager is the CTO's delegate, making sure the product follows technical strategy. One represents business the other represents technology. But IMO since both are building the product together, the title Product Manager creates competition instead of collaboration.

The software needs the customer just as much as the customer needs the software. That's why I think the roles of Engineering Manager and Customer Manager make more sense, working together to build the best product possible. The product isn't managed by one side, it's managed by both.

However, the real problem isn't the role title, it's the qualifications of the person in the role. Companies don't hire lawyers as Engineering Managers, so why do they hire musicians as Product Managers?

I was saying that many companies already make a mistake by putting unqualified people in senior product roles, and some go even further by making the bigger mistake of promoting an engineer with only project management experience straight to Head of Product.

Time.

Most of my 10-hour workday people bombard me with messages and meeting requests. Messages I can usually ignore, but meeting requests get abused by some. Anyone can send one anytime and it hijacks your focus.

I wish companies would set a limit on how many meeting requests employees can send per month. At least then people would think twice before stealing someone else's time and attention.

Time thieves are the real productivity killer.

How exactly is your question related to the link you shared? You should change the title to: "Show HN: SubBuddy"

People skills matter for product managers, but they come after customer and product experience, business and product strategy, and execution and delivery. Otherwise you just end up with a nice PM who doesn't know how to move the product forward.

Lots of product managers have never studied product development. You'll find philosophers, designers, physicists, even musicians in the role. Many have great people skills, but little understanding of customer service, building products, or scaling a business. And funnily enough, those are all real careers and degrees.

The result, which you often see in companies with 300+ employees, is that engineers have far more experience building products than their PMs, what engineers usually lack is knowledge of the customer and their pain points, and a roadmap that leads to successful outcomes. In other words: a real product manager.

It's not enough for PMs to throw around cliches like "I represent the customer" or "the product has to be built around customer needs" if they don't understand how to actually build and ship software.

Last year I dug into this and found it's not unusual. Many software companies hire smart people as CPO, Product Director, or Head of Product because they have leadership skills, people skills, and some knowledge of the industry. But most have little to no background in business, marketing, economics, or product development. Some companies go even further and promote an engineer with project management experience to Head of Product. And, of course, people in those roles tend to hire others who look like them, with similar experience. One day their CEO realiseS their product isn't selling, customers aren't happy, or engineers are left to figure out what to build.

To put it in perspective, imagine a company making a lawyer their Engineering Manager and asking them to build an engineering team. What are the chances they'd do better than a computer scientist or an actual engineer? Pretty slim. Sure, there are exceptions, but what usually happens is their engineers aren't motivated and complain about the lack of coaching, vision, purpose, and the poor quality of their tools, processes, code, and work environment.

Bottom line: companies need to audit product leadership roles as a priority and figure out who's really in charge of the product. Run an internal survey to check whether your CPO, Director, Head of Product, and Product Managers have studied business or have actual expertise in it. If not, you're in trouble.

I would say 100% of their audience should be held accountable. Watching a crime take place, no matter how entertaining it seems, and not reporting it to the police is still a crime. In most civilised countries, complacent viewers are also responsible.

Influencers without complacent viewers are not influencers. Just like dumb people being encouraged by other dumb people to commit a crime are simply criminals. Being an influencer has little to do with it.

Torturing someone to make money, or paying to watch it, is a crime. Police should act accordingly, seize the servers, retrieve the IP addresses, and arrest the criminals.

a comment in the JavaScript code even pointing to a website that allows anyone to decrypt the key

Intel hiring vibe coders and junior devs, nothing new here.

But Intel needs to fire a bunch of Engineering Managers and Directors ASAP. They're the ones replacing experienced devs with inexperienced ones to cut costs by 10x, with no plan in place to test security or product quality. Then they brag in leadership meetings about saving money by replacing their entire Python API team with two JavaScript devs.

Time to make those people accountable.

"There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users: illegal drugs and software." - Edward Tufte

I remember buying into OpenAI's claim that I had Aristoteles in my pocket, and at first I was amazed. Then one day I realised it wasn't Aristoteles at all, it was my little brother Timmy. From that day on, whenever Timmy says something, I reply with: Nope, No, Again, Wrong Timmy, It doesn't work, and sometimes, Do better Timmy!

Timmy relies on patterns learned from huge amounts of text, so his answers are always relative and unpredictable.

Now AI companies are shifting how they talk about intelligence. They admit LLMs can't truly reason with the current architecture, so intelligence is being sold as the ability to solve problems using learned patterns, not actual reasoning. That's a big downgrade from the original dream of human-level thinking and AGI.

Still, I'm impressed with little Timmy and I know he will keep growing and getting smarter. But I don't see him solving climate change just yet.

It doesn't affect us, so why complain? We can always just get a visa to watch porn.

Newton was obsessed with the idea that matter could be transformed, which is basically what alchemy is about. He thought metals like lead could be changed into gold if you uncovered the hidden principles of nature. In a way, he was chasing the same dream that much later became real with nuclear reactions.

Great article and research!

I'd argue that shamelessness and countersignalling are different things but share the same foundation: confidence.

Shamelessness is acting without embarrassment and countersignalling is deliberately downplaying because you're so confident you don't need to prove yourself.

Using the example from the article, another person who comes to mind besides Paris Hilton is Trump. He uses countersignalling as a strategic tool, and sloppiness as a Swiss knife. The followers of both Paris and Trump interpret that sloppiness as confidence and authenticity, which is why it's so effective. And to pull off being deliberately sloppy, you need to be shameless.

This is actually a great time to launch a product for 13-18 year olds who'll be looking for something else to do on their phones during the 6 hours they used to spend watching porn.

I'm thinking of an AI tool that automatically dresses people in porn videos, turning them into 12+ content. The Pro+ plan could even replace the moaning with actual dialogue. That way they can keep watching their favourite movies without needing to verify their age or use a VPN.

The only thing I need for VCs to invest is to put the term "10x" on my website.

"10x fewer moans and 10x more dialogue"

the report does not mention the leading causes of death for American children, which are firearms and motor vehicle accidents.

I'm honestly tired of seeing all these AI wannabes bragging on Twitter and LinkedIn about how they've built a tool that does "10x better" than something else, and how they only hire people willing to work 80 hours a week, with no life and no need for money. They're trying to normalise tech sweatshops because their VCs told them that being a psychopath is the fastest way to get a return on investment. These founders are so driven and so dumb that I have more respect for flat-earth conspiracy theorists than for this new wave of brainless, heartless founders.

And I don't buy into their Mother Theresa's story either, that they'll exploit people for decades, cash out billions, and then magically turn into philanthropists to fix all the harm they caused.

This is the time to use technology to solve real problems. That's the mission, that's why we're here. The leading causes of death for American children are firearms and motor vehicle accidents. The Volvo engineer who invented the seatbelt is a hero because he saved millions of lives.

We need to stop these shallow founders from destroying the reputation of our industry.

(Sorry for the rant)

Test-driven development is back.

Since LLMs rely on patterns learned from large amounts of text, the results are relative. If the training data contained more Rust repos, that could explain why it feels stronger in Rust.

The way AI companies talk about "intelligence" now is shifting. They admit LLMs can't truly reason with the current architecture, so intelligence is being framed as the ability to solve problems using patterns learned from text, not reasoning on their own. That's a big downgrade from the original idea of AI reaching human-level thinking and developing AGI.

Also, my understanding is that since Microsoft invests in Copilot, it doesn't want ChatGPT to get better at coding. Instead, it wants it to get better at being a lawyer.

I used GPT-5 as my personal lawyer the other day. I uploaded contracts and agreements, and the number of things it got wrong was mind blowing. It made me look like a complete amateur with the emails it drafted. GPT-5 is extremely dumb and incompetent when it comes to understanding real-world problems and offering solutions. It wasn't even at the level of a junior lawyer, it was ten times worse. I was honestly shocked by the results.

When it comes to programming, I have to keep replaying with "Nope", "No", "Again", "Wrong", "It doesn't work" and a couple of times "Do better" before it finally produces something complex that actually works.

With coding at least I know when it's wrong. The real problem is when I don't.

Whenever people ask Google, Meta, Microsoft, or Twitter why their tools are polarising friendships, doing the Nazi salute, or stealing copyrighted material, they say: "Hey, we didn't know our AI was doing that. We didn't even know it could do that."

Well, next time they find Chinese malware on the phone of the NSA director, China should just say: "We didn't know Bruce AI was hacking phones! We only trained it to recommend products on Alibaba."

I guess what I'm trying to say is, with AI becoming so popular and quantum computers around the corner, either we all get serious about the truth or no one will. Because big tech companies in the US are lying through their teeth, about the AI they're building for military use, about the satellites they're launching, about everything. Then they tell the world, "they're bad, we're good." That doesn't work anymore. More and more developing countries are partnering with China, and perceptions are shifting. While the US focuses only on the cyber war, China is winning the tech, cyber, and diplomatic wars.

For me, the turning point was Covid-19. While the US was selling vaccines to wealthy countries, China was donating them to developing ones and saving lives. It shipped over a billion doses across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In my country, China is seen as the good guy now.

I read about this the other day. The argument is that a one-party system can push through long-term plans more easily because it doesn't get interrupted by elections or changes in government like democracies do.

With its cofounders’ experience at Tesla, Hubber will buy sites, transform them into a charger-ready location, and essentially provide the dream location that they would have liked to see during the site selection processes they went through in their previous jobs.

So let me get this straight. Three ex-Tesla employees started Hubber to roll out the same solution that got them fired by Elon Musk? Can't wait to see what they come up with. It's like Netflix announcing season two of my favourite show.

I know the answer to this one:

Instagram used to be a photo sharing app, but after Mark Zuckerberg bought it, it turned into an infinite scroll of junk that keeps you glued to your phone for hours, chasing the next video to make you feel a little less miserable about wasting your time.

Nice use of AI. My only concern with tools for uploading sensitive information is trust. I trust big tech companies like Google and Microsoft with my documents, emails, and even private chats, but can I trust individuals? Even if the tech you're using looks safe, trust is the billion-dollar question, one that even Dropbox had to fight hard to earn.