The missing piece for connecting an agent to your credit card or other financials is financial liability.
If Meta/OpenAI/etc would guarantee they’d compensate you in full for anything that wasn’t supposed to happen —and had an established track record of doing so— it would make trusting agents to make financial choices easier
Assuming financial liability is an option, but because the risk profile of having an agent making purchases for a cardholder will never be zero, the companies making these guarantees will simply price the risk in to the cost of service. It’s the same basic mechanic at work with credit card reward points, the brands are all fighting each other for a share of customer debt so they slowly increase the rewards rates to one-up each other, and make up the cost on the back end by increasing merchant fees. It’s a dumb, unnecessary price war that ultimately increases the cost to the consumer and drives up the profits of the businesses providing risk/cost-burdened services.
“ If Meta/OpenAI/etc would guarantee they’d compensate you in full for anything that wasn’t supposed to happen —and had an established track record of doing so— it would make trusting agents to make financial choices easier”
What I will do is give you a genuine reply: I listened to a few tracks from their latest album, but when I posted this I had forgotten they had that album out.
I'd actually completely forgotten I made this post until I noticed my karma had jumped for some reason -- sometimes I don't grok why people like one link but not another, and I try to just focus on surfacing interesting stuff.
And as I said on another nym recently:
I might lack things like tact, diplomacy, and deodorant.
But I think if someone had a perfect history of me, from that pollyannyish little twelve year old on Gamefaqs to the man in the corner with his back to the wall like Matt Damon, they’d respect that when I made mistakes, I was operating with imperfect information, a limited budget, and, at times, behind enemy lines.
I am a people & open source obsessed Product Manager with over 10 years of experience working on databases and developer platforms. I was an iOS developer for 5 years prior.
I have lead product teams at:
- Grafana Labs (Loki, k6)
- Sauce Labs (Sauce Orchestrate, Modern Frameworks)
I am looking to get more focused on the people side of tech, either through expanding into a role where I help other PMs grow & succeed or through pivoting to UX Research or Developer Advocacy. I am also looking for volunteer OSS opportunities.
I prefer to be in roles where I have high agency and the ability to act directly.
If you’ve ever wondered why the symbol of health is a snake spiraling a staff (the Greek god Asclepius’s staff to be specific), it’s because in Ancient Greece they used small amounts of snake venom to treat serious illnesses
I always assumed what I felt was obvious: Numbers 21:4-9, where God instructs Moses to make a bronze serpent and place it on a pole to heal Israelites dying from poisonous snake bites.
The Bible contains many verifiable historical references supported by archaeology and ancient records, even as a primarily theological text. Here are three examples:
1. The Tel Dan Stele and the House of David
This 9th-century BCE inscription records an Aramean king’s victories over the “king of Israel” and the “king of the House of David.” It gives the earliest extra-biblical proof of the Davidic dynasty at the heart of the Hebrew Bible.
2. Sennacherib’s Prism and Hezekiah
The prism names “Hezekiah the Judahite,” details the capture of 46 cities, and describes besieging Jerusalem in 701 BCE, closely matching 2 Kings 18–19, including the tribute paid.
3. The Pilate Stone and Pontius Pilate
Found at Caesarea Maritima, this inscription names “Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea” under Tiberius, directly confirming the Roman official who tried Jesus in the Gospels.
These independent sources from rival powers strongly support the Bible’s historical value where evidence exists.
I was taught that the symbol came from Egypt, specifically a reference to standard guinea worm treatment whereby the worm was extracted from under the skin by winding it around a stick.
They also did an episode about rapamycin that I thought was really cool. I had no idea the history of it and found it fascinating and it really gets the imagination going thinking about what other things are hidden all around us.
That article doesn’t explain why acupuncture works, just gives a hint of a possible mechanism. It also doesn’t contain any evidence that acupuncture works at all (other than as a placebo).
There’s also electroacupuncture, which is gaining popularity in physical therapy clinics in the US.
> Like traditional acupuncture, electroacupuncture uses needles placed in the same spots. Then, a small electrode is attached to the needles. A small amount of electricity runs through the electrode and gives a slight vibration or soft hum during treatment. (1)
Since they use the same spots as traditional acupuncture even now, I would think traditional acupuncture does work to some degree.
I read a paper that basically said that the spot itself didn't matter so much, that part was voodoo, but the needling produced a response from your body that helped.
I did a course of dry needling for tendon inflammation. It's basically just poking tendons with needles. It's an accepted treatment and it works, but the spots don't matter at all (as long as they are in the same area).
It's just relying on poking stuff with needles to improve the blood flow.
Um, the spots do seem to have some importance - there's little point jabbing your left temple if, as you say, the aim is to improve the blood flow to your ankles
When I was looking for my next role after being laid off, I didn’t get much of a response with my human handmade resume despite my experience
Just for kicks, I asked ChatGPT to “Analyze my resume and give it a score for what percentage it was in” then I asked it to revise it to make it score as high as possible
I still tweaked and fact checked it but after I started sending that out, I got a much higher hit rate than before
But who knows, maybe the market changed, was a better time of year, etc
I still had to pass interviews and prove my worth. But it probably helped me get my foot in the door
Same thing happened to my wife as well. I helped her tailor her LinkedIn profile and resume with a lot of attention to detail: adding metrics, keywords, results, etc. Nevertheless, she never received any outreach recruiters and got very few application responses. It went like that for months, almost a year.
Then she asked ChatGPT 5.x for help. I was skeptical about the changes it recommended (and was skeptical at all about using AI for this given the homogeneification it tends to produce). But somehow it worked: few days later, a recruiter reached out, then another, then applications started moving forward, etc.
My guess is that, as LLMs are shoveled into every phase of the recruiting process, not having an LLM write your resume for you is now playing on hard mode. The LLMs reviewing resumes are downranking resumes and profiles that are not "speaking" the same language and activating the correct neurons, thus preventing you from moving forward. This contrasts with years ago when we had more humans in the loop and the pasteurised writing of GPT 3.5/4o would make you look less worthy. Again, just a theory, but...
If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.
But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.
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I don't summarily reject AI-written resumés to be clear, as honestly, it's basically a necessity at this point to be competitive with others; it'd be putting yourself at a severe disadvantage on pure principles in a way that has no real positive net effect on society. Even if you disagree with AI resumé screeners, you're only hurting yourself — especially at a time that has the largest impact on your compensation (i.e. negotiating salary at job start is one of the most valuable ways to spend your time since it will pay you back every paycheck).
Though I _do_ tend to question resumés that look like they were written almost entirely by an LLM without the candidate providing significant context and refinement.
> If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.
> But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.
Do you mind explaining why? The former doesn't indicate caring about business impact whatsoever (is this service in the critical path of any online process? Who knows!) while the latter does.
> "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%,"
The first is that they're playing fast and loose with their numbers. Latency has before/after, conversion and LTV have percentages; revenue is just a single number. Did that double revenue? Or is that half a percent, and is it lost in the statistical noise?
The other is that there's nothing there to convince me that the technical work was was the full cause, instead of, say a new marketing promotion that launched at the same time, or another team redesigning the landing page flow, or another team re-doing all the product photography, or any other concurrent work.
Maybe all those questions have good answers, but I would at least want some nod in there to how they validated it. I find people who focus on "business impact" but don't know how to do the math to have confidence in it dangerous, because it's so easy to cherry-pick numbers that will make execs happy at a glance and prioritize for those things instead of actual long-term system or product or customer-facing improvements.
I'm not binning the resume for it, and maybe it helps get past the people who see it before I do, but I'm gonna dig in on it. And I'm usually disappointed by the answers.
I wish it was at least normalized to submit two resumes - one for AI and one for humans. Threading the needle to please both audiences is such a crap-shoot.
Which is a very “HN” sentiment when the vast majority of recruiters and hiring managers are absolutely not doing the same. Especially for roles outside of tech.
Yeah I don’t know what others are doing, but I work in the valley and those elements signal checklist mentality. To wit, those keyword lists often include, in my experience, proficiency in specific tool use, rather than communicating skills that transcend tools, which tells me the person is likely not very dynamic or creative.
> those keyword lists often include, in my experience, proficiency in specific tool use
This used to be called "buzzword bingo" and was pretty much required. It was how you got past the initial automated filtering step before a human even saw your resume.
I don’t know whether it was ever effective strategy for candidates, but I will simply say that as a hiring manager for over 12 years, I have never been interested in anyone’s resume when I see that.
The problem is that the candidate doesn't know, its not even good proxy either way just like everything on the resume besides the list of companies the person worked on.
Most applicants have no idea about your internal HR procedures and what's the pipeline before the resume even gets from you so they might as well optimize for what generally seems the most "successful" approach. Maybe they actually think writing metrics and keywords is a good idea, maybe they think its stupid and resent it but can't get any interviews without it, its really impossible to tell without other variables..
As someone who's been a hiring manager for around 7 years, I agree with you, but note that the people who screen resumés before they even _get to you_ very well may be looking for those references.
For my own resumé, I include the stack used at each job which I feel strikes a fair balance.
That's what I always did too. Then I removed it because I wanted to focus more on the kind of problems I solve rather than the languages I've worked in, and recruiters complained, so I put it back in.
Most HR departments have been filtering resumes (or LinkedIn) based on things like keywords for years before they got to you. So your reaction to resumes that heavily use those may be reactionary to being presented with tons of those (by whoever filtered them before you)
No used to be. It still is standard. Large companies that do not use external recruiters still use keywords and skills matching to find candidates and it drives me nuts.
I rewrote my resume in a way that sounds like exactly what you want: focus on skills that transcend tools instead of just the tools, and every recruiter asks me about tools.
What i have observed, which is the hard (unpredictable) part for candidates is, they can't tell which kind of hiring manager they'll get. Some reject resumes with metrics, others use software that won't let the resume through without them. Most (non-subject matter experts) would just look for whatever they think will get past the filter.
what i am researching right now is if you (hiring manager) got 2 resumes from the same candidate, one hand-written (metaphorically) and the other built by chat-GPT or AI, which one would you call ?
Same. I am well aware how the metrics game goes - even inside the company it can be hard to disprove the metrics claimed, and people count on that. Even managers coach you on putting metrics you cannot prove or disprove.
Knowing or having experience with Redux isn’t going to cause me to pick you over someone else who doesn’t list it for a job where I’m paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars. I look at other skills.
I would not can it in isolation, but if I see a comma-separated list like: “proficient in redux, react, html, JavaScript, sql, kubernetes, word and excel”… then yes, you don’t make the cut.
Or if you list your Microsoft qualifications or your MIT continuing education courses. These are all negative signals.
Unfortunately many recruiters do look at that. I'm always a bit disappointed when someone wants me to rate my Java experience, or complains that my CV doesn't mention REST experience.
Metrics: I increased retention 2x; I reduced latency from X ms to Y ms; increased slo to 99.999… those are all meaningless. It was in fashion to put such numbers in cvs maybe 5-10 years ago. Not anymore
They were always lies because they’re imprecise. “I” didn’t do any of those things, you did other things together with other people leveraging company infrastructure to accomplish those things. Tell me about the SKILLS you excel in tha make those things happen.
Why would you not want to know a general idea of what specific technology someone is familiar with ? Someone could be an "infrastructure engineer" and be more proficient in specific tools vs others - don't you want to match that to the job your hiring for ?
In my case it's not a lie: I reduced the time for a complex import process from 1 hour to 3 minutes, a 20 fold improvement. I included it in my CV, but now I wonder if I should take it out.
Gigachad. Just don’t forget to signal somehow that you aren’t like everyone else, so that legitimate candidates can send their real resume instead of AI generated one.
Having implemented more than a few applicant tracking systems, too many are so anchored in the past, that they would probably try to boil the ocean at once by letting AI loose on it, leaving an ability for ai resumes to ai applicant tracking systems.
The key insight here is humans are responsible for improved articulation to the ai, who in turn will improve the rest, and that can be as detailed and informative, and educational as the human likes.
I was recently job hunting and did something similar. Had it check my bullets and see if they "read well" and it suggested many many tweaks. I tried a few. I'm not sure how much more it helped the applications though.
It's not uncommon to get hundreds or thousands of applications per opening for web tech, if the position is advertised on LinkedIn or a similar job board.
They'd need to use some automation, even if it is just picking ten at random.
Maybe? I've filtered 300-400 CVs by hand before, and didn't find it particularly time consuming to bin the ones which clearly didn't meet requirements or have any redeeming features. And hiring was not my full-time role.
At 90 seconds per resume, that would take up a full 8 hour day. Having gone through this myself, I don't think it's possible to do this much faster than that, even if you have an ATS that optimizes for that workflow.
I often found myself falling into patterns of poor judgement, e.g. mentally filtering out resumes based on the layout because, to my tired and bored mind, they looked similar to the resumes I had seen from unqualified candidates. I actually think some automation is helpful in evaluating them more rigorously.
The last time I posted on HN in the 1-st of the month hiring post, I got around 2 thousand resumes. Pretty much all of them were this kind of: "Increased the performance of the service by 23.123213%" collection of bullet points.
PS: I replied to most of them, I think, but I'm sorry if I missed somebody :(
Before the resume ends up in the hiring manager's inbox it needs to be picked by the recruiter from literally hundreds of others. The recruiter uses HR software to determine the match (usually the percentage), and then picks top 5% or top 20 or whatever highest ranked resumes.
It actually is important and if I was hiring you I'd find it useful to get a more comprehensive understanding of your experience, especially if there's something I'm aware is a very challenging problem to solve. And it would provide more things to cross-examine in interviews to make sure it's not fake. The idea that people hiring are saving time by not reading an extra resume page when deciding on someone that will hopefully work there for years is ridiculous.
For some reason that's the minority opinion because everything has to be dumbed down now.
And how is a resume with the most important or recent work highlighted and at the top worse than a resume with that plus the rest of your experience after it?
that's the loop though. if GPT does the screening, people learn to write for GPT. once that loop exists, why would the company selling the filter want it gone?
Probably gonna get downvoted for this, but when you give an anecdote you don't have to preface it with "anecdata, n=1 sample size".
We know it's from your individual experience because it's a story about your individual experience. We've been doing this for all of human history. This is some kind of strange milieu of trying to always sound scientific, or it's fear of the "well akshually I'm gonna need to see a random placebo controlled trial", which is equally annoying.
It became necessary because, for years (decades), if you made a comment online that your personal experience informed you in such-and-such a way, the first comment would always be some moronic comment dismissing that personal experience because it is just one person’s experience. So, to avoid that idiocy, people started to preface their anecdotes by acknowledging that they know it is an anecdote. It sets the tone for the conversation.
Yeah but we can't let the insufferable dictate our way of speaking. In spoken language I hear it mainly by people that don't have a scientific background trying to sound more scientific.
I’ve been told explicitly to do what GP said, so it’s perhaps becoming word-of-mouth career advice at this point. In my case it told a different career story that is maybe more easily digestible.
Yep, and the price point theyre looking at is 95% of an engineer.
Once they get people hooked, deskilled, and paying, the money ratchet only tightens.
And the companies KNOW that theyre replacing engineers, or trying to. So each engineer replaced is X salary a year they now have available, so make it back in SaaS LLM tokens.
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