MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by w10-1 | 2025-04-27 23:38:10+00:00
The value of a business co-founder lies in their ability to build business relationships and extract value from them.

The value of one founder to another lies in complementary skills and perspectives engaging start-up issues in a productive way, which usually means deep levels of mutual understanding and trust -- which can be antithetical to business relationships and personal comfort. So: hard.

The CEO/COO split reflects the difficulty of scaling this.

Is the solution to talk early? Maybe, or maybe that interferes with trust-building. The key thing I believe (here and elsewhere) is to avoid projecting what you want or fear into what you have. If it's important to success, validate it. For that, it helps to have people willing and able to be honest and truthful, particularly about unknown unknowns -- even if it is otherwise their mandate and mission to project confidence and gain trust.
by einpoklum | 2025-04-27 23:38:49+00:00
It is the opposite of Internet in a box. This exemplifies how, in our day and age, "The Internet" is mostly a one-sided experience where a few large organizations offer a bunch of content, which they control, for your perusal.

It would have been more "Internet in a box" if it would have helped people set up their own services and pages; and if it were extensible using other radio-capable devices.
by skydhash | 2025-04-27 23:39:06+00:00
"Writing code is easy" once you learn the tools and have thought through the design. But most people are skipping the latter two and complain about the first one.

It's like doing math proofs. It's easy when you know maths and have a theoretical solution. So, the first steps is always learning maths and think about a solution. Not jump head first into doing proofs.
by LexiMax | 2025-04-27 23:39:16+00:00
> With autism, we’re not allowed to even speculate publicly. If we do it’s a simple “I don’t know what causes it but it’s DEFINITELY not the thing that I don’t want to believe is involved.”

I think that communication could be improved on both sides.

I have had non-confrontational and earnest discussions with the kinds of people who believe vaccines cause autism. I couldn't escape the conclusion I eventually arrived at - these sorts of people started with a gut feeling or belief and worked backwards to find the justification for it.

This realization is what I feel is missing from a lot of science communication. People who are distrustful of the science aren't going to be swayed by more science unless it dovetails with their underlying gut feelings - so assuming that you can simply out-evidence any concerns is a fools errand.

But by the same token, if critics want a productive conversation, I think it's incumbent on them to be more honest about where their concerns are rooted. What is it about vaccines that makes them predisposed to not want to have them?
by TuringNYC | 2025-04-27 23:39:35+00:00
>> I recently walked away from a potential startup because my non-technical partner (MBA ideas guy) wanted an 80/20 equity split in his favor. I was the first to broach the discussion and proposed 50/50.

I'm constantly approached by "business guy" with deals like this. Here is the truth -- even 50/50 isnt enough because technically, the tech-co-founder is often doing all the upfront work and taking all the upfront risk. The business-co-founder gets a free option to do work (or not) afterwards. All upside and little downside.

IMHO good business co-founders are worth gold and make their worth obvious. They already have POs lined up, they have partnership agreements already in the works, they have VCs willing to invest based on past performance. Perhaps they already tried the business with some overseas teams doing POCs. Perhaps the business co-founder already has exits or a successful business and is willing to pay the tech-co-founder some nominal amount to show skin in the game. Those are all good signs.

If those arent the case, and the "business-co-founder" is sitting back while the other is hard at work coding a prototype -- you dont need a co-founder. Just be the CTO+CEO and hire the "business" work yourself!

In the absolute worst case, i've seen a "business-co-founder" continue to push the definition of MVP more and more and the "tech-co-founder" seeing the sunk-cost of the work they have put in, continues to ever-expand the MVP. Meanwhile the "business-co-founder" gets months or a year of free labour with a free option to participate -- or not.
by RIMR | 2025-04-27 23:40:02+00:00
Absolutely not. Free speech exists just fine on the Internet, evidenced by the fact that a site like 4chan is capable of existing in the first place. We don't have to financially support repulsive communities just to protect their ability to exist.

If 4chan were taken down by government action, I might be inclined to speak up for them in some capacity, as I don't consider that anything 4chan is currently doing illegal, but that's not the situation here. If 4chan dies because it's a poorly-managed shithole with no allies, then we can and should let it die, and rest easy knowing that it wasn't censored, it collapsed under it's own debt.
by zzo38computer | 2025-04-27 23:40:21+00:00
I think that HTTP is not the best way to do it, and that JSON is also not the best way to do it. (HTTP may work reasonably when you only want to download existing events and do not intend to continue polling.)

I also think using UUID alone isn't the best way to make the ID number. If events only come from one source, then just using autoincrementing will work (like NNTP does for article numbers within a group); being able to request by time might also work (which is also something that NNTP does).
by dzhiurgis | 2025-04-27 23:40:35+00:00
I don't get the false equivalence. You are comparing compact car vs 7 seater.

Besides 7 seaters are only must for families with 4 kids, AKA less than 10% of households.

I have both - decent sized EV and an old 7 seater. I'd never want to take it for a road trip as EV is just far more comfortable and easier to drive (autopilot 90%+). Its sole purpose is to deal with family visits and when I need to tow something like twice a year.
by the_snooze | 2025-04-27 23:41:09+00:00
>If the problem is well understood, a sentence would most likely be suffice.

I feel this falls flat for the rather well-bounded use case I really want: a universal IDE that can set up my environment with a buildable/runnable boilerplate "hello world" for arbitrary project targets. I tried vibe coding an NES 6502 "hello world" program with Cursor and it took way more steps (and missteps) than me finding an existing project on GitHub and cloning that.
by CharlesW | 2025-04-27 23:41:25+00:00
> If you already know how to code, yes AI/LLMs can speed you along at certain tasks, though be careful you don't let your skills atrophy.

This isn't a concern. Ice-cutting skills no longer have value, and cursive writing is mostly a 20th century memory. Not only have I let my assembly language skills atrophy, but I'll happily bid farewell to all of my useless CS-related skills. In 10 years, if "app developer" still involves manual coding by then, we'll talk about coding without an AI partner like we talk about coding with punch cards.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-27 23:41:45+00:00
Not really trying to make a point about predatory ads here, though I probably should have left out the bit about predation to that point. I just didn’t want people to think they were all intended to be as bad as the gambling example. I agree the fast food example is not any more predatory than, say, Factor but it (and that, actually) is an example of an advertisement intended to capture someone’s regular spending.
by kranke155 | 2025-04-27 23:41:48+00:00
I am currently accumulating evidence to file the same kind of complaint that led the Croatian Wikipedia being reformed.

But in order to do that you need X amount of edits. You also need strong evidence. There are other complaints for other Wikipedias in other languages that have become biased.

You need to take into account that the Croatian Wikipedia had become a Holocaust denial website. That’s how far things had been allowed to slide.

Just look into the fact that theyre is an article about ‘Super Dragões’ which is an ultra/hooligan mafia that runs the drug trade in Porto, Portugal. They’ve been involved in multiple murders, episodes of violence, and recently their leader was arrested.

For some reason this article kept being altered/censored by two users, over literally months. They’ve successfully removed important details that link the leader of the group to an important murder (I assume they couldn’t do more).

Every single major Portuguese org. Or political figure in Portugal is like this. You add things and then it’s a fight for months to get it to stick, if you’re lucky. Here a moderator clearly acted well, but they still managed to clean some of the detail.

Or look at the article for Valentim Loureiro, where the major crimes are there, but it’s been removed that he was in fact convicted at least once. They clean up what they can.
by pcwalton | 2025-04-27 23:42:34+00:00
> I do not understand how people expect to write convincingly that tools that reliably turn slapdash prose into median-grade idiomatic working code "provide little value".

Honestly, I'm curious why your experience is so different from mine. Approximately 50% of the time for me, LLMs hallucinate APIs, which is deeply frustrating and sometimes costs me more time than it would have taken to just look up the API. I still use them regularly, and the net value they've imparted has been overall greater than zero, but in general, my experience has been decidedly mixed.

It might be simply that my code tends to be in specialized areas in which the LLM has little training data. Still, I get regular frustrating API hallucinations even in areas you'd think would be perfect use cases, like writing Blender plugins, where the documentation is poor (so the LLM has a relatively higher advantage over reading the documentation) and examples are plentiful.

Edit: Specifically, the frustrating pattern is: (1) the LLM produces some code that contains hallucinated APIs; (2) in order to test (or even compile) that code, I need to write some extra supporting code to integrate it into my project; (3) I discover that the APIs were hallucinated because the code doesn't work; (4) now I not only have to rewrite the LLM's code, but I also have to rewrite all the supporting code I wrote, because it was based around a pattern that didn't work. Overall, this adds up to more time than if I had just written the code from scratch.
by wsve | 2025-04-27 23:43:14+00:00
That seems unlikely, the code to do that would be part of the OS or maybe even part of the hardware, not really trivial things to hack.

Plus, what could a hacker really do with voice recordings that they couldn't do more easily with keylogging? It's not exactly common for people to say their credit card info or passwords aloud, much more common to type it
by myself248 | 2025-04-27 23:43:35+00:00
Ooo, there's another one to look at. There seem to be a bunch of these with variously-overlapping goals. Two more I'm aware of:

https://bibliosansfrontieres.gitlab.io/olip/olip-documentati...

https://wrolpi.org/

And I feel like the PirateBox concept is sort of adjacent.
by satvikpendem | 2025-04-27 23:44:05+00:00
> I have a codebase in Zig and it doesn't understand Zig at all.

> I have another which is embedded C using zephyr RTOS. It doesn't understand zephyr at all and even if it could, it can't read the documentation for the different sensors nor can it plug in cables.

If you use Cursor, you can let it index the documentation for whatever language or framework you want [0], and it works exceptionally well. Don't rely solely on the LLM's training data, allow it to use external resources. I've done that and it solves many of the issues you're talking about.

[0] https://docs.cursor.com/context/@-symbols/@-docs
by TuringNYC | 2025-04-27 23:44:07+00:00
From what i'm reading, you seem like you need employees or outsourcing, not partners. Why would you even bother with this person, their incentives seem all misaligned.

Not sure if they approached you, or vice versa -- but people often approach with deals like this because they are trying to find suckers who they can dupe. And sadly, they find them.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-04-27 23:44:15+00:00
This is a very interesting comment. When I read your physics story, I thought you would be getting to the similarity to current llms. However hallucinations seem like a different issue that the young student might not have. If she incorrectly matches some scenario to a text match, maybe some hallucinations. Some humans are confident in making comments about things I don't understand, like you know who. But many humans somehow have a concept of their limited knowledge. When they add that to LLMs, that will be powerful.
by frenchmajesty | 2025-04-27 23:44:33+00:00
Hey, OP here. I view it like this: if you were to take all technical people on the market for launching a startup and plot them on a distribution to find the "valuable in early stage" subset, you would find that 35% are good enough to get a startup off the ground. They don't need to be extraordinary programmers, just good enough but with a lot of drive.*

However, for non-technical folks that are on the market, the distribution is worse. Only the top 10% ~ 15% actually have sufficient abilities to pull it off. The remaining fall into the archetype I wrote about here.

The caliber for what's in the market is skewed thus the technical person has to be a whole lot more picky than the other way around to avoid ending up with a dead weight.

[*]: This excludes specialized skills like Deep Learning or chemical bio-engineering, etc...
by mixmastamyk | 2025-04-27 23:45:07+00:00
Your critique rests heavily on a small part of the language and specificaly the odd? trick. Python has filter available as well, but you did not use it:

ys = sorted(x for x in xs if x % 2) # vs ys = sorted(filter(lambda x: x % 2, xs)) ys = ", ".join(str(y) for y in ys)

I find Python a better language in total, more regular and readable, when one-liners are avoided (though "".join() is not my favorite). I do however like shell and gleam style pipelines, a bit more than fluent style.
by n_ary | 2025-04-27 23:45:17+00:00
Honestly, I am surprised by your opinion on this matter(something also echoed a few times in other comments too). Lets switch the context for a bit… human drivers kill few thousand people, so why make so much regulations for self driving cars… why not kick out pilots entirely, autopilot can do smooth(though damaging to tires) landing/takeoffs, how about we layoff all govt workers and regulatory auditors, LLMs are better at recall and most of those paper pushers do subpar work anyways…

My analogies may sound apples to gorillas comparison but the point of automation is that they perform 100x better than human with highest safety. Just because I can DUI and get a fine does not mean a self driving car should drive without fully operational sensors, both bear same risk of killing people but one has higher regulatory restrictions.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-27 23:45:39+00:00
> that's frustrating for everyone behind them in the best case at best... and I imagine possibly even more dangerous in the worst case, no?

No.

Waymo put the myth to bed [1]. Even if you might piss off a speeder, driving the limit in speeding flow remains safer as the handling advantage (frequency) and exponentially-lower energy in the event of a collision (magnitude) dwarf other effects.

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/new-swiss-re-study-waymo
by poobear22 | 2025-04-27 23:46:08+00:00
I managed the system administrators for a high performance computing center. We took a lot of blame for the applications when in reality, often times it was poor programming on the developer's part. So, I got really tired of taking the blame and implemented statistical process control to track the mean time between failures of the jobs. I was really just shining the flashlight on production jobs and was hoping it could change the culture. It was not my job to fix their code, and the applications were developed by a different group of people with a very different culture. I thought the process control worked really well, and it did allow me to take the heat off me for random blaming of my team, when I could respond with "your job is failing XX times per year" and from there, push for a root cause analysis. But pushing against that culture was really hard, and there was a lot of "set the job to complete and I will look at it on Monday". If they do not want to conduct a root cause analysis on the failure modes for their code, I can't do much. So, even implementing some type of monitoring can have little effect if the ones who need to fix something do not support the culture. And, as I read your post, I'd think people would be looking at these business metrics a little closer or develop more sensitive metrics to catch these issues.
by Gimpei | 2025-04-27 23:46:36+00:00
Somebody has to manage the business relationships and go out and sell. Somebody has to be in charge of marketing, payroll, and PR. Somebody has to be the public face of the company, out networking and attending trade shows. If you’re a technical founder and all this sounds like fun to you, then yeah, a non-technical cofounder would not offer much. But there’s something to be said for having more time to put your head down and build.
by mparis | 2025-04-27 23:46:39+00:00
I also love rust and we use it heavily at our startup, but I agree with you and wish there were a mainstream alternative that kept much of the type system, pervasive expressions, and pattern matching while being smaller. I’d accept “very fast” even if it’s not as fast as rust.

One project I’ve seen that I don’t think is particularly active but that I really like the ideas behind is borgo. It compiles to go (thus GC) but is decidedly more rustacean.

Check it out. I hope someone makes something like this wide spread.

https://borgo-lang.github.io/

PS. I have no affiliation with borgo, just an online fan.
by susam | 2025-04-27 23:47:09+00:00
Outside of professional software jobs, for me code is also a form of personal expression. I code for work. But I also code for fun. Although there is some overlap in the experience between the two, the two forms of coding are wildly different.

I probably don't need to explain much about coding at work. It's not just about "writing code". It's about software engineering. It's a responsibility that requires professionalism, discipline, and care. The real focus isn't the code itself. The focus is first and foremost on the business problems. Good code, good algorithms, and solid engineering practices are simply means to an end in solving those problems effectively.

But in my free time, coding is something else entirely. It's a form of art and expressing myself. It all started with IBM PC Logo and GW-BASIC, where writing code to draw patterns on the screen was my way of creating art. While some kids painted with brushes and watercolours, I painted with code and CGA colours.

Coding in my leisure time is a way for me to create, explore, and express my silly ideas without the constraints of business requirements or deadlines. It's where I get to experiment, play, and bring ideas, no matter how trivial or pointless, to life purely for the joy of it. Occasionally, these small experiments evolve into something I'm comfortable sharing online. That's when I write up a README.md, add a LICENSE.md, commit the code to my repo, and push it to GitHub or Codeberg to share with others hoping fellow like-minded individuals might find joy or utility in these experiments.

Fortunately, I've been able to release a few projects that have gathered small communities of users. For example, my last such project was https://susam.net/myrgb.html which, as far as I can tell, has got about 50 to 60 daily users. It's a small number but it's not nothing. While coding for leisure has always been enjoyable, the presence of these small communities has also been quite motivating.

I think it is possible to do both with some luck. While coding for work happens almost everyday by necessity, I think coding for leisure can also happen along with it, provided other circumstances of life don't get in the way. If circumstances allow, it is certainly possible. It doesn't have to happen everyday. I know everyone has got responsibilities in their lives. I've got too. But it can happen once in a while, when a spark of inspiration strikes. For me, it usually happens on some weekends when I get an itch to explore an idea, something I feel compelled to implement and see through.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-27 23:47:22+00:00
Back in the mid-80s, it was an open secret that some AMPS transmissions could be received on ordinary TV tuners which were capable up to Channel 83 or so.

My father being a DXer and installer of a home-built Yagi and rotator system, I discovered this fairly easily. All he told me was to just guard the privacy of these people I was snooping on, because they were supposed to be private conversations after all. I never heard anything of substance anyway. It was one of the more boring surveillance activities of my misspent youth.
by osrec | 2025-04-27 23:47:58+00:00
The reluctance to use LiDAR boggles the mind. The rationale provided by Elon is also questionable (humans don't use it, so we shouldn't need to either).

The cars themselves are nothing special at best, and given the political shenanigans the CEO is pulling, it really will turn a lot of people off trusting anything associated with him.
by TuringNYC | 2025-04-27 23:48:21+00:00
>> But an engineer can't help but also factor in "i'm the one that has to build this, so how much extra work am i giving myself?" so they're design will be a compromise of what's good for the user and what can be built easily.

The PM/Strat component is like a fifth or tenth of the tech work, typically. Every product design decision often has a magnitude more of associated implementation work. The only way i'd go with this setup is if the PM/Strat person if one of these things:

- PM/Strat person already has customers lined up

- PM/Strat person has paying partners lined up

- PM/Strat person has had exits with associated aura

- PM/Strat person puts in upfront $ to compensate the tech person

- PM/Strat person takes a way lower equity
by John23832 | 2025-04-27 23:48:43+00:00
> But a valuable business co-founder brings extensive domain expertise, a network of people, sales skills, management skills, and fund-raising talent.

A valuable technical cofounder brings the skills to literally create what you're trying to sell. Otherwise, have fun selling dust. Or networking to sell nothing.

The "0 to 1" here isn't "no management to management" it's "not having a product built to having a product built".
by 0xy | 2025-04-27 23:49:38+00:00
The figures stretch back hundreds of years, ironically even to the team Democrats and Republicans were ideologically flipped.

It shows a pretty clear bias. Just reading some of the articles confirms as such. Biden's son is credibly accused of peddling influence for cash with some of the proceeds going to his father and it's a 'conspiracy theory' (with citations from far left leaning papers and no counterbalance).

This is why one of Wikipedia's founders says it is ideologically biased.
by chrisldgk | 2025-04-27 23:49:42+00:00
Have you ever worked in a monorepo? With at least 5 apps and at least 5 packages, each with direct dependencies, devDependencies and testing libraries? The amount of packages you’ll need to download for a full dev environment can get really big really quickly, even if your end-user bundle doesn’t have many dependencies at all. I’ve worked on projects where an npm install took five minutes and a bun install took 10 seconds. In the real world this makes a big difference.