MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjc50 | 2025-04-07 15:31:21+00:00
> there is no OS I'm aware of that will threaten Unix's dominance any time soon

True, but irrelevant?

> What kinds of programming abstractions produce code that runs well on a microprocessor

.. securely. Yes, this can be done in C-with-proofs (sel4), but the cost is rather high.

To a certain extent microprocessors have co-evolved with C because of the need to run the same code that already exists. And existing systems force new work to be done with C linkage. But the ongoing CVE pressure is never going to go away.
by zvitiate | 2025-04-07 15:31:28+00:00
What if you were in an environment where you had to play Minecraft for say, an hour. Do you think your child brain would've eventually tried enough things (or had your finger slip and stay on the mouse a little extra while), noticed that hitting a block caused an animation, (maybe even connect it with the fact that your cursor highlights individual blocks with a black box,) decide to explore that further, and eventually mine a block? Your example doesn't speak to this situation at all.
by lrock1 | 2025-04-07 15:31:44+00:00
Workhelix | www.workhelix.com | San Francisco, CA.

Workhelix is a tech-enabled services company with a single goal: helping organizations get the most out of their AI investments. Our people and software combine to give leaders answers to the three critical questions about the business value of AI: * Where are our top opportunities to create value with AI? * Are our current efforts actually delivering? What’s their ROI? * How can we accelerate and increase the benefits of our AI? Renowned AI and Economics thinkers including Andrew Ng, and cofounders Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson stand proudly behind our mission.

Our team is 12 full-time employees and growing quickly. Our stack is mostly Python, PostgreSQL & AWS.

We are looking for several roles:

---> A Forward-Deployed Strategist to drive end-to-end client engagements

---> A Forward-Deployed Software Engineer to deliver technical solutions to client teams and develop scalable software and infrastructure

---> A Tech Lead who can provide leadership and technical oversight for a (growing!) team of engineers.

---> A Marketing Manager who can lead our marketing strategy by creating compelling content and GTM materials, managing social media and executing campaigns and events.

---> An Enterprise Account Executive with experience selling SaaS products to c-suite executives.

Apply at the link below or feel free to email our recruiter at hiring at workhelix dot com with questions! https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/workhelix
by sanderjd | 2025-04-07 15:31:49+00:00
Yeah the problem is that as soon as you're doing something that is bigger than like 8 people, it just doesn't really work anymore. Now people sitting in the room with you must coordinate with people sitting outside the room, and so either you have to listen to that, which is distracting, or they have to go elsewhere to do meetings and calls, which breaks the whole magic of the setup. In a big or even medium-sized company, it's nearly impossible to subdivide teams so well that you have small teams like this who are able to work with total autonomy for most of their time.

This is actually something I'm cautiously optimistic about with the advent of AI tooling. Maybe we can make a 5-10 person company work for a much wider range of businesses now? I think it needs to be planned from the start, as all the pressure from investors and just the status quo is to grow headcount at least to an order of magnitude or so larger than that.

But I do think I'd love to work in a very small business (or partnership, or co-op) that is explicitly not trying to grow bigger than a team all working directly together.
by blokey | 2025-04-07 15:32:23+00:00
The risk is that Apple code sign's all the executables they ship and that someone could try to use GPLv3 to force Apple to either give them their signing keys to run their own version (the anti-tivo clauses) or that it would restrict Apple from suing someone for patent infringement because they've shipped GPLv3 software.

Valid or not in anyone else's opinion, it doesn't really matter, the risk that someone will attempt to use a court to enforce one of these tends to mean companies don't want to even go near it.

Working in a Bank we won't touch anything GPL3, even to build our software/services or mobile app, because we don't want to even open that Pandora's box.

We don't have to find out if a court would try to force us to release our signing keys if we don't use or ship any code that contains language that could in some ways be phrased to do that.
by yummypaint | 2025-04-07 15:32:49+00:00
Technologically speaking, climate change, world hunger, poverty, peace, etc are all solved problems already. Unfortunately these aren't technical problems. They are social, political, and economic in nature.

The world has had the means to globally end poverty and hunger for decades, but we haven't. We know exactly and quantitatively what is needed to meet climate goals, but we won't do it. Groups of people who have been murdering each other for generations could choose to stop tomorrow and live in peace forever after, but they refuse. These are as far from technological problems as one can get.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-07 15:33:05+00:00
> Whether the unsafety should be blamed on the outside code that's allowed to create a 0-valued NonZero<…> or on the code that requires this purported invariant in the first place is ultimately a matter of judgment, that people may freely disagree about.

It's not, though. NonZero<T> has an invariant that a zero value is undefined behavior. Therefore, any API which allows for the ability to create one must be unsafe. This is a very straightforward case.
by bzmrgonz | 2025-04-07 15:34:13+00:00
I remember using comodo at one time. Is fort the best you've had throughout the years? I've been searching for a robust in-host firewall for an ancient win2k8 server I cannot shutdown. I remember comodo had a verbose setting which told you what was being being blocked when it was being blocked. Was very helpful in troubleshooting.
by smugglerFlynn | 2025-04-07 15:34:14+00:00
CTO is "management" by definition. Do you mean to say most companies have non-technical CTOs who treat engineering as commodity?

That might have been the case with CIO/CTOs coming from pre-2010s era where they indeed were maintaining landscapes built from commodities or vendor solutions (i.e. on-prem server racks, CRM and ERP systems, networks, end user devices, subscriptions to cloud applications etc - some still do). Modern CTOs managing complex tech landscapes that were partially built in-house are rarely like that.

In my experience any CTO ties engineering, be it commodity or not, to value which is highlighted in the article, or get replaced. That's a key part of their role, if not 80% of it. If you think your CTO is underselling engineering contributions, he's either not doing a good job of making that value visible, or you overestimate these contributions.
by riehwvfbk | 2025-04-07 15:34:21+00:00
It's not a monoculture, but there aren't many places on a typical tourist's itinerary that aren't also 3-5x the price of a European, Asian, South American, or Caribbean destination. It doesn't make US tourism bad, but at a 5x price differential one may weigh whether they want to see the Grand Canyon or Hawaii that much more than the Andes or Malta. There may be underappreciated gems in the US, but the fact that they are underappreciated also means they aren't popular destinations for mass tourism.
Show HN: I created a tool that aligns your CV with a job requirement
by miloo94 | 2025-04-07 15:35:01+00:00
Hey HN,

This is my first post on HackerNews ever, and honestly I’ve been contemplating for a long while whether to post this. Usually, the quality of the things that people present here is very high (as is the level of discussion) and I became very self-conscious about the value of my work, but here goes nothing.

After submitting thousands of CVs in the recent months and getting an automatic rejection in 99% of the cases, I thought why not create a tool that will give me at least some direction where I can improve my CV and estimate how well I fit the criteria of a given job offer. The result of this is the app that I called reqmatch. This is the first time I dabbled in web development, as my expertise lies in iOS Development, but I am very much open to criticism, and what HNs general thoughts about this project are. If you want to see me using it, you can watch a short video that I posted here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7314927920626466816-..., but the general premise of the app is very simple and I encourage you to try it :)
by woodruffw | 2025-04-07 15:35:34+00:00
> "Panics are not crashes" is a new one. I'm referring to the fact that the rust code panics at the slightest sign of discomfort.

In this context, I'm using "crash" to mean something like a program fault, i.e. an uncontrolled termination orchestrated by the kernel rather than the program itself. Rust programs generally terminate in a controlled manner, even if that manner is analogous to an unchecked exception.

It's also not my experience that Rust code, on average, panics on abnormal inputs. I've seen it happen, but the presence of e.g. safe iterators and access APIs means that you see a lot less of the "crash from invalid offset or index" behavior you see in C codebases.

(However, as pointed out in the adjacent thread, none of this really has anything to do with what "safe" means in Rust; controlled termination is one way to preserve safety, but idiomatic Rust codebases tend to lean much more heavily in the "error and result types for everything" direction. This in and of itself is arguably non-ideal in some cases.)
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-07 15:35:43+00:00
"It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?"

"How do you define it?" is an oft-repeated and weak argument against regulation used by online commenters who likely are defending a self-interest in maintaining tha status quo behaviour of so-called "tech" companies.

Online advertising services are obviously capable of being defined as these are bought by advertisers and sold by so-called "tech" companies every day. These so-called "tech" companies define "products" and "services", offered for "free", all the time. The commercial purpose is facilitation of online advertising. This can be regulated.

Before the internet was opened to the public, commercial use was prohibited. Today, HN commenters would no doubt try to suggest that defining what is and is not "commercial use" would be "impossible". But it's too late. It was already done.

The uncomfortable truth for so-called "tech" companies is that _any_ regulation that affects the ability to collect data, conduct surveillance and assist the injection of advertising into people's "user experience" could have a significant impact on their "business model". Hence they try to argue _any_ regulation is unworkable. All-or-nothing. Perfect, 100% solution or nothing at all.

But regulation does not have to define _all_ advertising. It may only define advertising that meets certain criteria. All-or-nothing thinking is nonsensical in this context. By analogy, when so-called "tech" companies propose alleged "solutions" for privacy issues, do they propose one solution that offers total, complete "privacy". How do we even define "privacy". What they propose is usually some incremental improvement.

It is possible to limit online advertising through rules and regulations. Of course this is a unacceptable proposition for so-called "tech" companies. Their only viable "business model" depends on usurping the bandwidth of internet subscribers for surreptitious, unwanted data collection, real-time surveillance and online advertising.
by iLemming | 2025-04-07 15:36:17+00:00
How old are you? You get to your forties as a software engineer, and you'd realize how taxing this occupation is. Your eyesight may deteriorate; your neck and spine may experience chronic pain; you could develop digestive and kidney problems from prolonged immobility; you might get hemorrhoids and carpal tunnel syndrome; your immune system could weaken from constant stress and may cause depression. The number of different "solutions" for solving ergonomics alone is evidence of how difficult a career as a software engineer is, both - mentally and physically.
by lsaferite | 2025-04-07 15:36:47+00:00
Benefit: A standard and purpose driven protocol for connecting agents (MCP Host/MCP Clients) to tools, resources, and prompts (MCP Server) that also exposes LLM services to said MCP Servers.

The alternative you suggest is manually integrating each set of tools or data?

Or maybe there's some misunderstanding about MCP? MCP currently has 2 transports, stdio and HTTP+SEE. The second one is, in fact, a "network-accessible API" as you call out.
by fsociety | 2025-04-07 15:37:04+00:00
Upvotes for you. I have also worked a ton of odd jobs out of necessity. Many doing things that would frankly disgust most people, or people would say is a worker’s right violation, or is a safety violation. I enjoyed these jobs more despite the conditions.

Financially it is great, no doubt about that. Take away the money and it’s a terrible job - despite loving programming, design, and engineering. And I mean, I love design, programming, ambiguity, and the constant learning required.

My largest source of sanity in this career is to spend extra time at work doing the things that I love in my position. Ironically, I get high performance ratings because of this - but have to fight to spend my time on it.

Modern tech companies and culture suck, even the best ones that I praise. I can’t even blame anyone at this point because it is hard and I have not started a company that tries to be better. I'm not even sure I would do better, to be honest.
by cromulent | 2025-04-07 15:38:17+00:00
> Unfortunately, news of the 1582 promulgation had not yet reached the developers of Lotus 1-2-3, so they assumed that 1900 (being a multiple of 4) was a leap year.

Joel Spolsky mentions a more charitable take on this from Ed Fries:

> Lotus had to fit in 640K. That’s not a lot of memory. If you ignore 1900, you can figure out if a given year is a leap year just by looking to see if the rightmost two bits are zero. That’s really fast and easy. The Lotus guys probably figured it didn’t matter to be wrong for those two months way in the past.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
by rickdeckard | 2025-04-07 15:38:29+00:00
> None of this is terrifying and seems overblown. I read the patent grant [..]

Considering that you entered this discussion instantly claiming that others are wrong without having even read the license in question makes this conversation rather..."open-ended"

> Also, the right of revocation only applies if the DNG implementor tries to sue Adobe. Why would they do that?

As I wrote above, Adobe reserves the right to use every patent that happens to be used to create this DNG from your design at no cost, and will revoke your license if you disagree i.e. with what they do with it.

> Occam's razor here suggests [..]

Or, as I suggested, it's simply hard to make a case in favor of developing and maintaining DNG with all that burden if you anyway have to support RAW
by bglazer | 2025-04-07 15:38:37+00:00
Yes, I suspect that engineering the loss and hyperparams could eventually get this to work. However, I was hoping the model would help me get to a more fundamental insight into why the training falls into bad minima. Like the Wasserstein GAN is a principled change to the GAN that improves stability, not just fiddling around with Adam’s beta parameter.

The reason I expected better mathematical reasoning is because the companies making them are very loudly proclaiming that these models are capable of high level mathematical reasoning.

And yes the fact I don’t have to look at matplotlib documentation anymore makes these models extremely useful already, but thats qualitatively different from having Putnam prize winning reasoning ability
by afpx | 2025-04-07 15:38:43+00:00
I developed some significant executive functioning issues over the past 15 years. The symptoms started shortly after I started taking bipolar 2 medications.

I suspected that it was from the APs, so I looked for research and found a few papers that showed links between APs and gray matter loss. So, I stopped taking the APs (the side-effects were really bad, anyway), but my mind hasn't really recovered though.

It's extremely frustrating. I have to constantly write 'to do' lists. And, I have to put my thinking down on paper. I used to be able to hold big models in my mind and just code. It's slowed down my productivity probably 70%.
by imtringued | 2025-04-07 15:38:54+00:00
Parametric programming problems are problems whose structure (most often sparsity structure) is known.

Most quadratic and linear programming solvers assume a fully generic problem structure. You give them any matrix and they'll spit out an answer. This means that internally they must also use generic matrix operations.

If you know the full structure of the optimization problem and how it changes with respect to changes in parameters, you could in principle compile a unique solver that is fully specialized to the parameterized problem. If your problem is particularly simple, you could even enumerate all possible answers in a lookup table.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametric_programming

Now here is the problem: While it is not that difficult to find the sparsity pattern of the optimization problem and choose the appropriate sparse matrix library based on the problem, actually producing a unique program that does nothing but solve your parametric optimization problem is a pipe dream. Most approaches involve a lot of human ingenuity to find exploitable structures in specific problems that become useless the moment you change the problem even a little bit.

So here is my suggestion: figure out how to use genetic programming to produce fast quadratic programming solvers to specific problems.

Note that you don't necessarily need a perfect solution since you can always run a bunch of QP steps on an initial guess to nudge it towards convergence. The goal would be to reduce the number of these steps to as close to zero as possible.
by 9rx | 2025-04-07 15:39:02+00:00
> businesses and governments pay for a ton of stuff.

Yes, that was addressed in the second half of the comment. But ultimately business must serve consumers – unless angel money is paying for. If you sell to a business, who sells to a business, who sells to a business, who sells to a business collecting angel checks you are still dependent on angel money.

Government too is effectively the angel model. The money will be there even if the consumer isn't being served anything they want to pay for.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-07 15:39:08+00:00
Lol there is no due process at the border for a simple imprisonment, it is 'administrative' and I have been held up to a day or so without any sort of hearing. I pulled my FBI record from the last time they tossed me in immigration holding cell, there is no record of it. They don't allow you to have a phone, they do not let you have an attorney, and they do not document they've imprisoned you. They lock you away and that is that, it is your word against theirs and your word from behind a jail cell. You will never prevail in such a situation, and if you complain outside of some place like HN the vast majority of people will angrily ask what you did wrong and that there 'must be more to the story' so you rarely even bring it up.

I do not think most people can conceive just how common and deranged the situation is, and that not only that the documentation is so poor and that most of the people this happens to will not speak up, either because no one will believe them or because they are not a citizen and are afraid it will result in reprisal.
by KWxIUElW8Xt0tD9 | 2025-04-07 15:39:33+00:00
Britannica: "The Council of Nicaea in 325 decreed that Easter should be observed on the first Sunday following the first full moon after the spring equinox (March 21). Easter, therefore, can fall on any Sunday between March 22 and April 25."

The correct date for Easter was a huge deal in the early Church. The Pope brought Easter back into conformity with Nicaea by reforming the calendar -- astronomical knowledge had improved a lot over the centuries.
by nradov | 2025-04-07 15:39:59+00:00
The Biden administration coerced social media and technology companies into censoring user content. There was an implied threat that if the companies didn't comply then the administration would hit them in other ways. This was a violation of the spirit of the First Amendment, although not technically illegal.

https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/06/justices-side-with-biden-...

(Yes, I am aware that other administrations have also attempted various forms of censorship so let's not waste time on whataboutism.)
by naasking | 2025-04-07 15:40:16+00:00
> The weird thing about it though is that whatever the dark matter is it has to be spread out.

In fact, they'd have to be so spread out that rotation curves remain flat past a million light years [1]. There seems to be no plausible particle dark matter distribution that can satisfy all of the necessary constraints at this point.

[1] https://tritonstation.com/2024/06/18/rotation-curves-still-f...
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-07 15:40:27+00:00
Here's a program that uses only std::unique_ptr:

#include<iostream> #include<memory> int main() { std::unique_ptr<int> null_ptr; std::cout << *null_ptr << std::endl; // Undefined behavior }

Clang 20 compiles this code with `-std=c++23 -Wall -Werror`. If you add -fsanitize=undefined, it will print

==1==ERROR: UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer: SEGV on unknown address 0x000000000000 (pc 0x55589736d8ea bp 0x7ffe04a94920 sp 0x7ffe04a948d0 T1)

or similar.
by lolinder | 2025-04-07 15:41:09+00:00
Every project I've seen of theirs has been like this one: take an existing animal and tweak its genome very slightly to make it look kinda like the extinct one, then declare that they've brought back the extinct species. Never mind that it's still just a wolf with 14 very specific genes tweaked.

That could be just a limitation of the current technology and one that they're working on fixing—maybe some day they plan to bring back large amounts of lost genetic diversity—but their PR around it definitely communicates that they see this as the de-extinction project itself, which sure does make it look like they're only really interested in building a zoo, not actually rebuilding true biodiversity.