MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
What are the key bottlenecks for AI Agent development in the next 1–2 years?
by jasonwangwcy | 2025-04-29 05:50:22+00:00
I've been following the progress of AI Agent systems like Devin (by Cognition), AutoGen, and OpenAI's GPTs.

I’m curious: what do you think will be the key bottlenecks for AI Agents over the next 1–2 years? Will it be reasoning capabilities, long-term task planning, toolchain integration, or something else?

If someone were to build in this space today, which technical challenges or application areas would be the most worthwhile to tackle?

(For context: I’m an engineer exploring how to apply AI Agents to SaaS product development, with a particular interest in reasoning, multi-step tasks, and tool usage.)

Would love to hear your thoughts, and any resources you'd recommend digging into. Thanks!
Show HN: Tailor My Resume – 1-click resume tailoring that works on any job board
by aarontjdev | 2025-04-29 05:50:51+00:00
Hi HN,

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Most resume tools make you copy and paste into a text box or only work on specific job boards. I wanted something that works everywhere with minimal friction.

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You'll need to sign in to try it out (Google or email auth). We offer a 3-day free trial — you’ll start on a subscription, but you can cancel any time before the trial ends.

I'm looking for honest feedback — on the product, onboarding, UX, or anything else. Happy to answer questions or go deeper on any part of the build.

Thanks!
by treetalker | 2025-04-29 05:52:45+00:00
Practicing appellate lawyer here.

As it so happens, just today I decided to give GPT 4o (through Kagi Assistant) a whirl on a legal issue I was dealing with, purely as an experiment. I gave it a custom context prompt (i.e., it was one of Kagi's custom agents/assistants). The context prompt was actually taken verbatim from another HN post from today (the one about querying the Apollonian oracle, if anyone saw that one).

I was impressed with the framework it told itself (and me) it would use to answer my question and draft a sample motion / outline based on that answer. By "impressed," I mean that it was basically the pattern that a 1L would be taught in a respectable legal rhetoric course (yet many practicing lawyers can't manage to do).

And then it invented cases to support the point I tried to make. Or it cited the name of an actual case but gave the citation of another, and offered holdings that were not part of either case. And it took me, a professional, several rounds to get the thing to stop offering bullshit and admit that it couldn't properly answer and handle my query.

I would not be surprised that laypersons would trust an AI (read: LLM) answer over a competent lawyer's answer: the layperson has no expertise to judge; the LLM is probably erring toward sycophantism, thus building trust unbeknownst to the layperson; and the answer is both faster and (far) less expensive. But you get what you pay for.

Even lawyers need lawyers, and that's both a truth and an evergreen source of jokes and stories for us.

Every legal application of LLMs I've seen is utter trash and I wouldn't trust them under any circumstances. Stay far away and beware.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-29 06:00:37+00:00
More like variable confounding satire.

Last year Australian university published paper stating that solar panels on roofs are increasing temperature in cities...

They probably too, drank a lot of Champaign, with little sprinkle of chatgpt on top.

What a time to be alive!

Edit: https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/10/rooftop-solar-...

Temperature watts vs temperature celsius. Basic middle school curriculum misunderstanding. Unfortunately it became fact, from what i googled right now... Ahhh

Edit2: Article literally says "...used mesoscale (weather system) simulations due to the absence of available observational data for rooftop photovoltaic solar panels (RPVSPs)..."
by ty6853 | 2025-04-29 06:01:30+00:00
Even filings like this one appear to purjure them then, as they claim the owner of the business at starlink.com is Starlink Services LLC [0]. The FCC petition as a telecom carrier appears to be for Starlink Services LLC [1]. This is in addition to various state bids for service I found to be for the company 'Starlink Services LLC.'

The body of the evidence as far as I can tell suggests Starlink is a separate company even if employees that produce much of its products work for a different company.

[0] https://apiproxy.utc.wa.gov/cases/GetDocument?docID=10&year=...

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/1020316268311/1
by lutusp | 2025-04-29 06:02:35+00:00
> In short, if the scientist has no reason to doubt the null hypothesis then there is no reason to test.

On the contrary, that's the point at which positive evidence may contradict the null hypothesis, assuming it exists. But the null hypothesis must be the default initial assumption.

My point is that if the scientist assumes anything but the null hypothesis a priori, it's not science, it's marketing. This is why the null hypothesis is the default initial position in any legitimate scientific investigation.

The alternative is to assume the truth of a theory and seek falsifying evidence. But this may require proof of a negative, which is frequently impossible. I can't prove Bigfoot's nonexistence, but this failure doesn't support Bigfoot's existence.
by nabla9 | 2025-04-29 06:02:50+00:00
Business journalist doing their best to avoid mentioning the obvious. Peter Thiel bet early on Trump. He is the grey eminence behind JD Vance, Musk's old friend who as invested into his businesses.

Of course Palantir will soar when it hoovers all government contracts.

Donald Trump Was Peter Thiel’s Most Successful Investment https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/peter-thiel-don...
by otterley | 2025-04-29 06:03:59+00:00
The DeCSS case actually went to court (Bunner case), though it wasn’t about the T-shirt. It was a civil case based on trade secret law, not DMCA. The trial court assumed that sharing a trade secret without the permission of the secret’s owner is unlawful. That assumption wasn’t challenged.

That law is consistent with trade secret law in general. The First Amendment does not require trade secrets to lose all protection. If it did, you could freely disclose your own employer’s secrets without penalty.
by cynicalpeace | 2025-04-29 06:04:14+00:00
Living in Maine makes you prepared for this type of stuff.

It happens every winter. When I was a kid, we once went 2 weeks without electricity.

Wood stove becomes an obvious necessity. Not just for staying warm. For cooking.

Chickens in the backyard too.

Those moments show you that being self-sufficient is an extremely important skill, and while we're not totally self sufficient in those moments, we get pretty darn close.

Really makes you appreciate the pre-electric era.

People cut down forests with axes. Pulled the stumps out with oxen. Cut the lumber with hand saws. Chiseled foundations with pickaxes. Etc, etc.

With the constant threat of Nuclear War, there's a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads that we will return to this era.

That makes it all the more important to learn these skills.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-29 06:04:45+00:00
That will be a relief. Though if I may rant a bit to a bikeshed:

I really hate that thr naming scheme of "people mover" was probably part of the reason this project is coming next year and not 2035. The phrase itself just oozes this sentiment that no one politically involved was allowed to say "train" or "rail" so it doesn't scare off investors.
by mzi | 2025-04-29 06:04:50+00:00
It was formulated a little different. But this was the 2002 mandate:

1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols — doesn’t matter.

5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7. Thank you; have a nice day!
by thot_experiment | 2025-04-29 06:05:34+00:00
idk, if you have a decent grasp of the fundamentals you can get up to speed these days in pretty much whatever language/sub discipline with a couple days of hard study with LLMs

i made the transition from embedded C to low level tensor wrangling in about a week, it takes some work but it's definitely doable, of course i'm not an expert but it's enough time to go pretty deep, i went from "yeah i've run ollama" to optimizing inference code to get research papers to run on consumer hardware

if the task is to get up to speed on C++ enough to teach undergrads and you're a reasonably competent academic programmer who gives at least half a shit about the task at hand a weekend is plenty
by WalterBright | 2025-04-29 06:07:53+00:00
I caveat my remarks with although I've have studed the Rust specification, I have not written a line of Rust code.

I was quite intrigued with the borrow checker, and set about learning about it. While D cannot be retrofitted with a borrow checker, it can be enhanced with it. A borrow checker has nothing tying it to the Rust syntax, so it should work.

So I implemented a borrow checker for D, and it is enabled by adding the `@live` annotation for a function, which turns on the borrow checker for that function. There are no syntax or semantic changes to the language, other than laying on a borrow checker.

Yes, it does data flow analysis, has semantic scopes, yup. It issues errors in the right places, although the error messages are rather basic.

In my personal coding style, I have gravitated towards following the borrow checker rules. I like it. But it doesn't work for everything.

It reminds me of OOP. OOP was sold as the answer to every programming problem. Many OOP languages appeared. But, eventually, things died down and OOP became just another tool in the toolbox. D and C++ support OOP, too.

I predict that over time the borrow checker will become just another tool in the toolbox, and it'll be used for algorithms and data structures where it makes sense, and other methods will be used where it doesn't.

I've been around to see a lot of fashions in programming, which is most likely why D is a bit of a polyglot language :-/

I can also say confidently that the #1 method to combat memory safety errors is array bounds checking. The #2 method is guaranteed initialization of variables. The #3 is stop doing pointer arithmetic (use arrays and ref's instead).

The language can nail that down for you (D does). What's left are memory allocation errors. Garbage collection fixes that.
by 7bit | 2025-04-29 06:09:50+00:00
Men are genetically stronger. That's a sober fact. But if it's alright to have women in the army, then why is then there a higher standard for men? Minority is a bad excuse, because in the army, people die. So does the army accept lower baselines for women, because they don't care when they die in the conflict? Or is it more that the higher standard applied to men is indeed too high as a baseline?
by neonsunset | 2025-04-29 06:09:51+00:00
Structs in C# or F# are not low-level per se, they simply are a choice and used frequently in gamedev. So is stackalloc because using it is just 'var things = (stackalloc Thing[5])' where the type of `things` is Span<Thing>. The keyword is a bit niche but it's very normal to see it in code that cares about avoiding allocations.

Note that going more hands-on with these is not the same as violating memory safety - C# even has ref and byreflike struct lifetime analysis specifically to ensure this not an issue (https://em-tg.github.io/csborrow/).
by serbuvlad | 2025-04-29 06:10:55+00:00
I've always thought about this. In my mind there are two ways a language can guarantee memory safety:

* Simply check all array accesses and pointer de references and panic if we are out of bounds and panic/throw an exception/etc. if we are doing something wrong.

* Guarantee at compile-time that we are always accessing valid memory, to prevent even those panics.

Rust makes a lot of effort to reach the second goal, but, since it gives you integers and arrays, it makes the problem fundamentally insoluble.

The memory it wants so hard to regulate access to is just an array, and a pointer is just an index.
by otterley | 2025-04-29 06:10:57+00:00
Courts have never equated code with speech in such a way that it’s protected the same way as, say, political speech. People have been making the argument that “code is speech” (without understanding that not all speech is treated alike by our legal system) since DMCA was still being drafted 20+ years ago, but the legal system has never seen it that way.
by vlowrian | 2025-04-29 06:11:45+00:00
As someone who prefers a solid color background, I’m always surprised by how often this simple preference leads me into bizarre rabbit holes.

Some additional examples beyond the OP:

- In the latest macOS, trying to set a custom solid color background just gives you a blinding white screen (see: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/256029958?sortBy=rank).

- GNOME removed all UI controls for setting solid color backgrounds, but still technically supports it if you manually set a bunch of config keys — which seem to randomly change between versions (see: https://www.tc3.dev/posts/2021-09-04-gnome-3-solid-color-bac...).

The pattern here seems pretty clear: a half-baked feature kept alive for niche users, rather than either properly supporting or cleanly deprecating it. Personally, I’d love to simply set an RGB value without needing to generate a custom image. But given the state of things, I’d rather have one solid, well-maintained wallpaper system than flaky background color logic that’s barely hanging on.
by jingyibo123 | 2025-04-29 06:13:30+00:00
I guess both is "factual", but both is "biased", or 'selective'.

The first part of ChatGPT's answer is correct: > The answer depends on how you define “country” — politically, legally, and practically

But ChatGPT only answers the "practical" part. While Deepseek only answers the "political" part.
by anenefan | 2025-04-29 06:14:15+00:00
I will say if you had posted a nice good bye without laying blame at any one person or the situation at hand, and the mod needed to remove it minutes afterwards - you're probably safe to read that mod has serious butt hurt and is a kiddie unsuitable to wield the little bit of power being a mod has given them, even if they're as old as 40. If they're older they could be just having a really awful day, having a terrible time with mid life crisis, or really do need to start wearing glasses so they're not wondering why the headache tablets lately look different - being older and grumpy can lead one to do rash things they might not otherwise do.
by nice_byte | 2025-04-29 06:14:24+00:00
Romania, judging from the blog URL. But this type of PhD experience feels like the norm in most of eastern-european/ex-soviet countries. In mine, getting a PhD was one of the ways to get out of compulsory military service. Both profs and students knew that, of course. So real research is very scarce. Other small details, like worshipping titles and putting out a spread for the PhD commission also feel familiar.

Ironically, the only one of my university friends who I'd regard as "actual PhD material" ended up _not_ finishing their PhD in 3yrs time (I surmise because they picked a topic they _actually_ thought worthy) and went to serve in the army.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-29 06:17:40+00:00
Article is deeply misleading, pretending that Brightline West has proceeded many times faster than CA HSR, when that is not at all true. While the particular operator and name are relatively recent, that project has been through many names and operators, each of which has built on the progress done by the previous one, and, despite being much simpler project than CA HSR, is also older than CA HSR, starting as Desert Xpress in 2005 (the ballot measure which set up the California High Speed Rail Authority and outlined the basic concept of the project was passed in 2008.)
by 9dev | 2025-04-29 06:17:47+00:00
So, Colibri is intended to be a companion to Calibre, maybe do like 80% of what it does, but not all of it. Also, I want Colibri's core to have a fully clean collar: It handles your personal books, but will not be able to automatically de-DRM books and such. However, the way book assets work, you're of course free to just attach an encrypted AZW3 file to a book!

> Are these ebooks supported and does it only supports metadata, what about the content search for these ebooks?

Have you seen https://github.com/colibri-hq/colibri/issues/45? Content search is planned, but requires access to a book's text content, obviously. My recommendation would be to use Calibre to strip DRM and convert the books to epub/mobi files, and import those to Colibri; this has the general benefit of ensuring access to content you bought without depending on Amazon's good will :-)
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-29 06:18:24+00:00
Banning secret numbers is dumb, but it's also the part of the law which is the most completely ineffective. Do you think you can find a copy of DeCSS on the internet? Of course you can.

The actual problem is the fair use problem, because it prevents you from e.g. creating a third party Netflix or Twitter client without the corporation's approval. Which in turn forces you to use their app and puts them in control of recommendations, keeps you within a walled garden instead of exposing you to other voices, etc. It's a mechanism to monopolize the marketplace of ideas.

Of course, Apple et al have turned this against the creators in order to extract their vig, which is a related problem.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-04-29 06:18:50+00:00
Bugs are great chances to learn.

What might be fun is figuring out all the ways this bug could have been avoided.

Another way to avoid this problem would have been using a form of “content addressable storage”. For those who are new, this is just a fancy way of saying make sure to store/distribute the hash (ex. Sha256) of what you’re distributing and store it on disk in a way that content can be effectively deduplicated by name.

It’s probably not so easy as to make it a rule, but most of the time, an update download should probably do this
by donatj | 2025-04-29 06:19:33+00:00
I am always kind of a stickler about code reviews. I once had a manager tell me that I should leave more to QA with an offhand comment along the lines of "what is the worst that could happen" to which I replied without missing a beat "We all lose our jobs. We are always one bad line of code away from losing our jobs"

The number of times I have caught junior or even experienced devs writing potential PII leaks is absolutely wild. It's just crazy easy in most systems to open yourself up to potential legal issues.
by Denzel | 2025-04-29 06:20:39+00:00
Thank you for narrowing your claims, you might want to update your post at the top of the thread to call out your ADV/ACV assumption.

I appreciate all the experience and advice you’re offering on this thread! Take my feedback as a nitpick: as I was reading through your top post, my initial thought was “this isn’t true all the time” because I spent 6 years in 2 separate startups with significant and successful outbound sales where our ADV > $100k.

One company stayed private and profitable while driving revenue north of $80M/yr; and the other company sold enough long-term enterprise contracts to be acquired by a bigger $B company.

Context is king.
Show HN: I built a tool to automate estimate creation
by jusi | 2025-04-29 06:21:27+00:00
Hey HN,

I’m a software engineer based in Switzerland, working a regular 9–5 and doing some freelancing on the side. Balancing both can get pretty stressful, so I looked for ways to save time and focus on the parts that actually bring value.

That’s why I built my latest tool: Quotka.

Quotka helps freelancers and small teams create professional quotes quickly and accurately. You just input the client info and a short project description, and the AI generates a detailed quote with tasks and estimated time. You can customize it, export it as a PDF, or send it directly to the client via email.

Now, instead of spending hours tweaking a Word template, I can focus on doing actual work in my free time.

I’d love to get your feedback to help improve Quotka. What do you think? Is there anything I’m missing?

Happy to answer your questions. :)
by littlecranky67 | 2025-04-29 06:21:51+00:00
We had power on the canary islands (belong to spain, but located in the atlantic ocean ~80km west of Africa) since it is an independent grid. But couple of hours into the blackout (starting 5-6pm local time), internet issues occured - with confirmed multiple landline providers going offline (Digi, Movistar) while others seems to continue to work (Vodafone). Also some cellular 5G were affected, otheres continued. Interested to see the postmorten - I suspect after 8-10h the data center's diesel generators on the peninsula that route the traffic ran empty. Internet operation resumed during the night (for me around 1am).
by watwut | 2025-04-29 06:22:21+00:00
Duolingo never even claimed they teach up to fluency. How much they promiss depends on language, but most developed one ends with B1.

The fluency complaint is completely nonsensical. There is no in person class that would make you fluent, there is no textbook that would make you fluent.

It is possible to criticize Duolingo, but the fluency claim kind of show you don't know what you talk about.
by Animats | 2025-04-29 06:24:50+00:00
Weak is very helpful in preventing ownership loops which prevent deallocation. Weak plus RefCell lets you do back pointers cleanly. You call ".borrow()" to get access to the data protected by a RefCell. The run-time borrow panics if someone else is using the data item. This prevents two mutable pointers to the same data, which Rust requires.

Static analysis could potentially check for those potential panics at compile time. If that was implemented, the run time check, and the potential for a panic, would go away. It's not hard to check, provided that all borrows have limited scope. You just have to determine, conservatively, that no two borrow scopes for the same thing overlap.

If you had that check, it would be possible to have something that behaves like RefCell, but is checked entirely at compile time. Then you know you're free of potential double-borrow panics.

I started a discussion on this on a Rust forum. A problem is that you have to perform that check after template expansion, and the Rust compiler is not set up to do global analysis after template expansion. This idea needs further development.

This check belongs to the same set of checks which prevent deadlocking a mutex against itself. There's been some work on Rust static deadlock analysis, but it's still a research topic.
by watwut | 2025-04-29 06:25:03+00:00
It actually made me able to watch shows in Spanish. It just happened as a result of me doing Duolingo basically like a game.

I was still in the middle of Spanish course when I realize I can sorta kinda watch and understand some shows, so I watched. (The watching itself then made me progress mucj further, but it would not happen without duolingo).