MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diggan | 2025-04-24 12:51:56+00:00
> we'll never really see a decent open source model under the strict definition

But there are already a bunch of models like that, were everything (architecture, training data, training scripts, etc) is open, public and transparent. Since you weren't aware those existed since before, but you now know that, are you willing to change your perspective on it?

> so I'm fine with it coopting the term open source even if it doesn't fully apply

It really sucks that the community seems OK with this. I probably wouldn't have been a developer without FOSS, and I don't understand how it can seem OK to rob other people of this opportunity to learn from FOSS projects.
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-24 12:52:07+00:00
>"...the one thing that currently worries me most about using AI for software development: lack of joy."

I struggled with this at first too. But it just becomes another kind of joy. Think of it like jogging versus riding a motorcycle. Jogging is fun, people enjoy it, and they always will. But flying down a canyon road at 90MPH and racing through twists and turns is... way more fun. Once you've learned how to do it. But there's a gap there in which it stops being fun until you do.
by keerthiko | 2025-04-24 12:52:13+00:00
in my experience, people who grow up as the biggest fish in a small pond (whether concerning just fields they care about, or in general) are always 99% of the time, one of these two when they end up a middling fish in the big pond: like you, happy to find peers and inspiring exemplars to collaborate with and learn from, or those who hate that they are not the best anymore.

the former group probably leads the healthiest & happiest life fulfillment while pursuing their interests — i'm heavily biased though because i too fall into this category and am proud of this trait.

the latter group consists of people who either spin their wheels real hard and more often than not burn out in their pursuit of being the best, or pivot hard into something else they think they can be the best at (often repeatedly every time they encounter stronger competition) like gates & co, or in rare cases succeed in being the best even in the more competitive environment.

this last .001% are probably people whose egos get so boosted from the positive reinforcement that they become "overcompetitive" and domineering like zuck or elon, and let their egos control their power and resources to suppress competition rather than compete "fairly" ever again.

i think there's a subset of people from both main groups that may move from one into the other based on life experiences, luck, influence of people close to them, maturity, therapy, or simply wanting something different from life after a certain point. i don't have a good model for whether this is most people, or a tiny percentage.
by yapyap | 2025-04-24 12:52:35+00:00
> On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea. I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either.

So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?

Personally I do, if you don’t have the means to get to the end you shouldn’t get to the end and that goes double in a professional setting. If you are just generating for your own enjoyment go off I guess but if you are publishing or working for someone that’ll publish (aka a professional setting) you should be the means to the end, not AI.
by WaitWaitWha | 2025-04-24 12:52:46+00:00
This was written in 2022. Do people still know how to postal-mail things? Asking as the acquisition of envelope, paper and stamps read like a new adventure for the author.

I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-04-24 12:53:27+00:00
>Many competitive people want to win, but they want to win the real game, not a rigged version.

Apply the phrase to the staff member he lost to, and the situation makes sense. The staff member wants to win the real game (of remaining a high-salary Facebook employee), and will throw an otherwise inconsequential game of Catan to maintain that position's security.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-24 12:53:31+00:00
Nice page! I'm extremely happy about efforts like this. You might argue that the EU is a sprawling, wasteful bureaucracy and you would not be wrong, per se, but they made a lot of useful laws that just simply make the world a better place.

Having standardized chargers for phones and laptops is SUPER nice and would never have happened without intervention IMO.

The only equivalent for US "useful, average-citizen friendly legislation" that I recently heard about was the standardization of powertool batteries pursued by doge-- which turned out to be an april hoax when I just looked it up :(
by dangus | 2025-04-24 12:53:37+00:00
So then the challenge is valid but you just can’t think of any ways to satisfy it. You said yourself that chat is just the interface.

That means you should be able to find many popular applications that leverage LLM APIs that are a lot different than the interface of ChatGPT.

But in reality, they’re all just moving the chat window somewhere else and streamlining the data input/output process (e.g., exactly what Cursor is doing).

I can even think of one product that is a decent example of LLMs in action without a chat window. Someone on HN posted a little demo website they made that takes SEC filings and summarizes them to make automatic investor analysis of public companies.

But it’s kind of surprising to me how that little project seems to be in the minority of LLM applications and I can’t think of two more decent examples especially when it comes to big successful products.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-04-24 12:54:00+00:00
> France has put forward an anti-drug trafficking law that critics say would ban encryption. The Nordic countries have taken the fight to tech companies. Spain said it wants to ban encryption. And the U.K. government has now entered a legal battle with Apple over an apparent attempt to secretly spy on encrypted data.

> Denmark will soon take over the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU, giving it an influential role at a time when EU countries are debating the bloc’s child sexual abuse material bill (CSAM). That draft legislation could impose an obligation on all messaging platforms to conduct blanket scans on their content to root out child abuse images — even if they're end-to-end encrypted and thus technically out of reach of the platforms themselves.

The land of the free.
by cormorant | 2025-04-24 12:54:49+00:00
Different addresses are stated in different copies of the license. https://opensource.org/license/gpl-2-0 has: "59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA"

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.txt has no postal address.

https://spdx.org/licenses/GPL-2.0-only.html has "51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA" in red italics, and says: " Text in red is replaceable (see Matching Guidelines B.3.4). License or exception text will match to the text for the specified identifier if it includes a permitted variant of this replaceable text. The permitted variants can be found in the corresponding regular expression as shown in title text visible by hovering over the red text."

Which in turn says: "can be replaced with the pattern .{54,64}" (that is, any string between 54-64 characters long).
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-04-24 12:55:02+00:00
Reminds me of this post[0] from a few weeks ago:

>A couple years back, I got a job offer from an investment bank to help them win zero sum games against people who didn't necessarily deserve to lose. I had tried very hard to get that offer

https://www.hgreer.com/PlayingInTheCreek/
by sgarland | 2025-04-24 12:55:06+00:00
> Most printers take A4 and US letter and adapt automatically

I found out that they do not automatically adapt to JIS sizes. My wife’s work once had a printer that somehow got configured to use JIS, I assume JB5. It then refused to print on US Letter, but as printers are wont to do, didn’t produce any useful error message, nor relay this information to the computer. It just wouldn’t print. I only discovered this (because if you work in tech, you must know how to fix printers, right?) by laboriously scrolling through every menu on the tiny LCD screen, and finding that the paper settings were incorrect.
Ask HN: Who Got Hired? (April 2025)
by gj0 | 2025-04-24 12:55:46+00:00
Who's Getting Hired in April 2025? Let's Talk!

Lately, there's been a lot of buzz that many job postings out there are just... ghost listings - positions that aren't really open.

So, I'm curious: Did you or someone you know actually land a job this month? Or have you noticed the hiring landscape shifting?

Drop your wins, observations, or frustrations in the comments. Let's crowdsource the real hiring trends for April 2025.
by kashunstva | 2025-04-24 12:56:35+00:00
Just riding that hedonic treadmill, probably. Once you have bought all the properties you want, airplanes, helicopters and yachts, I imagine your hedonic set-point adjusts to that level and you begin to cast about for what's missing. (What's missing of course, is what all these people can't seem to find, which is an unwavering set of human-centred values.)
by motorest | 2025-04-24 12:56:47+00:00
> Travelling isn’t the be all and end all of things either remember.

I think you're missing the whole point. For you, traveling might not be that fun. For OP's uncle, apparently it was. He had to forego that because of reasons.

I do a fair share of traveling. I love it, and a few of my most cherished memories come from trips I did. This might come as a surprise to you, but the whole point of traveling is not to go from point A to point B or spend time in airports. The whole point is to do things you personally enjoy, including and not limited to spending time with people you enjoy being with. Most of the time, the destinations and the things we do are only the backdrop to the things we actually enjoy.
by int_19h | 2025-04-24 12:57:09+00:00
Like most other weird things in US that pertain to measurements and units thereof, letter-sized paper predates the A-series standard (which originated in Germany). FWIW the latter didn't became an ISO standard until late 20th century.

Americans are just very obstinate about those things. It's like the Windows of metrology - backwards compatibility trumps everything else, even when you have utterly bonkers things like ounces vs fluid ounces.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-24 12:57:29+00:00
You do you.

I attend a lot of meetings and I have reviewed the results of an AI note taker maybe twice ever. Getting an email with a todo-list saves a bit of time of writing down action items during a meeting, but I'd hardly consider it a game changer. "Wait, what'd we talk about in that meeting" is just not a problem I encounter often.

My experience with AI note takers is that they are useful for people who didn't attend the meeting and people who are being onboarded and want to be able to review what somebody was teaching them in the meeting and much much much less useful for other situations.
by skydhash | 2025-04-24 12:57:35+00:00
Maybe all code is boilerplate for them? I use libraries and frameworks exactly for the truly boilerplate part. But I still try to understand those code I depends on, as some times I want to deviate from the defaults. Or the bug might be in there.

It’s when you try to use an exotic language, you realize the amount of work that has been done to minimize dev time in more mainstream languages.
by laurence_cullen | 2025-04-24 12:57:40+00:00
Weekend hackathon in London to prototype software tools and infrastructure for engineering applications across mechanical, civil, electrical and more.

Themes: - Computational geometry (surface representation, mesh generation, rendering, geometric kernels) - Interoperability (file parsers, converters) - Workflow automation (combine multiple programmable CAD/CAE tools into unified workflows) - Simulation (mechanical, fluid, thermal, electrical) - Computational design (link CAD + simulation workflows to automatically converge on optimal designs)
by Crosseye_Jack | 2025-04-24 12:57:41+00:00
Yeah, I think it is car dependant. But the car I use (gave up my own car, but the family has a shared "work horse" car we are all insured on.) is a 10 year old UK Ford fiesta and that car doesn't trip the alarm if the door is unlocked with the key, and its not the transponder in the key, cause one of the keys to that car doesn't have a transponder and the keys get mixed up from time to time (So you only know you have picked up the wrong key only when you insert the key into the ignition and the immobilizer light is a solid red light - 3 keys, one with a fob, 2 without a fob, one of which has a failed transponder chip in it, these two keys look the same and not one of us has been arsed enough to take both keys to the car, figure out which doesn't work and label it :-P).

(One day, when I can be arsed, I'll rekey the car and reprogram it with fresh transponders, but today is not that day!)
by potato3732842 | 2025-04-24 12:57:59+00:00
Man, it's hilarious how you managed to go full circle around the point while missing it.

If the airline wants to ensure future supply at a given prices they can simply buy futures settled in actual product.

Hedging against future volatility by agreeing on a deal "now" is the entire point. Sure, sometimes you lose when there's a price drop but the other guy won. At the end of the day everyone benefits from smoothing out the volatility.

Buying and selling cash settled futures is just how small time buyers and sellers access the market since they can't take delivery of entire train loads of goods but still need to hedge.

Finance professionals trading them around to wring out an extra percent here and there it beside the point.
by suninsight | 2025-04-24 12:59:36+00:00
I also did not get it, but now I get it a bit, I think.

Look at it this way. You have to get some work done - maybe book a flight ticket. So you go to two sites - first you go to flight fare comparison, then you book the ticket on the airline website. And you have to do it in code.

There are two ways you can do it.

First Way 1. Understand the API of the flight comparison portal. 2. Understand the API for the airline website. 3. Write code which combines both these API and does the task.

Second Way 1. Message a coder friend who knows the API of the flight comparison portal and ask him to write code to get the cheapest flight. 2. Message another coder friend who knows the API of the airline portal and ask him to book a flight.

Both ways are possible, but which one do you think is Less Work ? Which one is 'cognitively' easier ? Which one can you do while driving a car with one hand ?

It should be clear that the second way is easier. Not only is the second way easier, but if the task requires multiple providers and a lot of context, it might be the only way possible.

The first way is analogous to LLM's doing API calls. The second way is analogous to LLM's doing MCP Servers. MCP servers reduce the cognitive cost to do a task to the LLM - which dramatically increases their power.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-04-24 12:59:49+00:00
> even if it is more expensive (relative to your assets)

A lot of this is relative to one's standards and objectives. You are certainly right that it is expensive relative to assets in one's youth, but it can still be quite attainable if backpacking, hostels, and street food are options.

When we went to Tokyo recently, the room we booked was tiny! The bed was only 6 or so inches away from the walls on each side. But for me, it was only a place to sleep at night and keep my luggage. If I had spent any more time than that in the hotel, it would have meant we did not spend enough time exploring Tokyo.
by chongli | 2025-04-24 13:00:26+00:00
I can’t speak for helix because I haven’t tried it, but I did spend a few weeks trying to get used to Kakoune before giving up and going back to vim.

The issue is that moving around would leave behind a trail of breadcrumbs. Sometimes these were visible cursors but other times they were invisible. Either way, I found myself being frequently surprised by the editor when it made changes I was not expecting.

Perhaps it’s something I could get used to with more time but it left me constantly perplexed and annoyed. I think ultimately what gets me is that in vim I can type a motion key and vim executes the motion and then returns to to a “null state” whereas with motion-action editors any time I key in a motion to jump somewhere I am now in the middle of the “motion-action” sequence and the editor is awaiting an action key to which it will eagerly respond. This to me feels very wrong, similar to the feeling I get when Siri is continuing to listen for more commands after invoking the command I asked for. Having to dismiss Siri all the time annoys the hell out of me.

Kakoune has a similar “dismiss key” which I remember pressing all the time out of habit, even when it was unnecessary, because the editor left me with this constant feeling of “unstable footing.”
by alganet | 2025-04-24 13:00:48+00:00
That is precisely the sadness of it. How barren stories have become, how limited humans have turned out to be in the way they see themselves.

Whatever it was before all that, it's probably lost forever. Whatever is new gets instantly absorbed and recategorized, it can't be avoided.

There's only so much recombinations of those basic grand themes you can do before noticing it.
by bluGill | 2025-04-24 13:01:05+00:00
At least he got a response. Meaning the address didn't change mostly.

A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts - they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license.

The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".
by omegaworks | 2025-04-24 13:01:08+00:00
I don't think this is about convincing anyone that she's a good person. She's forthright about her instincts and values and the institutions she worked at that fostered her understanding of the world.

She documents in detail critical moments where Facebook executives made decisions that exemplified their incompetence and damaged their potential impact.

That the "cultural purge" in big tech is flushing out people with these instincts is precisely why the industry is flailing and groveling at the feet of power, for they have no internal compass save for growth for growth's sake.

Everyone can see that now laid bare on these pages, and these companies that rely on their user's willingness to exchange details about their personal lives for cheap dopamine hits may find that generosity well run dry.
by buzzbyjool | 2025-04-24 13:01:34+00:00
Follow-up to Part 1, where I explained how we rebuilt our dev process around LLM agents at Easylab AI and stopped writing most code by hand.

The original post sparked a lot of questions — the most common being:

“Okay, but how did your developers react?”

Here’s a breakdown of what actually happened inside the team — who stayed, who didn’t, and what new skills emerged.

⸻

Some embraced it. Some left. That’s okay.

When we committed to building with agents — not just using LLMs for autocompletion, but making them first-class executors of logic — not everyone was thrilled.

Some engineers were fascinated. They saw the shift coming and wanted to be ahead of it. They became architects of multi-agent workflows, prompt designers, QA strategists, validators.

Others didn’t want to work that way. They liked writing every line, owning every detail, and were (understandably) uncomfortable giving up control to a system that feels less deterministic.

They moved on. We didn’t push them.

Like every evolution in software tooling, this one came with a natural selection effect. Not better or worse. Just different skillsets, different energy.

⸻

This isn’t no-code. It’s new-code.

Some assumed we were just automating CRUD. That’s not what happened.

The tools we use today — Claude 3.7, DeepSeek, bolt.new, role-based agents, memory stacks — aren’t trivial macros. They’re a new level of abstraction. They reason. They refactor. They test. They fail with style.

You don’t “ask the AI to do it.” You engineer constraints, context, fallbacks, tooling, and create robust systems through language.

At Easylab AI, we use context protocols, Redis-based memory layers, and model routing logic based on latency and task weight. It’s not less technical — it’s just built differently.

⸻

Did their skills atrophy?

Actually, the opposite.

Sure, they’re not practicing DSA interview puzzles every day. But they’re building systems that can write tests, simulate failure, and self-correct.

They’re learning new skills you can’t yet Google: • Prompt minimalism • Agent composability • Multi-agent state consistency • Prompt-based debugging

They think more like staff engineers than syntax solvers.

⸻

This is abstraction, not disappearance

The fear that “AI replaces engineering” misses the nuance.

This isn’t magic. It’s not cheating. It’s just abstraction — like every wave before: • Assembly to C • C to Python • Python to Terraform • Terraform to prompt-based execution

As Jensen Huang (NVIDIA CEO) said earlier this year:

“English is now the world’s most popular programming language.”

He’s not wrong. We’re just learning to write instructions that build systems — without the middle step of syntax.

⸻

One more thing

Some developers left. Most who stayed leveled up. And today, no one wants to go back.

That tells me something: It’s not easier work. It’s better work.

Happy to answer more if folks are curious.
by melvinroest | 2025-04-24 13:01:59+00:00
> I think the analogy/ substitution falls apart in that singing is generally not very stable or lucrative (for 99.999% of singers), so it is pretty rare to find someone singing who hates it.

I tried to cover this particular case with:

> And while it is easier to become good at coding than at singing - for professional purposes at least - I believe that the effect still holds.

---

> Yes, loving something is no guarantee of skill at it, but hating something is very likely to correspond to not being good at it, since skills take time and dedication to hone. Being bad at something is the default state.

I tried to cover this particular case with:

> It is of course positively correlated with it.

---

> Being bad at something is the default state.

Well, skill-wise yes. But being talented at something can happen, even when you hate something.