MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-07 17:02:31+00:00
I'm not at all against a new model providing a more solid foundation for a new OS, but it's not going to be garbage collected, so the most popular of the newer languages make the pickings slim indeed.

> But the ongoing CVE pressure is never going to go away.

I think there are other ways to deflect or defeat that pressure, but I have no proof or work in that direction, so I really have nothing but admittedly wild ideas.

However, one potentially promising possibility in that direction is the dawn of immutable kernels, but once again, that's just an intuition on my part, and they can likely be eventually defeated, if only by weaknesses in the underlying hardware architecture, even though newer techniques such as timing attacks should be more easily detected because they rely on being massively brute force.

The question, to me, is "Can whittling away at the inherent weaknesses reduce the vulns to a level of practical invulnerability?" I'm not hopeful that that can occur but seeing the amount of work a complete reimplementation would require, it may simply be the best approach to choose from a cost-benefit analysis perspective where having far fewer bugs and vulns is more feasible than guaranteed perfection. And, once again, such perfection would require the hardware architecture be co-developed with the OS and its language to really create a bulletproof system, IMO.
by maccard | 2025-04-07 17:02:49+00:00
> but if someone gives me an api doc I can figure out how to use it without them writing a wrapper library around the parts that I need to use to solve whatever problem I'm working on.

I think this is where AI is faling short hugely. AI _should_ be able to integrate with IDEs and tooling (e.g. LSP, Treesitter, Editorconfig) to make sure that it's contextually doing the right thin.

But it's not.
by thelock85 | 2025-04-07 17:02:57+00:00
This is somewhat akin to the U.S. government's SBIR grant program. Phase I (generally $250-500K for a year)to develop and pilot novel tech. Phase II ($1M) to develop scalable tech. And Phase III to go-to-market. (I'm being intentionally brief here as there is a lot of variability between participating agencies).

Because each award solicitation is closely aligned to the industry needs associated with a given agency (DoD, DHS, HHS, NSF, DoEd, DoEnergy, DoCommerce, USDA, EPA, DoT, NASA), you are on a fast-track if you can get into Phase I.

It's a ton of paperwork and bureaucracy --probably even more so under current administration-- but still a great alternative/addition to VC that doesn't take equity and forces you into technical clarity.
by Asraelite | 2025-04-07 17:03:24+00:00
Just came across your comment when googling this and was wondering if you had any thoughts. My understanding is that when startups have the insane levels of advertising on Youtube that Ground News does, it's because they're expected to eventually monopolize the market and generate huge revenue in the long run.

How would that work for Ground News? $2.50/month subscriptions for news aggregation seems a bit un-unicorny, even with data collection and other forms of soft monetization. Do you think it's actually that viable, or are they going to massively pivot?
by Marsymars | 2025-04-07 17:03:26+00:00
> If you've been through something similar—late job search success, unexpected turns that worked out, or just any advice—I’d really appreciate it.

So, I can provide my anecdote, at least. It took me the better part of a year after I graduated to find my first job. (That paid real poorly.) I lost that job after a year due to the role being eliminated and my contract not being renewed. I lost my next job at a startup after six months due to the company pivoting. I’ve been at my following job for 10+ years now.
by nialv7 | 2025-04-07 17:03:48+00:00
The part where employee whose work improves the life of people around them (by refactoring, work on tech-debt), or the life of people around the world in general (open source, accessibility, etc.) isn't rewarded financially. And somehow capitalists want me to believe people working to advance their own self interests will collectively benefit the society at large.

Also the part where employees have to constantly justify their own existences. I just want to work on interesting things and be left alone.

(To be fair I am exaggerating a bit, and I think the author is, too. I don't think the reality is as bad as presented.)
by billy99k | 2025-04-07 17:03:49+00:00
I never had any internships and I didn't gradute from a well-known university. During my senior year of college, I took on low-paying software development contracts I found on craigslist.

I used this as previous experience and found a job right out of college. I also learned a lot from this experience and used the same skills to find work during the 08 crash and never really had a loss of income during this time.
by zone411 | 2025-04-07 17:03:53+00:00
> Could you run some analysis on how often “p1” wins vs “p8”?

I checked the average finishing positions by assigned seat number from the start, but there weren't enough games to show a statistically significant effect. But I just reviewed the data again, and now with many more games it looks like there might be something there (P1 doing better than P8). I'll run additional analysis and include it in the write-up if anything emerges. For those who haven't looked at the logs: the conversation order etc. are randomized each round.

> My follow up thought is that it would be interesting to let llms choose a name at the beginning

Oh, interesting idea!
by peterldowns | 2025-04-07 17:04:09+00:00
Send me an email — I'm an '18 and if you're telling the truth about side projects, interview skills, graduating, etc. then I should be able to help you find a job very quickly, either in my own org or with someone I know who is hiring.

> I’m facing the very real possibility of moving back home to an unstable and abusive environment while continuing to job hunt

You don't have to do this. You can do anything you want you're a free person with your own agency and plenty of skills. There are a million ways you can work around this.

> What helped you push through when it felt like the system failed you?

Realizing that I am owed nothing, and focusing on ways to get what I want. With your background and skills I am certain you can achieve anything you set your mind to as long as you don't put yourself in a subordinate, dependent, position.
by NerualNowtork | 2025-04-07 17:04:16+00:00
Good point!

Yes, if we're talking about coding, luckily we don't need to deal with JSON schema in most cases. But there are places like OpenAI's playground and low-code platforms that don't support Pydantic model definition. I also doubt they will ever add Pydantic support because of the nature of such products.

Besides, I feel we need some automatic prompt engineering for structured output, then it'll probably be better done on JSON schema than on JS/Python code because you can use JSON as part of the prompt. But maybe I'm betting wrong on the future!
by quuxplusone | 2025-04-07 17:04:32+00:00
Thank you; the opening paragraph of that article was fantastic.

> American Alsatians were first bred to create a family friendly dog breed that looks like a dire wolf. (The dire wolf is an ancient North American wolf species that became extinct around 13,000 years ago.) This dog has all the benefits of looking like a dire wolf, but it is calm and gentle enough to be a great pet. They are an intelligent, loving and gentle family dog [...]

"Has all the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" is a great phrase, and I think highly relevant to the OP article here and the disagreement I see in the HN comments between the people who think "the benefits of looking like a dire wolf" are self-evident and those who think they're non-existent. :)
by setsewerd | 2025-04-07 17:04:39+00:00
My understanding of economics doesn't go further than a few college classes I took, and I have no idea how sophisticated the models are that modern economists are using to make these kinds of conclusions. And Trump's whole approach does seem to be a pretty terrible idea from what I've read.

However, a part of me is curious whether certain political maneuvers (power dynamics etc) are sufficiently captured in modern economic models? Could there be a reason that the Trump administration is continuing to persevere on something that is seen across the board as an objectively bad idea? Is it possible that this is actually smarter than just a poorly calculated ego trip or a means to game the economy for personal profit?
by stas2k | 2025-04-07 17:04:47+00:00
Only Nikons I own are 35mm film FM2 and F4. The bodies feel like tactile bliss. FM2 has a dry lubricated system with crazy titanium honeycombed etched shutter and F4 is the last pro DSLR they made with no menu system.

On the digital front I found Fuji X-Txx series to be like tiny Nikons in their usability with all common controls on dials.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-07 17:05:03+00:00
> Any personal computer that shipped with a GUI OS at the time shipped it in a state that wasn't yet fully realized or completely documented

You are forgetting Apple. By the time the Amiga was introduced it was pointing the way GUIs were going for the next decade. The one thing it didn’t have was multitasking, which came in 87 with Multifinder.

The Amiga was more powerful and I wish it had an OS based on Coherent, which was scheduled for the CBM 900, rather than what ended up being AmigaOS.
by jsumm1942 | 2025-04-07 17:05:03+00:00
I’ll echo a couple of other people who have said to network. This was many years ago, but when I was in college and applying for jobs I was getting no interest at all. No interviews… not even an email response acknowledging receiving a resume. Then a person that I knew who had graduated the previous year was at a campus event, I started talking to her, and she told me the company she worked at was hiring. I emailed the hiring manager the next day, attached a resume, mentioned the woman I was talking to. Got a call 2 days later, an interview the following week, then an offer after later.
by 9rx | 2025-04-07 17:05:53+00:00
> My broader point is that if you want to build a business there's a ton of opportunity if you're not overly picky on what that opportunity looks like.

That point was already firmly established before you arrived. What were you hoping to add?

> You might be mixing up opportunities within the tech industry with using tech to build a business within other industries.

Industry doesn't matter. An economy is all connected. What does matter is that at some point your sale needs a "final destination". If you sell to another business, they are going to need to pass the need on to the next hop. If they fail to do that, they will go out of business, and soon you will too.

That means either a consumer, someone with angel money to burn, or government (which is, as it pertains to this discussion, basically the same as angel money). Angel money keeps a lot of these B2B businesses alive. You might not need to accept the angel money directly, but someone needs to in order to support the system we have.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-07 17:06:53+00:00
Well you can say it doesn't understand, but then you don't have a very useful definition of the word.

You can say this is not 'real' understanding but you like many others will be unable to clearly distinguish this 'fake' understanding from 'real' understanding in a verifiable fashion, so you are just playing a game of meaningless semantics.

You really should think about what kind of difference is supposedly so important yet will not manifest itself in any testable way - an invented one.
Save search results to a text file
by GirishSharma643 | 2025-04-07 17:07:21+00:00
I open https://news.ycombinator.com/ in my android phone. On this page, at the bottom there is a text box for input search. How do I capy and paste the search result to a text file with URLs, because on the search result page, I can't select all as we can do on the PC or is there any way to save the result.
by cucubeleza | 2025-04-07 17:07:50+00:00
Yeah, the world is a illusion, it tells you "study here or there and you'll have an amazing job and will win a lot of money!" but a lot of times, that never happen. You ended up felting like "was all for nothing?". I see my dad now working with his 60+ years old and I can't say to him "You can rest now, I'll pay your bills", at least was something that I was dreaming for a long time and now I know that will never be possible. I can't give you advice since you and I are on the same boat (I'm not an MIT senior but you get it, right?) but try not to lose hope and don't be harsh with yourself
by laidoffamazon | 2025-04-07 17:07:57+00:00
I find this seriously unlikely. Most MIT grads are getting into Jane Street or at minimum Google - they literally think working at Amazon is beneath them. Course 6 grads are not going unemployed.

It is funny to hear that this person might have an unstable environment though - that isn't the profile of someone that gets into MIT.

If OP is actually serious I'm more than willing to give resume advice - including in person living in the area. But again, I seriously doubt this is real, or if people like OP are willing to take advice from failures like me.
by asadm | 2025-04-07 17:07:59+00:00
Is there a simple utility / script that takes gemini/grok/gpt output (usually markdown with changes, and apply it to the folder back.

I dont want to deal with "smartness" of aider. I WANT to use the chatgpt/ai-studio/grok UI for conversation but I also want to apply any changes it suggests back to my code easily.
by laidoffamazon | 2025-04-07 17:08:59+00:00
> Realizing that I am owed nothing, and focusing on ways to get what I want.

I don't think the system _ever_ fails people with "merit" like MIT grads. It fails people like me that can't get into top schools that went to 50% accept rate public schools.

I graduated in 2018 too - I guarantee people like you consider me and my career accomplishments in the intervening years to be failure worthy. I genuinely think a typical MIT Course 6 grad from 2018 would be clinically depressed if they were in my shoes.
by jagged-chisel | 2025-04-07 17:09:59+00:00
So a little silly, a little serious.

On a practical note, we don’t tend to prefix zeroes to numbers because they are superfluous. If programmers are using strings to store a year and those strings are limited to four digits, your project likely has a host of other issues that will become problems long before Y10K.

We already have a precedent, in programming, for prefixed zeroes having meaning: “an octal number follows.” Much like 0x indicates a hexadecimal number.
by erikerikson | 2025-04-07 17:10:32+00:00
Mine is almost certainly almost the minimal case, except for someone running in Delaware. Federally, I file quarterly 941s (employee tax withholding), annual 940 (unemployment) and 1020 (tax return). In Delaware I final annually (stamp tax). I then file locally for Washington (excise tax) and Seattle (licensing tax).

I believe a freelancers wouldn't file employee tax forms. They frequently roll their filings into their personal taxes.

[edit: this is for a C corp]
by shalmanese | 2025-04-07 17:10:39+00:00
> Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work inside (some) companies

Mainly to prove you can sell, not that they can buy. Selling involves understanding the customer's needs, their tradeoff preferences, your value prop and being able to reflect that back to them. The minimum bar for successful selling requires you to demonstrate a certain degree of competence and due diligence that provides assurance that you're able to operate autonomously with trust.
by lukan | 2025-04-07 17:10:41+00:00
I once got a mail back from dang, about why my account got restricted. (Limited posts per day)

"I made plenty of good comments, but this one thread counts as flame war and he has to go by the worst, not by the best comments"

I thought about replying with some Don Hopkins comments, that were way worse than what was here and he is clearly not restricted. But I didn't, as I don't do Kindergarten, I just took a time off from HN.

But it definitely is not equal standards.

So I respect Don Hopkins for his knowledge and experience, but not his style of communication sometimes.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-04-07 17:10:44+00:00
The temp allocator is a stack allocator,

How much have you used that? C has that and it will get cleared at the end of a scope too, but it is pretty exotic because it is so fragile. It's a catch-22, if something is so big that you need to allocate the exact size to save stack space, then it could become problematic and blow the stack. This is not a substitute for having allocations be freed at the end of a scope.

For scoping files, sockets and so on, there's actually a simple mechanism in C3 that allows creating code like that very easily using macros with "trailing body". Which is a little like trailing closures in Swift, but here there is no closure, just a macro.

I think stuff like this is interesting, but it's interesting in the context of straight C, not in the context of a new language where it could be done better.

In regular C you could already create a custom allocator and macros that would use the fact that a for loop will run something after the scope finishes to mimic some of these effects.

C's syntax may be a little funky, but it's real pain point is the actual semantics that will bite people over and over until they move on.
by sksxihve | 2025-04-07 17:10:53+00:00
That's reasonable along with your comment below too, but when you have the ceo of anthropic saying "AI will write all code for software engineers within a year" last month I would say that is pretty hard to believe given how it performs without user intervention (MCP etc...). It feels like bullshit just like the self driving car stuff did ~10 years ago.
Show HN: I made an AI tutor and teaching assistant for the classroom
by HelloZorzini | 2025-04-07 17:11:01+00:00
Hi Everyone!!

We're a group of experienced entrepreneurs, educators, and AI enthusiasts brought together by a shared mission: to reimagine how people teach and learn in the age of intelligent technology. Our team has spent years building meaningful products in the EdTech space, always with a focus on improving learning outcomes and reducing friction for both teachers and students.
by farazbabar | 2025-04-07 17:11:17+00:00
I am seeing this in my community as well, it has become nearly impossible for early career folks to find opportunities and it is due to a number of factors. In addition to economy, the fast ramp up of hiring in covid and of course AI, we now have geo-political headwinds in the mix. If you are in this situation, or if you would like to help make a difference, please reach out to me, email is in profile. @Dang, if this is not appropriate, please let me know.
by alvatech | 2025-04-07 17:11:53+00:00
I received a campus offer in 2008, but then the recession hit. Since it was with a large company, I graduated in 2009 and was supposed to join afterward. However, just a few weeks before my start date, they postponed it indefinitely. I found myself back at square one and it took more than six months to land a job at a mid-sized company with a lower salary. Eventually, things worked out. So, don’t lose hope—just keep trying. Best of luck!
by Pet_Ant | 2025-04-07 17:12:14+00:00
> Grit and nihilism. No one is coming to save us.

What I'll say won't help you now, but: this will help you later.

Don't assume you'll always be able to find a job. Work towards financial independence early. Avoid debt. Don't get some fancy car as a "treat" to yourself, counting on your future income to make payments... that income might not come.

Sorry it sucks right now. Don't give up, don't let your skills dull. Keep grinding and take any programming job just to start getting that 2-3 experience that locks out so many of the labour market.
Show HN: Clone any web element to React and Tailwind with this Chrome extension
by yuvalyes | 2025-04-07 17:12:44+00:00
Hi HN!

Backstory - I've been writing backend code for years, and about a year ago I told my boss to shove it and went full solopreneur mode.

Problem is - many products need a nice web interface, and I'm a TERRIBLE designer. over the past few months, I kept feeding screenshots of website sections i found beautiful to v0/Claude, asking it to give me something similar for my own apps. This approach sometimes works, but often completely falls apart for more complex UI elements.

So, i built this chrome extension, which grabs the actual source code (heavily pre-processed and sanitized) and feeds that to the LLM as context, instead of just a screenshot - and it works way better! It lets you pick any element in a webpage (kinda like the chrome devtools element selector), and it then outputs a react + tailwind component of the selected element.

would love your feedback or any thoughts/ideas

Yuval
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-04-07 17:12:48+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catullus_16

"Pēdīcābo ego vōs et irrumābō"

I had a college Latin teacher who asked us to translate this one. The professor was very clear that we should translate it in the spirit it was written, which is to say, vulgar.

I offered the following translation of the first line:

"I will fuck you up the ass, and jam my cock down your throat."

The professor then said, "Excellent. Tonally perfect. Now let us never speak of it again."
by notpushkin | 2025-04-07 17:12:59+00:00
Why not try Estonia instead? You’ll need to get an e-signature card (“e-Residency”) which might take about a month, then you just submit an online form and get your company number the same day. Mimimum capital is 1 €, and the fees are about 400 € for setup and 100 €/yr for virtual address. https://www.e-resident.gov.ee/eresidency-germans/

The downside, of course, is that you probably won’t get any direct(-ish) subsidies from Germany — although any pan-EU options should be on the table.
Ask HN: How would you build a turn-based multiplayer browser game?
by hnroo99 | 2025-04-07 17:14:23+00:00
I've recently been tinkering away at a turn-based multiplayer browser game in my downtime. I'm a Typescript guy so my current tech stack is Next.js, Node.js, and ws[0] for WebSockets (though I'm thinking of switching over to socket.io[1] given how much more they provide out of the box).

Right now my main concern is how to handle continuous deployments without interrupting ongoing games (amongst other WebSocket challenges[2]). I was planning to deploy via Coolify, but am considering other options given that their zero downtime deploys still needs some love[3].

How would you approach building a turn-based multiplayer browser game in 2025?

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/ws

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/socket.io

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816359

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43589794
by valbaca | 2025-04-07 17:14:46+00:00
When I graduated in 2011, the Great Recession was just beginning to unthaw. I nearly joined the Air Force as an officer. I even went to MEPS and did the physical but decided against it at the last second and joined a military contractor instead.

It was a similar situation, but honestly nowhere as dire as yours. Even in that rough situation, the best of my state college were at least getting one offer. I cannot imagine how rough it must be for MIT grads to not be getting job offers.

I'm not proud of either, but I did what I needed to so that I never moved back home.