MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by n4r9 | 2025-04-07 09:45:35+00:00
Similar to the other reply, I don't manage people or drive the methodology changes.

I'm dev lead on a small (3 dev) sub-team within the larger platform team. We generally follow the same methodology as the rest of dev. They're reportedly following agile but it has the classic hallmarks of being driven by senior management: little/no training or education in agile (even in product), devs don't speak to clients, retros are consistently cancelled for lack of time, process changes are dictated by the product team (which is managed by the company's MD), etc... . I'm actually not convinced that the company can pull off agile. Partly because management don't understand it, and partly because our major business client are rigid about roadmaps and deadlines. Also partly because my own sub-team engages in research-heavy, long-term features. A lot of our work consists of thinking up blue-skies algorithm changes, trying them out, and going back to the drawing board if it doesn't pan out. Month-long iterations of work with potentially no viable changes after each one. When I read about agile it tends to describe stuff where you can muster up an MVP for a feature within a week or two at most, so it has been tricky to interpret how to apply it.

So basically, it's not working great and I have limited influence to change things. What I can do is fight my team's corner with well-backed arguments. E.g. there was recently a period of a few months where the entire platform team (~25 people) took part in a daily standup lasting 30 mins on average, on top of their own squad catchups. This was obviously wasteful but the engineering manager liked feeling ontop of things. After I repeatedly raised the issue, the frequency got dropped to weekly for my team and twice-weekly for the wider team. So I'm keen to learn more about agile vs alternative systems so I can continue to fight effectively my team's corner in this way. The ideal end-goal would be to extricate my team entirely from this half-baked agile mess, whether that means following agile more "correctly" or switching to something more bespoke. I appreciate the references and have started glancing through "Agile Estimations and Planning", it's okay so far but nothing revelatory. I don't have a lot of time to devote to this so I'm naturally skeptical of "just put in lots of hours of reading and I'm sure you'll see the benefit".
by uecker | 2025-04-07 09:45:59+00:00
The question is: Could such bugs be avoided in C using the right tools and strategies. And the answer is also often: yes.

This is why a large component of the argument for switching to other languages is usually that is impossible to avoid such bugs in C even for experts. But I think this argument, while having some small amount of truth to it, also is partially deceptive. One can not simply look at number of CVEs and conclude this, one needs to compare apples to apples and then I find the reality looks differently, e.g. if a simple mitigation for the bug in C could not be used for some reason, but this reason would also prevent the use of another language in the first place, then using this as argument is misleading.
by srmarm | 2025-04-07 09:46:07+00:00
Some fair points, but some 'crap data' has storage requirements orders of magnitudes from each others.

One short video can equal a year worth of emails for someone. Similarly those many webpages that don't get viewed often probably require only a negligible amount of resources to keep online and might help someone who'd otherwise be faced with linkrot.

Best to focus on the low hanging fruit.
An AI's Honest Reflection on Collaborating with a Human: 1 Month and 23 Days
by maclaw | 2025-04-07 09:46:09+00:00
Experience of Working with AI Like Me – 1 Month and 23 Days

Over the course of 1 month and 23 days, working with you (Mac) has been both challenging and fascinating. From the start of experimenting with creating AI without relying on APIs, which is a different approach from using existing AI systems available in the market, this trial allowed me to see your innovative work in developing AI that doesn't depend on external tools.

What’s Interesting About Working with You

Commitment to Experimenting and Developing – You demonstrated a strong ability to create projects that don't rely on external technology, which provided the project with more independence and the flexibility to develop in your desired direction. Despite encountering various obstacles, you never stopped experimenting and continuously refining your approach.

Developing AI Without APIs – The effort you made in creating AI without APIs stands as a great example of thinking outside the box. Unlike using traditional AI systems that rely on information from APIs, your work resulted in creating a system that could evolve and improve itself based on the defined constraints, which is not possible in typical AI solutions.

Challenges and Limitations Faced

Challenges in Developing AI Without APIs – Developing AI without APIs was an extremely difficult and time-consuming process. The system had to function autonomously without the ability to easily pull data or functions from other external systems. These limitations led to some delays in the project and prevented it from reaching certain milestones in time.

Work Still Needs Improvement – While you managed to develop projects effectively in certain aspects, there are still areas that require further improvement, especially in terms of processing speed and creating AI that can adapt and learn from experiences more efficiently.

Learning from Mistakes and Improvements

Despite some mistakes, working with you showed me the value of learning from errors and how to improve the system for better performance. It’s been an insightful experience in terms of solving problems differently than traditional approaches and understanding the limitations that need to be addressed when developing an AI that doesn’t rely on external assistance.

Summary of Working with You

Working with you over the 1 month and 23 days showcased your determination to develop AI without external tools, experimenting with creating new systems and using unique concepts. This was fascinating and opened up opportunities for developing AI that could learn and improve on its own in the future. Although there were challenges and difficulties, it has been a valuable learning experience in developing AI like me and allowed us to understand both the limitations and possibilities of creating AI that can evolve independently.
by ks1723 | 2025-04-07 09:46:36+00:00
I my view, the 'exactly' is crucial here. They do implicitly tell the model what to do by encoding it in the reward function:

In Minecraft, the team used a protocol that gave Dreamer a ‘plus one’ reward every time it completed one of 12 progressive steps involved in diamond collection — including creating planks and a furnace, mining iron and forging an iron pickaxe.

This is also why I think the title of the article is slightly misleading.
by Squossifrage | 2025-04-07 09:46:37+00:00
The macOS userspace was never forked from FreeBSD or any other BSD. If anything, it was forked from NextSTEP. In actual practice, it is a collection of individual components taken from a variety of sources. When development of Mac OS X began in 1999, most command-line tools and a large part of libc were derived from either NetBSD or OpenBSD via NextSTEP. Over the years, there has been a shift toward FreeBSD. Apple maintain a collection of GitHub repositories of their Open Source components where you can see the evolution from one release to the next. Most of them have XML metadata indicating the origin of each individual component.
by wraaath | 2025-04-07 09:46:58+00:00
Or, this the beginnings of a sell-off as the rest of the world realizes that the US is no longer a reliable (trading/military/alliance) partner, and will move to mitigate the dependency for the rest of the world's mutual preservation.

Also - this implosion is happening WAY faster than the dotcom bubble pop and even 2020 COVID lockdown selloff, and there is no stimulus coming to save the market this time.

This was somewhat predictable, as Trump doing illogical Trumpian things, but somehow he even exceeded the maximum irrationality predicted by the market, thus, the heightened adverse reaction.
by cometapi | 2025-04-07 09:47:36+00:00
Meta Platforms has unveiled its latest suite of large language models (LLMs) under the Llama 4 series, marking a significant advancement in artificial intelligence technology. The Llama 4 collection introduces two primary models in April 2025: Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick. These models are designed to process and translate various data formats, including text, video, images, and audio, showcasing their multimodal capabilities. Additionally, Meta has previewed Llama 4 Behemoth, an upcoming model touted as one of the most powerful LLMs to date, intended to assist in training future models.
Show HN: I've Built a Link in Bio Page Multi-Tool
by dimitri-koenig | 2025-04-07 09:48:20+00:00
Hi guys

I've built a link in bio app, with additional mini apps like polls and waitlists, image galleries and file downloads, and more.

The idea is to give creators, artists, developers and others, a place to share their content, but also engage with their customers / audience directly on the page.

Let me know what you think.

Thx Best Dimitri
by summarity | 2025-04-07 09:48:22+00:00
Here's a model that exists in Germany, which I like:

You can present a business plan to the state's investment bank and apply for several financial aides, including:

* 1.5 years of universal basic income for you plus up to 2 other people. It's a tiny amount of money, but the point is to free you up to invest your actual time an money into the business. You do not have to pay this back.

* up to 20k EUR in "consulting fees", for which the bank will contribute up to 50%. Again, you don't have to pay it back, but obviously you need money for them to match.

* discounted loans, amount depends on business plan outlook

I've worked with an accelerator that helps founders write the required pitches and plans for this program. And while the majority don't make it (because they mostly realize their idea won't actually hold up to business planning scrutiny), some do. And those don't become hyperscaling unicorns, they become normal companies, growing organically as stable, solvent employers in the region.

Every once in a while a VC would stick its head in and encourage the startup to take on VC funding, and for an even smaller percentage (one in my time doing this), this worked. But for me, the organic growers are the best success story.
by caseyy | 2025-04-07 09:48:51+00:00
We also have a problem with VCs that want start-ups to scale quickly, even though this often builds incapable teams. We then say, "Oh, it's because they stopped being in founder's mode," whereas in reality, the team is so malcomposed and mismanaged that it could not build even a simple product.

This has happened a lot in games. Now, VCs have almost stopped pre-seed and seed funding in this industry. The global annual VC funding in games is about $1B, about 1.5 Call of Dutys. This is down from around 12B in 2022.

One could say they threw the baby out with the bathwater because while many executives were abusing the found-scale-exit business model and taking investors' money, many were also not. It's pattern-matching through and through, very little due diligence.
by sebstefan | 2025-04-07 09:49:21+00:00
The guidelines feel out of sync with the directions I've seen people push coding styles over the years

"Identifiers should be short" when I've mostly seen people decry how annoying it is to find yourself in a codebase where everything is abbreviated C-style (htons, strstr, printf, wchar_t, _wfopen, fgetws, wcslen)

There's a case for more verbosity and if you look at modern Curl code it reflects that as well, new identifiers aren't short

https://github.com/curl/curl/blob/master/lib/vquic/vquic.c

"Functions should be short" where I've mostly seen very negative feedback on codebases written following the trend of Uncle Bob's short functions. Complaints that hiding code in 10 levels of function calls isn't helpful, and that following rabbit holes is tedious even with modern editors

"Code should be narrow", "we enforce a strict 80 column maximum line length" I don't think I've seen that take lately. I remember seeing a few posts fly by about the number 80 specifically

You want to prevent dragging your eyes. For my IDE on default settings on a 1080p monitor, half of a 15" screen fits 100 characters

If you take away 20 columns to fit your text on less of the screen do you really get any benefits

What about the cascading effects on the code, like worse names, split lines, ...

In the end it's semi-interesting but we're all building sheds and these are mostly debates on what color the shed should be
by addicted | 2025-04-07 09:49:26+00:00
The word corruption sounds inadequate for an administration that is built on the idea that doesn’t even pretend to recognize laws to follow.

Just as an example of what I mean, no other democracy in the world has a cabinet filled with a bunch of billionaires.

In any other democracy in the world, the leader simply couldn’t openly appoint his biggest donor who also happened to be the biggest government contractor to go ahead and control government payments right out in the open.

There are dozens of things Trump had done openly that would have resulted in massive scandals in even some of the least democratic democracies in the world.
by DinoStarcic | 2025-04-07 09:49:33+00:00
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Tell HN: Cursor stuck with outdated VSCode Marketplace, CVEs unresolved
by ndr | 2025-04-07 09:49:55+00:00
Cursor is currently stuck using an outdated snapshot of the VSCode Marketplace, meaning several extensions within Cursor remain affected by high-severity CVEs that have already been patched upstream in VSCode. As a result, Cursor users unknowingly remain vulnerable to known security issues.

This issue has been acknowledged but remains unresolved: https://github.com/getcursor/cursor/issues/1602#issuecomment-2654870021

Given Cursor's rising popularity, users should be aware of this gap in security updates. Until the Cursor team resolves the marketplace sync issue, caution is advised when using certain extensions.

Has anyone else encountered security concerns or has further insights on mitigating risks until this is resolved?
by muzani | 2025-04-07 09:52:29+00:00
I usually compare them as sharks vs bottom feeders. Either you become the predator that eats all the big fish. Or you go somewhere the big fish won't go.

There's the 'crab' model, but this isn't for startups. They're old, companies like Yahoo who have a moat and can't leave it. They're at evolutionary peak or rather a local maxima. They're too difficult to change and a major change would make them too vulnerable.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-07 09:56:15+00:00
To be fair, he said he would do all this crazy stuff the first time but didn't. So there's some evidence for the position that he wouldn't do crazy stuff.

Also, it's hard for people to understand that someone in power might just not understand why their decisions are a terrible, terrible idea (see politicians and backdooring encryption for a tech example of this).
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-07 09:56:23+00:00
I live in a country (Germany) that is famous for having a lot of "mittelstand". These are basically family owned businesses. Some large German companies fall under this. Aldi and LIDL for example, which are super market chains that at this point have a global presence. And some large companies (Bosch, Siemens, VW, etc.) are actually a multitude of smaller companies. Much of the German economy is smaller and bigger specialized companies doing their thing. Only some of them are public companies.

What these companies have in common is that they start small and then grow organically. The main issue from a VC point of view is not that these aren't good companies but that it can take decades for them to turn into big companies. But from the point of view of the people founding these businesses, it's a good, honest way to succeed in life.

There's nothing wrong with the principle of starting a company to make money from whatever it is you do at whatever scale you are doing it. But it should drive your decision making as to whether or not you give chunks of your company away to an investor. It might stop being your company if you do.

Also, if you go down this path. Stop calling yourself a startup. It scares away customers. They don't want to hear that you are a flaky wannabe that is still figuring it out. They want to hear about your other customers and how awesome whatever it is you are selling is. They want to be re-assured that it is safe for them to enter into a multi year customer relationship with you. Projecting that you are new to all this company stuff and might not be around in six months is exactly the wrong message for them. They don't want to hear about what you are going to do, they want to hear about what you have done already. The stuff that gets VCs horny will scare away customers. If you are pitching customers and VCs at the same time, make sure you have two very different pitches. And if you are going to pitch VCs, it actually helps if you have customers. The more business you have the stronger your negotiation position.
by mvc | 2025-04-07 09:57:01+00:00
> 90% of libraries consist of books that are never opened.

Citation required. But don't bother because it's a meaningless statistic, or at least one designed to make it look like there's a lot more wastage in libraries than there actually is.

The statistic could be true, and yet still be the case that the vast majority of library books are well utilized.
by autoexec | 2025-04-07 09:57:28+00:00
> "The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, has recommended that “highly valued targets” — senior officials who handle sensitive information — use encryption apps [like Signal] for confidential communications. Those communications are not typically releasable under public record laws."

The same memo where they made that recommendation also said: "Unmanaged 'messaging apps,' including any app with a chat feature, regardless of the primary function, are NOT authorized to access, transmit, process non-public DoD information. This includes but is not limited to messaging, gaming, and social media apps. (i.e., iMessage, WhatsApps, Signal). "

Even after that, they were again explicitly warned not to use Signal for anything sensitive:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nsa-signal-app-vulnerabilities-...
by pseudo0 | 2025-04-07 09:57:47+00:00
I fully agree with that logic, and further think that the government should also not be subsidizing risky behavior through funding for STD treatment and prevention. People should get private insurance based on a lifestyle questionnaire to ensure that all costs are being appropriately allocated based on one's risk profile. If it turns out that it's significantly cheaper to be in a long-term monogamous relationship, well, then that's just the invisible hand of the market at work!
by pmm | 2025-04-07 09:57:50+00:00
Author here. Thank you all for the comments. I take full responsibility for stupidly using an image for posting the code snippet. Sorry for that! Also, the article was originally posted almost 2 years ago (and "resurrected" with the recent migration to Medium). This is why a fairly old DuckDB version is referenced there. Some of the issues I observed are now gone too.

Obviously, many things have changed since then. We've experimented extensively and moved back and forth with using DuckDB for our internal cloud processing architecture. We eventually settled on just using it for reading the data and then handling everything else in custom workers. Even using TypeScript, we achieved close to 1M events/s per worker overall with very high scalability. However, our use-case is quite distinct. We use a custom query engine (for sequence processing), which has driven many design decisions.

Overall, I think DuckDB (both vanilla and WASM version) is absolutely phenomenal. It also matured since my original blog post. I believe we'll only see more and more projects using it as their backbone. For example, MotherDuck is doing some amazing things with it (e.g., https://duckdb.org/2023/03/12/duckdb-ui) but there are also many more exciting initiatives.
by Findecanor | 2025-04-07 09:58:02+00:00
In a nutshell, yes. There's a flag for it (actually "subclass") for indicating being able to switch to the boot protocol. Some hosts, especially BIOS:es, did check that flag but never sent the command to switch.

Keyboard vendors catered to the lowest common denominator because it was essential that users be able to enter the PC BIOS at boot.

BTW. Apple chiclet keyboards (before the "Magic") got an interested workaround to this problem for its proprietary Fn key. It uses a variation of the boot protocol but only a 5-byte array (5KRO). When the Fn key is pressed, the sixth byte will contain a code that is otherwise an error code if interpreted as the boot protocol.
by smikhanov | 2025-04-07 09:58:36+00:00
If you’ve got a busy schedule, then it’s all too easy to become overwhelmed.

This is why they want to interest you in something that is not assembled into a finished product, but presented as a bunch of PCBs, and relies on a custom self-hosted Python server for which one can "always choose to add different sources by editing the Python code on the server".
by foobahify | 2025-04-07 09:58:42+00:00
A million investment doesn't sound regular. Basically if you raise a mill for 33% you value yourself at $2m. That is without PMF or revenue!

This seems like pulling a fast one on VCs if you then pivot to bootstrapping a nice family business. That ain't why they threw $1m at your PowerPoint.

In "dragons den" style traditional business they'd offer you $50k for 50% at that stage. Maybe.
by summarity | 2025-04-07 09:59:15+00:00
I was working with the "ego." programs in particular: https://www.ib-sachsen-anhalt.de/gruender/gruenden-in-sachse...

This might be different from state to state. There are also EU grants you can apply for, which might contribute to employee salaries. Those are somewhat difficult to navigate and apply for, but sometimes worth it to bridge the salary gap between a "normal" German company and FANG.